Much less the Super Cafe....
....and much more the Villain's Pub.
Indeed, Trumpmania has bred so much corruption, con-artistry, scamming, and flim-flammery that even TrumpWorld can neither control it beyond or even within its own confines.
Let's take the beyond first:
As Donald Trump rushes to start collecting the $1 billion expected to be necessary to compete for the White House, one of his biggest challenges may come from those claiming to support him.
Oh, I'm sure they do support him. "Scumbags of a feather flock together" and all that.
An increasing number of unauthorized groups are invoking the presumptive GOP nominee’s name to raise money, suggesting that they’ll use the cash to support his campaign, even as some appear to be spending most of their money on contracts with favored consultants.
The pattern of Trump's entire business career. Anybody know, by the way, if the pittance of all the cash he claimed to be raising "for Americans' veterans" has actually gotten to them yet? Just asking.
Trump’s campaign and its allies worry that the groups are doing little to help the campaign and may be doing more harm than good by siphoning off cash that would otherwise go to the campaign’s fledgling fundraising effort.
Which wouldn't be a problem if he had kept his word on his original promise to self-fund his efforts. Something he'd surely be able to do if he's as "rich" and "successful" as he claims to be. And which he quite evidently is not given his refusal to release any of his tax returns.
The campaign has disavowed several of the groups, demanding they stop using the candidate’s name in fundraising appeals and calling at least one super PAC founded by a Trump adviser a “big-league scam.” But appeals keep coming from other groups, with more now joining the scrum, and rival groups accusing one another of being scams.
Well, Trump is their Yoda, so they, and he, would know.
The thing is, the closer you get to TrumpWorld itself, the more egregious the scams become:
[Great America] PAC has spent more than $1 million so far on pro-Trump ads but raised eyebrows with a TV spot that looked unprofessional and asked supporters to call a toll-free number to donate. One of its strategists, Jesse Benton, was convicted this month of buying an endorsement for Ron Paul in 2012. And Amy Kremer, a tea party activist who was an early leader of the group, quit this month over a disagreement with Beach.
The PAC’s treasurer is Dan Backer, whose consulting firm, DB Capitol Strategies, has been paid more than $2,000. Backer is also the treasurer of PACs such as Conservative Action Fund and Tea Party Forward that have spent more on their own operating expenses than on their stated causes.
Great America PAC has been one of the top pro-Trump PACs out there up to now. Guess what Trump convention rioting coordinator Roger "The Fixer" Stoner thinks of them:
Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone has warned donors to “beware” of Great America PAC, branding it a “scam.”
Beware -Convicted felon @JesseBenton and Clinton stooge @EdRoliins get caught running SCAM Pro- @realDonaldTrumpPAC nytimes.com/politics/first…
Okay. Now guess what Corey Lewandowski thinks of Roger Stone's convention rioting coordination fundraising efforts?:
“Big league scam,” Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told the Hill.
“We sent a cease-and-desist letter to this PAC in October and want nothing to do with this,” he said. “These guys are scam artists doing it for their own personal benefit and seeking to profiteer off Trump’s name. People should not give to this or any other super-PAC claiming to support Donald Trump for president.”
None of this cross-finger-pointing is a search for virtue and ethics and integrity. Rather, every last one of them is a grifter, just like their standardbearer, and they're all in a huge brawl to claw their way to the top of the Trump pecking order. Kind of like swindler Darwinism, or Charles Xavier's description of the future Sentinel-dominated world "leaving only the worst of humanity in charge". That sure as shinola describes TrumpWorld, alright.
When I was in college, I was a GDI ("Independent" is represented by the last initial; I'll let y'all fill in the other two on your own). Not politically, but in terms of not being a "dormie" or a "frat boy". My cousin and I lived off-campus in an apartment complex. We were on the first floor in a "C" shaped building. On the other side of it, on the top (third) floor was the apartment that had the reputation all over campus as being Party Central - and its reputation was, let's just say, well-earned, judging by the size of its inhabitants' stereo speakers (what looked like eight-feet tall), the way our lights would dim when they turned them on, to say nothing of how their windows would pulsate and the building foundation would rumble, and the refrigerator carton after refrigerator carton of beer cans they'd haul out to the dumpster the following mornings. I often tried to picture what the inside of that apartment must have looked like. But I never did so for long, for fear of the rapid upwelling of nausea that would soon overtake me if I lingered on that mental image for too long.
A few years later I rented that very apartment after graduation. The first things I noticed were (1) a lingering....odor, (2) a rather large barf-colored stain on the carpet, and (3) a head-sized hole in one closet door. And this was AFTER the apartment owners cleaned up and remodeled the place. Turns out my earlier mental images didn't do the reality justice.
This is what the Republican Party is going to be after Trumpmania is finally put out of its misery six months from now. A dirty, smelly, rancid, barf-stained, gutted shell of what it once was, with its crazed, angry, aggrieved, corrupt defenders standing outside of it ready to fight to the death to keep it in that very decimated condition.
Or maybe they'll all be in a huge brawl with each other to claw their way to the top of the post-Trump pecking order, and grab the biggest dirty, smell, barf-stained, odoriferous spot for themselves. Heck, if it gets heated enough, they may not even notice the election, and perhaps conservatives can take it back unopposed, and start anew.
Hey, it'll be worth a try, anyway.
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