Trump’s Corruption Circus: Distraction, Deception And Dirty Deals… America’s Billion Dollar Grift

Police State USA: Law-and-Order Con Man— Our Depraved Criminal-in-Chief

There are plenty of liberals who are— vocally or kind of secretly— unsympathetic to homeless people. I was with a friend yesterday and saw a guy who looked like he was in trouble. My friend and I spoke at the same time. I said “That guy looks like he needs help.” My friend said “Look at the damn meth-head.” 

No one seems to want homeless people around. Cities pass laws to make them invisible, cops harass them and even people who call themselves progressive talk about them like they’re a nuisance instead of human beings. We’ve normalized looking away, as if refusing to see suffering makes it go away. And meanwhile, the politicians who could actually address the housing crisis treat homelessness like litter on the sidewalk— something to be “cleaned up” instead of solved. It’s easier to criminalize desperation than to fix the systems that create it, easier to point at a “meth-head” than to admit our economy is failing millions. But the truth is, every tent under an overpass is a billboard advertising political failure. And every time we pretend that homelessness is a personal flaw instead of a predictable outcome of greed, wage theft and rent gouging, we’re siding with the people who profit from keeping others one paycheck away from the street. Homelessness isn’t an eyesore; it’s the canary in the coal mine for a society that’s rotting from the top down. It makes me sad to say that if you can walk past it without wanting to change it, you’re part of the reason it exists.

And a few days ago, Señor TACO walked past it— or drove past it on the way to pay some golf— and his idea for how to change it isn’t the kind of change I was talking about. Think Alligator Alcatraz or one of the other Trump concentration camps he’s having built. If this doesn’t scare you, it should:

All these images were taken from the monster’s “motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course… Trump’s post promoted a previously announced news conference on Monday, which he has promised, ‘will, essentially, stop violent crime’ in the capital district, without explaining how. In a subsequent post, he said that the news conference at 10am Monday, ‘will not only involve ending the Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation’s Capital, but will also be about Cleanliness.’ Despite Trump’s claims, there is no epidemic of homelessness or violent crime in the capital. According to the Community Partnership, which works to prevent homelessness in Washington DC, on any given night there are about 800 unsheltered persons sleeping outdoors in the city of about 700,000 people. A further 3,275 people use emergency shelters in Washington, and 1,065 people are in transitional housing facilities. Trump’s repeated claims that it might be necessary to federalize law enforcement in the city to make it safe also ignores data collected by the Metropolitan police department, released in January by the federal government, which showed that violent crime in Washington DC in 2024 was down 35% from 2023 and was at the lowest level in over 30 years.”

So, as usual, Trump was lying. There is no crime wave in DC; it was basically an excuse to put the DC police under his own control, which is just what he did on Monday. He posted that DC “has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!! Bragging that he would “essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C.”

In a news conference Monday, Trump said he has ordered a federal takeover of the D.C. police and would deploy 800 National Guard troops, who will be armed and have the ability to conduct arrests if needed. Over the weekend, he ordered more federal law enforcement agents to be deployed on city streets and called for teenagers as young as 14 to be charged as adults as he continues to cast the capital as overrun with violent youngsters.

Local and federal data, though, paint a contrasting picture.

… Last week, the president described crime in D.C. as “out of control,” with young “thugs” and “gang members” who are “randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) refuted that image Sunday, noting the recent drops in crime while adding that the city could use the federal government’s help with other law enforcement priorities, such as adding more prosecutors and judges in the city.

“If the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here,” Bower, who had been silent since the president initially threatened to take over the city, said of Trump in an interview on MSNBC. “But it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime.”

…FBI arrest data collected by The Post shows juvenile arrests nationwide have largely been dropping since the 1990s. In 2024, the rate was about 439 juvenile arrests per 100,000 juveniles, down 7 percent from 2023 and five times lower than in 1997.

Trump plans to use DC as a jumping off point to federalize local police in other large cities, namely Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland, New York and Chicago. Authoritarians always start by picking a target group they can dehumanize, criminalize, and use as a pretext for tightening their grip on power. Hitler didn’t begin with the full machinery of the Holocaust—he started with vagrancy laws and “asocial” registries that treated the homeless, the mentally ill, and Roma people as criminal outsiders. Mussolini turned street crime into a propaganda weapon, using it to justify a police state that could sweep up not just criminals but political opponents. In Chile, Pinochet claimed he was restoring “order” when he filled stadiums with detainees, many of them students and union organizers, under the pretext of fighting lawlessness.

The blueprint is always the same: declare a crisis that either doesn’t exist or is grossly exaggerated, send in militarized forces, strip local governments of control, and normalize the idea that poverty, protest, and dissent are threats to “public safety.” Once you’ve trained the public to accept armed troops patrolling for “undesirables,” it’s a short step to defining anyone who opposes you as one of them.

That’s exactly what Trump is doing now. He keeps calling other people criminals while plotting mass detentions, building camps, and seizing powers no president should ever have. The truth is simple: the only career criminal in this story is Donald J. Trump. If you step back and look at the whole picture, meticulously developed by David Kirkpatrick in the New Yorker, the scale of Trump’s corruption is shocking, staggering. Billions in profits funneled straight from the Oval Office, through shell companies, meme coins and secretive deals with foreign autocrats and crypto hustlers who’d have been persona non grata under any decent administration. This isn’t some accidental overlap of business and government; it’s a brazen, full-throttle exploitation of the highest public office for personal gain.

Trump’s operation is lining his and his family’s pockets as he purposefully shreds every standard of public ethics we used to take for granted. He’s turned conflicts of interest into a profit center, welcomed shady characters like Justin Sun and Changpeng Zhao into his inner circle, and used his Presidency as a cudgel to open regulatory floodgates for crypto schemes that enrich his family and friends while putting ordinary Americans at risk. And what do we get in return? A circus act of distractions. The endless parade of culture wars, the manufactured outrage, the relentless pointing fingers— all designed to keep the public’s eyes off the enormous grift happening in plain sight. While the media scrambles over the latest scandal of the day, Trump’s crypto empire grows fat, his business deals with Gulf monarchs deepen, and the Presidency becomes a personal ATM machine. The tragedy is not just that Señor TACO is corrupt is the most corrupt occupant of the White House in history. It’s that this corruption is so transparent and so vast that it threatens to normalize the idea that the Presidency is a personal fiefdom to be exploited, not a public trust to be honored. Trump’s shameless profiteering is a warning shot at the heart of democracy— a reminder that when power is unchecked, greed wins, and accountability dies.

A smidge of good news. I spoke with a senior elected Democrat today who said, just wait until after 2028— and agreed that we need someone who is nothing like Merrick Garland running the Department of Justice.