Donald Trump: A First Class Con Man

One of the reasons he was elected was because of the perception of his being a successful businessman. But one of the reasons that you know that America isn’t yet owned by Trump is that it’s still in business.

Yet as Trump continues to play the American people and the world, the question has to be asked: are we more willing now to be conned? Do we invite being played; even expect it?


Donald Trump spent his entire campaign railing against the establishment and promising to “drain the swamp.” But now that he has begun announcing his cabinet choices, many liberty-loving people are getting increasingly uncomfortable with the Wall-Street-studded, war-loving picks. Instead of draining the swamp, it seems like he may be repopulating the swamp with bigger predators than before.

I really hoped the President-Elect proves me wrong, but we have a responsibility to speak the truth, regardless of how unpleasant it is. The question has to be asked…did Donald Trump just run the biggest con game in history by telling us all what we wanted to hear?

Many people voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault, a man whose “university” defrauded thousands of people, a billionaire who thought the minimum wage was too high. You switched from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 many were white working-class voters because you they thought he was on their side.

You don’t mind the lying. In fact, you’re all in with the biggest lies, the baseless claims that three million people voted illegally, that Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower, and on, and on. The lying is disruptive. Yay for disruption!

You don’t mind the flip-flops. Last year, Trump said the unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in American history.” This year, because he’s president, it’s very real. Last year, Wall Street was a puppeteer for the Democrats. Now your man has brought in Goldman Sachs puppeteers to run the economy. Last year, a golfing president was lazy. Now your guy has paid 14 presidential visits to a golf course.

You’re not bothered by the foreign policy incompetence, the siding up to gangster regimes and human rights violators, the snub of the rest of the world in the name of America First. You don’t mind unleashing polluters. If the job creators want filthy air and foul water, give it to them.

You shrug at all of this hypocrisy and craziness, because you still think he’s going to help you. But you’ve been played, sucker-punched, duped. You can continue to believe Trump has your back, but the evidence is already overwhelming that the people his presidency will hurt most are those at the bottom who gave him their trust.

Trump acknowledged as much when told that the health care plan he pushed would significantly harm his base.

Given that Trump’s approval rating, which is at a historic low, given that a majority of Americans believe that Trump is not honest and does not care about average people, it’s easy to think Democrats can abandon the voters who abandoned them last year.

White voters without a college degree, who went for Trump by almost 40 points, are never going to come around  no matter how much this president turns his back on them.

The condescension, like the opioids, may feel good as well, but it won’t do anything to help the forces of reason and progress. The way to bring around the forgotten men and women is to remind them, every day, that Trump has forgotten them. And to give them something  say, Medicare for all, being pushed by the energized Bernie Sanders base to back words with action.

Trump is banking on the ignorance of voters who took a chance with him. His budget proposal — a cruel, Dickensian document — offers nothing but pain for these people. An Appalachian economic partnership that helps workers in 420 of the nation’s poorest counties would be abolished. Seniors who need Meals on Wheels for food and social contact would lose the service. Cancer victims, waiting for something miraculous to come from the extraordinary work of the National Institutes of Health, will have to wait longer, as Trump cuts cancer research to fund his Mexican wall.

If you’re a poor kid in Georgia looking for that college break that will get you somewhere, his budget slashes tuition grants for you. If you’re a single mom living in Baxley trying to hold onto a job, he could force you onto welfare by eliminating the after-school program that enabled you to work full time.

He promised “insurance for everybody” and then supported the ill-fated Republican plan that would have added 24 million Americans to the uninsured. Those in their 50s and early 60s, and the working poor, would have been hit hardest. And Medicaid recipients, many of whom didn’t realize they had coverage for the first time in their lives thanks to Obamacare, would have been left out.

Oh, but Trump is bringing back jobs  that’s why many in the midwestern states such as Ohio, Michigan put him in office. About those jobs: The coal mining initiative is a hoax. Let's be real here.  This is because of the free market, turning to cheaper natural gas for power, and energy alternatives because they are the future.

The bottom line is that America elected a con man to the White House