'The Big Money'

It should surprise no one that the man who made his living selling Trump-branded condos to Russian mobsters through anonymous LLCs, and who paid a ten million dollar fine to FinCEN in 2015 as a settlement in his money-laundering case involving his Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City (which was found to have willfully and repeatedly violated the Bank Secrecy Act), had his supplicant Treasury Secretary gut the Corporate Accountability Act this week; effectively opening the floodgates to unlimited money-laundering and a tsunami of political and financial corruption.

This follows a Trump-appointed regulator preliminarily approving a federally chartered trust bank for his family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency firm, which is run by Zach Witkoff, son of Steve, Trump’s erstwhile Special Envoy.

An apex moment of self-dealing, marrying the powers of the presidency to personal financial interests. The last man in the world who should have his own bank is Donald Trump. The last people on earth you would want to trust your money with are the execrable Trump clan.

Never before has such a pustular cabal of treasonous, glutinous venality metastasized so swiftly and eaten away at the undergirding of a system of government that may not just be temporarily broken - it may be heading towards a place well beyond repair.

To say the fox is guarding the hen house is too weak an analogy at this point. What we are witnessing is larceny on a scale we have not witnessed before in this nation. What occurred in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union may pale in comparison to the thievery and corruption now taking place in the U.S.A.

Part of the KGB’s plan was to let America’s own greed and decadence do us in - and they may have finally gotten their wish. This is not by accident of course, but through decades of cultivation of Donald Trump and his associates. ‘Active measures’ were certainly taken - and they paid off grotesquely.

Everything DJT is now doing is designed to undermine our democracy and install him as an authoritarian ruler. Using district attorneys’ offices to go after his political opponents’ fundraising apparatus is designed to hobble the ability of the opposition party to hold him accountable and provide checks and balances on his unitarian powers.

The recent revelation that Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s NY State Supreme Court conviction on 34 felony counts for attempting to silence a porn star with whom he had sexual relations, has had his family targeted for over a year by the DOJ is chilling.

Merchan’s daughter, and the Democratic fundraising firm she was a co-owner of, was investigated by the U.S. Attorney in Chicago; the latest in an onslaught of weaponization of government powers against POTUS’ perceived enemies.

To Trump and his oligarchic administration, money is the reward for holding elected office - and they are attempting to amass so much of it in such a short period of time, that it may allow them to never again be ousted by the will of the people.

To never be dislodged from their privileged perch of insatiable profiteering, and naked, blatant corruption is the ultimate goal the MAGA movement.

The ultimate act of white supremacy is to place themselves firmly and forever above the law.

Men like Russell Vought were brought in to make sure our institutions fail so they can never again find footing sure enough to hold the criminals accountable. This administration gutted institutional knowledge for a nefarious and strategic reason. Project 2025 in the end may prove to have been a greater threat to our republic than any enemy we fought on a battlefield.

The lesson Trump took from his loss in 2020 is that democracy is for suckers; he will do his best to make sure it is not employed to unseat him or his MAGA movement ever again.

They are stealing far too much treasure to stop the looting now.

POTUS has made 2.2 billion dollars so far in his second term, as the most corrupt president in our nation’s history by a country mile. Trump’s Treasury Department’s dismembering of FinCEN this week will only add to his illegal haul and allow untold amounts of foreign dark money into the U.S. in the form of campaign contributions.

The international organized crime outfits that Trump participated in for decades before becoming president have now been consolidated in such a way that any financial crime or money laundering anywhere on earth could potentially benefit Trump and his family.

We are not just up against the MAGA movement, and the immorality of the billionaire backers of his xenophobic regime, but a well-oiled crime machine that just broke through the last remaining guardrails against corruption.

Trump had vetoed the reporting rules regarding ‘shell companies’ late in his first term. The bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act passed anyway - and it was a gigantic step towards rooting out money laundering and illicit funds from being moved and hidden anonymously within the United States by forcing shell companies to reveal their ownership.

Now, not only are those regulations abandoned, the databases themselves have been destroyed - and Republicans in Congress are working to make sure this evisceration of the rule of law cannot be reversed by any future administration.

A little known Trumpworld fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, is making sure the race to save democracy may in fact be lost ahead of the starting gun.

Shaking down everyone in Trump’s purview, not merely willing donors but also the corporate cowards who wish to compete in this rigged and corrupt, insider-favored economy.

Many perhaps know deep down it is wrong to pour their millions into his grift machine, yet they do it anyway to receive preferential treatment in the most crooked administration in American history.

The real folks getting fleeced by this unbridled greed are the American taxpayers - and anyone looking for an even playing field, equal opportunity and representation in our government. We are handing future generations a rotten husk of a country if this malfeasance continues.

The ‘Princess of Darkness’, a sobriquet given by Trump himself, checks in with ‘the boss’ (as she refers to him on donors calls, ‘the boss wants this money’) nightly to compile a list of who has paid up and who hasn’t.

So far they have raised a staggering 800 million dollars for his MAGA, Inc. super PAC, his Presidential Library and ballroom funds. Unheard of in modern times, and thanks to SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling, perfectly legal.

