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If you think Donald Trump is going to walk away from a money faucet with that kind of dollar-flow, you haven’t been paying much attention over the last ten years.
If there is one defining characteristic of the Trump second term in office, it is his naked mixing of the presidency with his personal business. The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick recently estimated that by August, in just eight months, Trump’s family business made $3.4 billion—that is billion with a B—in profits linked to his presidency. The money-flow starts with the Gulf states. Just today, Trump crowed “A lot of cash. Unlimited cash,” as he shook hands with United Arab Emirates Vice President Sheik Mansour at the Gaza summit he presided over in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, surrounded by leaders from other Gulf nations and almost a dozen European Union countries as well as Indonesia, India, Japan and Canada.
Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has raked in billions from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Qatar. There is the famous, or infamous, $800 million Boeing 747 jet from Qatar that Trump will take with him when he leaves office, a “donation” to his “library.” Trump and his sons are associated with at least five separate crypto scams worth hundreds of millions. Kirkpatrick estimates that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago has profited by at least $125 million alone since he first took office in 2016. Now he is selling Trump-branded merchandise—everything from his ubiquitous MAGA red hats to coffee cups—right out of the White House to the tune of $28 million. He’s extorting tens of millions from law firms, television networks, and universities with lawsuits and threats to withhold federal funding, and he’s figured out a way to slide a goodly portion of that money into his voluminous pockets. Last week, he announced TrumpRx, a website that will allegedly steer customers to the least expensive sources for drugs from various companies. The website is supposedly run by the federal government, but if he hasn’t come up with a way to take a piece of every buck that passes through, it would be the first time anything with his name on it didn’t end up putting dollars in his pocket.
If you think Donald Trump is going to walk away from a money faucet with that kind of dollar-flow, you haven’t been paying much attention over the last ten years. Making money is all he cares about. Oh, the pundits say he wants to accumulate “power,” but the way he keeps score is with dollar signs, the only power he’s ever understood.
There has been near-constant speculation about how Trump is going to stay in power, given the fact that he faces the two-term-limit of the 22nd Amendment. He could stage a coup—he’s tried before, so that isn’t out of the question—or he could come up with some scammy thing about the 22nd Amendment only referring to consecutive terms. Or he could just say fuck it to the Constitution and run again and rile up his base and rig the “election” and stay in the Oval Office and say, who’s going to take me out of here?
The New York Times on Sunday published a major story that raises a third possibility: Trump could leave the office of the presidency but by maintaining his iron grip on the Republican Party, dictate who runs as its candidate for president and rule from Mar-a-Lago. The Times story, “Someone Tipped Me Off About a Crypto Story. What I Found Was Crazy,” isn’t about Trump, and it isn’t even about the U.S.A., but it is about a very wealthy man maintaining his control over his country after leaving political office. The man is Bidzina Ivanishvili, who served one term in office as prime minister of Georgia in 2012 and 2013. He is the richest man in Georgia, and he controls its dominating Georgian Dream political party, and since leaving office, he “rules Georgia…ensconced in a hilltop mansion…having consolidated almost total control, rigging elections and sidelining opponents,” according to the Times story.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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