Donald Trump is a con man. His cons have varied, as have his targets. But he’s always been a con man.
Trump is just wrapping up a five-year con in which his mark was Republican voters and the Republican Party. And on the way out the door, he gave a final payout to the scammers who got in on his con.
A troupe of swindlers surrounded Trump from the moment he entered the presidential race. Some of them simply served Trump’s swindle. Others piggybacked their own con on top of Trump’s. Trump never minded these hangers-on getting their own beaks wet, as long as they never turned on him. If you paid that one price, loyalty to the most disloyal man in America, you could count on a payout in the end — as long as it didn’t cost Trump anything.
The 11th-hour pardons of Elliot Broidy and Steve Bannon are the latest payouts. Both men used Trump, exploiting the fact that millions believed in Trump and believed Trump could “Make America Great Again,” to line their own pockets. Broidy pleaded guilty to illegal foreign lobbying, and Bannon was awaiting trial on fraud charges. In both cases, the victims (proven or alleged) were the average American.
Broidy was a disgraced former Republican fundraiser until Trump came on the scene. Broidy’s 2009 conviction for a blatant pay-to-play fraud made him persona non grata in the Republican Party for years, but it never bugged Trump. Why would it?
Trump saw it as a virtue when rich and powerful men used their money and power to further enrich themselves at the public’s expense. Anyone who had an opportunity to get paid and didn’t was a fool in his eyes.
So, when Broidy spent $75,000 in luxury travel and hotels for New York Comptroller Alan Hevesi and family, alongside with about $1 million in other gifts for Hevesi’s office, that just proved to Trump how smart Broidy was. After all, Hevesi rewarded Broidy with $250 million in state pension money.
Why wouldn’t you want such a killer on your team? That’s why Trump happily brought on Broidy as a fundraiser (after all, the guy clearly knows how to scrape up cash) and then made him deputy national finance chairman for the Republican National Committee.
Broidy, of course, used his RNC role and access to Trump in order to enrich Broidy. Specifically, one corrupt Malaysian businessman paid Broidy millions (again, while he was in his RNC role) to lobby Trump on China’s behalf to extradite a critic of China’s Communist regime.
Broidy, that is, convinced people to fund Trump’s campaign in the name of America First and then used this power to get a secret gig as an illegal lobbyist for Chinese Communists and a Malaysian crook. Broidy, in October 2020, pleaded guilty to charges related to this con.
Broidy, like Trump, is a con man, and as with Trump’s con, MAGA patriots were his mark.
With Steve Bannon, if federal prosecutors are correct, the con was simpler. Bannon helped raise $25 million supposedly to build the wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. The money was never likely to go to such a purpose. It was always likely a con. Sure enough, according to charging documents, Bannon funneled at least $1 million of that to himself, contrary to promises that he was undertaking the project without compensation.
The crime wasn’t that Bannon and Broidy turned MAGA into millions. There were real victims here. Millions of people were convinced that they were supporting a noble cause when the men running the show were undermining that cause in order to enrich themselves.
It was the same con Trump ran. Trump used his candidacy and his presidency to enrich himself. If you donated to his campaign or the RNC, you were donating to Trump’s private bank account because those entities spent huge chunks of cash at Trump’s properties. Lobbyists and foreign leaders stayed at Trump properties to gain access, lining Trump’s pockets all along.
Typical Washington pay-to-play involves special interests buying access through campaign contributions. Trump’s con involved selling access for payments to Trump himself — forget the campaign.
Paul Manafort and Roger Stone ran similar cons. Like Broidy, it looks like Manafort was using Trump rather than working for Trump. But a conman can respect another man’s con. Crucially, Stone and Manafort never turned on Trump, which earned them pardons.
Corrupt Democrats Sheldon Silver and Kwame Kilpatrick, who used public office to enrich themselves? They were men after Trump’s own heart. So was former Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, who sold his home above market value to defense contractors and then rewarded them with earmarks. They were just being “smart,” according to Trump’s ethics. They got pardons too.
It would be nice, as Trump leaves the White House, to say the man had run his last con. But we know that’s not true.
