The Plague-Ground – Trump.com is the worst Trump.con of all

You may have heard America’s 45^th President will announce his campaign to be the 47^th President on the eve of the inauguration of the 46^th President.

A typical Trump stunt. But nowhere near his latest, most cynical grift yet. That judgement comes from John Cassidy who wrote last week in The New Yorker about the Trump campaign’s voracious need to raise more money, new money, now!

Even though the election ended a month ago, Trump just keeps raising money. He’s raised $170 million since November 3rd. He says it’s to pay for all the court battles to overturn the ‘fake election’ and his relentlessly real loss. After all, of the 34 lawsuits launched in the six swing states, Trump has lost 33. Those who call him litigious may forget he’s launched some 4,000 lawsuits before entering the White House.

What John Cassidy discovered is that only a tiny part of anyone’s donation goes to the Donald J. Trump for the President Recount Account. “For any donation of up to $5,000, not a cent goes directly… to help pay for Trump’s legal battle… Instead, a quarter of the donation goes to the R.N.C., and the other three quarters goes into a new Trump fund-raising vehicle called Save America.”

Save America, of course, is Trump’s’ war-chest for his 2024 campaign — when he’ll be 78.

Cassidy signed up for the Trump campaign newsletter just to see what would land in his inbox. Curious to know how Trump is separating his supporters from their cash, I too logged on to www.donaldjtrump.com and I urge you to as well.

This site makes Cash for Gold look like Tiffanys: “President Trump is counting on YOU to DEFEND the Election, so he asked us to EXTEND your 1000% offer for your next contribution. This offer is available FOR 1 HOUR, so you need to act fast.”

It gets much worse, of course, because his home page, like everything else about Trump, is simply a shocking prelude to the much worse things to come. I clicked on “News” and was greeted by screen-grabs of old Fox News interviews about how “Election whistleblowers tell their story on Hannity tonight.”

But I have to confess my brief tour of trump.com was oddly elating, like having your first beer at 16. I’d entered a strange land where I could read the language but not understand a word. So this was where Trump’s base lived. With a simple click, I was inside their man-cave. This is what makes them so loyal and so angry-all-the-time?

More than anything, I felt curious to learn more, the way an anthropologist would study the culture of an unknown tribe.

So I logged on to www.foxnews.com.

Truth be told, I’d bookmarked it a month ago, the day after the election, just to see if those pundits who talked about “two Americas” and “feedback loops” and “blind solitudes” were right.

They were. And I urge you to bookmark Fox News as well.

As of yesterday, the big stories on Fox were about election recounts, defying lockdown rules in the name of liberty, and the prospects for Trump firing his attorney general.

Nothing on the pandemic itself. Nothing on Trump losing all six states. Certainly nothing on the US Justice Department probe into bribes for pardons, or Giuliani speaking in tongues. Nothing. Just not there.

I’m not saying CNN is the BBC of objectivity, not by a long shot. Even the BBC isn’t that any more.

I’m just inviting you to see for yourself what brought 74 million Americans to vote for Donald Trump, and how he’s working to make that grow in the years to come.

It’s frightening, but not nearly as scary as covering your eyes.