Much of Donald Trump’s business model, for lack of a better term, has been derived from picking on ‘poor people’.
His father, Fred Trump, received subsidized ‘New Deal’ era FHA loans to build housing for low income NYC residents and returning WWII G.I.s and their families.
Fred then spent the subsequent decades ripping off his tenants, passing building upgrades on to the renters and cheating the city and federal government out of their share of the taxes.
Without an ounce of remorse or obligation to the government or communities that helped him build his real estate empire.
Donnie’s dad also racially discriminated in his housing that was designed for working class families by not allowing Black tenants to rent apartments.
This culminated in a 1973 lawsuit brought by the DOJ against Trump Management in which both Donald and his father were defendants.
Fred Trump was so notorious in his day that he had even earned the ire of none other than Woody Guthrie, perhaps America’s greatest chronicler of the poor and disenfranchised.
Written in 1954, Guthrie’s song titled ‘Old Man Trump’ was about Fred Trump’s racially discriminatory rental policies - that Guthrie himself witnessed living in a Trump property in Gravesend, Brooklyn.
Guthrie also revised another song “Ain’t Got No Home” with the lyrics:
‘Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower/Where no Black folks come to roam/ No no, Old Man Trump!/Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!’
Woody Guthrie had an eye for the truth and a penchant for speaking out against injustice - a tradition carried on by the ensuing generations of Guthrie family folk singers, several of whom I count as personal friends.
The two clans provide an example of what we can choose to pass on to future generations: progress and equality, progressive artistic expression and a righteous belief in a better land or in the case of the Trump’s, greed and racism in service of self-gain.
After being banished from Germany on charges of cowardice for refusing to serve in the Bavarian army, Trump’s grandfather came to the U.S. and opened brothels in the Pacific Northwest.
A fitting prologue for the grandson who would receive no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam war and would allow the Russian mob to operate brothels in Trump Tower beginning in the late 1980s.
Trump’s grandfather happily took the earnings of those who sought their fortunes in the Klondike Gold Rush era and ventured into his brothels.
Tempting men with vice and exploiting the women lured into prostitution.
A morally dubious a business venture if ever there was one.
A hundred years between the two men and the same character defects and cowardice are on display.
It’s in the Trump DNA as much as a receding hairline and a propensity towards addictive behavior and compulsive mendacity.
Trump’s father was arrested at a KKK riot in 1927 that involved over a thousand men dressed in white robes and attempting to disrupt a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York.
Trump grew up in the affluent community of Jamaica Estates, Queens in a five bedroom Tudor-style home, replete with blackface lawn jockeys lining the approach to his columned front door.
Every bit a ‘McMansion’ in its day. The garish and gaudy with an undercurrent of white supremacy has always been a family aesthetic.
The image of the lawn jockeys, first reported by a University of Pennsylvania classmate who visited the Trump home for the weekend, speaks volumes about the character and climate that Donald was raised in and how he has subsequently carried those malignant traditions into his life since boyhood.
Trump even made his own coat of arms when he opened his Aberdeen, Scotland golf course; pilfering the imagery from another clan - his bloodline is in no way aristocratic no matter what fantasies he harbors.
Trump is a second generation immigrant like so many of the Americans he knowingly seduces with xenophobia and outright bigotry towards migrants.
When his mother, Mary Anne McLeod, was seventeen she immigrated to the U.S. on a ship from Glasgow, Scotland with $50 dollars to her name.
Mary Anne worked for several years as a domestic servant before meeting Trump’s father.
Nothing shameful or uncommon about that story (though Donald conveniently leaves it out of personal mythology) and it certainly echoes the lineage of hardworking folks who continue to follow a similar path today.
The difference being they are not coming so much from European countries as they are from Central and South America, Africa and the Middle East, all regions that the Republican Party, led by Trump, has built their ideology around demonizing.
The Trump real estate empire that began under his forefathers has now morphed into a political one - driven by the branding and blatant racism that Trump has unleashed on the American public.
There was a huge market for this: the fields had been plowed and fertilized in advance by Fox News and the deregulations, dog-whistle racism and outsourcing of America’s manufacturing economy during the Reagan Era.
The ‘Rust Belt’ rather quickly devolving into the ‘Racist Belt’ after a couple decades of a pharmaceutical company-backed opioid epidemic and the tsunami of guns that have poured into American communities thanks to the NRA and its vice grip on GOP politicians.
Trump’s aims are for personal profit.
He has masterfully exploited the ignorance and greed of not only the politicians and businessmen that helped build MAGA into the tumor it now represents in the body politic but also married the movement with conservative evangelical Christianity so that it has now achieved cult-like fervor in most of red state America.