The candlelight dinners POTUS hosts at the White House and his Trump properties are not just opportunities for shakedowns and insider trading on the public dime, they seem to be the only thing POTUS puts any effort into beyond his continual destruction of our National Monuments and the White House grounds.

Meredith O’Rourke has no official role in the government, beyond a seat on the board of the National Parks Foundation. The destruction of Big Bend National Park in recent weeks to build a steel barrier wall is in many ways a flex of Trump’s power (no one crosses the border there and the desecration of our public lands is another exercise in grifting taxpayers), as was the tearing down of the East Wing earlier this year.

It is no accident his primary fundraiser, whom he refers to as a ‘killer’, is involved in both of these projects.

The destruction of national monuments and parks is to show potential donors that POTUS can in fact, do whatever the hell he wants and nobody is gonna stop him (so you better f’n pay up, capiche?).

It is the equivalent of mobster walking into a store that hasn’t paid up for protection and taking a baseball bat to the shelves. It is violence in service of profit - and to inspire acquiescence and fear through sheer brutality.

Donald’s actions on the world stage always reflect this same mobster mentality; much of the geopolitical chaos we are witnessing stems from his avarice and immorality.

We must not allow this administration to keep punishing us all and tearing at the fabric of our nation.

We must stand up to this criminality, which has now become official with the confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General.

The courts alone will not save us despite the recent judgment against Trump in the construction of the ballroom - SCOTUS will once again come to his aid.

We the people must not accept this madness and do all we can to stop him while we still can. This summer of smoke and suffering may one day seem like our last chance, we do want to look back and wish we had done more.

If it feels like there has been an avalanche of chaos and corruption over these last couple of steamy months, you are correct, and that is by design.

While POTUS is golfing, his shadow government is working overtime to steal our republic from right under our sun-blocked noses. There are no vacations for the villainous; every outrage du jour distracts us from seeing the big picture and how rapidly they are advancing in their goals.

Trump and his ilk will always aspire to the awful and the morally bankrupt: if the last decade of American life has taught us anything, it should be that he is far from alone in his pursuits and predilections.

POTUS is an immensely criminal human being, make no mistake about that but he has always served as a Trojan horse of sorts for those in his immediate and extended orbit looking to capitalize on their proximity by doing very bad things in the darkness of his immense shadow.

The CIA covert operation in the waters off of Ecuador is a prime example of something larger brewing than just meets the eye. It is well funded and essentially untraceable; in our name uniformed mercenaries are abducting and interrogating foreign nationals with zero accountability.

I alluded to this last week and it was confirmed by The Washington Post in recent days that at least two fishing vessels have been attacked - its occupants zipped and hooded and brought to a facility in El Salvador, before being deported back to Ecuador.

This is a separate operation from the very public killing of fisherman falsely accused of being narco traffickers that Pete Hegseth so proudly posts snuff videos of on the Pentagon website.

The clandestine paramilitary actions include a top of the line Cessna surveillance equipped aircraft, with no tail markings, flying out of a shadowy airport outside of San Salvador that was last used by the U.S. at the height of the Iran Contra affair. It is registered to a p.o. box in Virginia.

My guess is that in addition to Trump’s obvious financial scams and looting of the United States, he is working on a plan to consolidate South American drug traffickers under one shadowy organization willing to work with his interests, i.e. he wants a piece of the action and will use the powers of the American government to insure he gets it.

We have a long history of interfering in the politics of Central and South America and profiting from the drug trade to serve our our interests.

These recent events are not unrelated to the recent FinCEN deregulation. Trump and his cabal are positioning themselves to be at the top of the pyramid when it comes to global criminal enterprises.

They are not trying to stop drug trafficking or those who would launder the proceeds. They are making sure no illicit business gets done in this hemisphere without his approval.

These patterns have been prevalent throughout DJT’s entire career but now he has unlimited funds and the U.S. Military at his command.

As was the case with the Watergate scandal, the best thing to do is follow the money.

If the task ahead of us seems daunting or insurmountable, we must remember that there are more of us than there are those willing to go along with living in a dictatorship.

Most folks still don’t have a clear picture of what his happening and that is understandable for a myriad of reasons. Our task is to enlighten them.

We must wake our fellow citizens up fast before it is too late because they amassing a vast arsenal to use against us in the upcoming midterm elections and Trump and his cronies know that if it gets past a certain point - say he does something completely undemocratic like seize ballots when it looks like GOP is going to lose or declare the election was rigged - any protests that occur after that point he may crush in the interest of ‘national security’.

He is already broadcasting his intentions, as he has always done and we would do well to heed the warnings. The enormous ICE budget exists for a reason and it’s not just to prosecute and deport migrants. The Trump administration’s response to the horrific murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this past winter was to investigate progressive groups and unions in Minneapolis.

They have shown their hand, we need to show them ours, rising up in our collective power before it is too late. We are a vast, creative and compassionate nation.

These dark days will pass but not without righteous effort and non-violent, urgent action. We need to call up a thundercloud and let ‘em hear from us. All of us.

The wicked do not rest and we shouldn’t either.

Be well.

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