Redtree Times

Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.

–Samuel Johnson

Come on, you knew he* was a fraud.

A grifter. A con man.

It was always out there for us to see if we took the time to look and weren’t distracted by the gaudy golden letters that screamed out his name being plastered on every surface of his properties. But a lot of us didn’t take the time to look deeper and some were indeed mesmerized by his branding.

I pointed out four years ago that one bit of evidence of his ineptitude as a businessman was to be found in looking at his Atlantic City casinos. His casinos were part of a publicly held corporation from 1985 to 1995. It was the only time he was answerable to shareholders and he failed them in a most spectacular fashion. You have to realize that in that specific time period, almost every company and stock affiliated with gambling and casinos were highly profitable. Yet, his was the exception, somehow managing to go bankrupt after ten years.

In fact, if you had invested $10,000 in his corporation’s stock in 1985 you would found yourself with a nearly worthless pile of paper. It lost 96% of its value in the ten years and your 10G’s were worth a measly $400.

$400.

All that was left after a 10 year investment of $10,000 in a booming industry at that time.

Yet, people continued to call him a great businessman. And it continued even as his every venture went boots up or were implicated in some sort of fraud litigation. His self-named university(!) and his ridiculous steaks or bottled water, for examples. The fraud even extended into his efforts to appear as a charitable benefactor.

His charity was disbanded and he and his family of grifters are prohibited from operating any charitable foundation in NY because of his illegal handling of the funds.

They actually stole money from a children’s charity, for chrissake.

He hasn’t done anything in the four years that changes any of this (and there is so much more that I just don’t feel like documenting here this morning) and the swampy, corrupt deals he continues to make every single day only enhances the truth of what he is– a fraud.

And maybe that is the only time you can use his own brand of narcissistic hyperbole and say that he is the greatest at anything.

He may be the greatest bad businessperson of all time. He certainly has perpetrated a fraud bigly.

And you know something? I don’t hold it against him that he is a shit businessperson. There are plenty of them out there who do little lasting harm.

Hell, I was and might still be a shit businessman.

But I hate that he has parlayed his failures, through shady deals with foreign interests and a deepening and broadening of the swamp that is public corruption, into a position where he has eroded all public confidence in nearly everything that binds us together.

His fraud, even if you can somehow dismiss the criminality of it, has put our entire system of democracy at risk.

It must stop.

But he is shielded by his enablers in the Senate and House, who only serve now to perpetuate the fraud.

The only way is to stop this is to Vote Blue in huge numbers up and down the ballots.

That is the only thing that can end this fraud.