Trump of course hopes to return to office to avoid the 91 felony counts in the four criminal indictments he now faces after his disastrous first term in office.
His adult children are also complicit and at least partially on the hook for the NYC criminal fraud cases involving his corporate malfeasance at the Trump Organization both during and before he was in office.
This is not even mentioning the decades of sexual assault accusations that have always swirled around him like the flies that follow his fetid funk on the golf course in July.
When Donald Trump owned his eponymous casinos in Atlantic City he was one of the innovators of busing his customers in from states west of New Jersey.
Places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky received casino coaches that would ferry mostly older, mostly retired, fixed-income pensioners and Social Security recipients back to the Jersey shore for a day of gambling.
After they poured their monthly stipend into Trump’s slot machines (which by the way had the lowest payouts of any in Atlantic City) he would send them back home broke without so much as a free lunch.
The enticement and excitement of glamour more often than not ended in empty hours and empty bellies while the miles rolled away on rainy turnpikes and highways as the come-down settled in like the rust and rot that was already attacking their communities from within.
Perhaps a metaphor for things to come when the MAGA circus pulled into town and set up its big tent a few decades later.
Same promise, same zero payout.
Rinse and repeat - a scam’s a scam in the Trump clan.
Trump was of course not alone among casino operators in these practices -and the gamblers themselves surely bear some responsibility - but it sure does speak to the lack of moral character of the man who profited from it.
Knowingly taking money from folks who can’t afford to lose it and specifically targeting those people is the definition of predatory - Trump’s modus operandi as a political leader.
It also says a lot about the businesses Trump likes to brand himself as successfully piloting.
Most of them ending in bankruptcies, including the casinos that also operated as fronts for mob-backed, money laundering operations.
Most notably, Trump Taj Mahal, which when it opened, ignored all financial laws and regulations designed to prevent money laundering, later resulting in a 10 million dollar FinCEN fine imposed in 2015.
In 1989, at the height of his boom years of casino money laundering, three Atlantic City Trump Organization executives were summoned to NYC by Donald to appear at a press conference for a boxing match - at the same time they were rumored to be cooperating with a federal investigation into money laundering at Trump’s casinos.
Trump chartered a rental helicopter to ferry his executives back home despite owning his own Sikorsky helicopters with his name emblazoned on the side in giant silver letters.
The helicopter went down in the Pine Barrens on its return trip to Atlantic City killing everyone on board.
After the deaths of his executives, Trump lied and said he himself was supposed to be on board the flight which his executive V.P. Barbara Res later said was an outright lie.
The deaths of the executives ended any cooperation that may have been taking place between the federal investigators and the Trump organization.
He’s always been lucky like that; the folks caught up in crimes, not so much.
Trump has now placed his political future in the same demographic he exploited in his casino days.
Inundating them with constant barrages of texts and emails pleading for cash for his campaign and legal defense.
Often signing them up for recurring payments through pre-checked boxes and digital sleight of hand fine print.
Predatory, like every other facet of his life and business.
He then diverts the money into his clubs and personal accounts and asks for more and more.
Rinse and repeat.
Preying on so-called Christian Evangelicals with limited incomes and educations.
Culturally reactionary folks who have been brainwashed for generations by preachers and pundits that have never had their best interest at heart.
Offering salvation and redemption for a low, low monthly payment but they must give now lest they suffer the purgatory of liberalism and the heathens who threaten the patriotic way of life.
Trump has added retribution into this narrative and its become irresistible manna for the well-armed militants in the MAGA army.
All the while exploiting those around him and serving foreign interests to the tune of $7.8 billion poured into his private businesses from foreign entities during his last term in office.
Trump is, by a country mile, the most corrupt individual to ever serve as President of the United States.
He has built an empire out of a misinformed base and the spineless GOP politicians that genuflect to him daily.
In the end, there may be no greater victims of his misdeeds and malfeasance than his own followers when and if the smoke finally clears.
MAGA has so far rewarded him with subservience and violence, two things he hungers for from deep inside his battered psyche.
Their actions on January 6th, 2021 may be the opening battle in the war he is waging on Democracy itself.
Of course, I pray this is not the case but judging by how well armed his followers are and how he has been able to rewrite the history of that awful day’s events, I fear there may be greater violence and upheaval to come.
I also believe that would be Trump’s greatest wish - he was never really a builder but always a destroyer.
A broken man from birth who has cajoled and exploited ignorance and avarice with equal measure.
And has found no shortage of awful men and women willing to go along with his plans.
He has branded chaos and contempt, turning his followers against the very principles that once defined us as a people.
He must be stopped: this November and every day up until that point, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure this awful chapter in our collective history finally comes to an end.
Be well.
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