Editor’s Note: Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book “High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
The thing about a grift is that it is usually a petty thing. A starving “artist” sells faked works on a sidewalk. A Who’s Who-like directory offers to honor you in exchange for a membership fee paid to a bogus association.
The best grifts rake in the most cash while delivering nothing of value. Consider, for example, the $170 million President Donald Trump has collected for his official “Election Defense Fund” in just the last four weeks. According to the Washington Post, that exceeds the best fundraising weeks for his election campaign.
These donations were solicited via hundreds of email appeals to Trump supporters laced with claims that he didn’t lose the election – it was stolen from him.
As anyone outside the Trump blockade of the truth knows, Trump lost an election notable not for fraud and turmoil, but for the absence of it. And he didn’t just lose. President-elect Joe Biden clobbered him by more than 6 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. (Last time around Trump called the same margin a “landslide.”)
The list of falsehoods and deceptions in the current fundraising appeals made by the President, his family members, and Vice President Mike Pence, begins with claims that the money is going to what the Trump team calls the “Election Defense Fund.” In fact, much of the donations are going to a new Trump “Save America” political action committee, which gets an early cut of the funds raised and which Trump can use for his post-presidency political activities. The fine print shows that 75% of the funds go first to the Save America PAC. Twenty-five percent will go to the Republican National Committee’s operating account. After a donation of $5,000 is made to the PAC, then money can go to the Trump campaign’s recount account.
The Rudy Giuliani show, which involves the former New York City mayor and some other Trump lawyers careening around the country making wild public claims and losing in the courts, is an ingenious element of this grift because it can be bankrolled by the money put up by the marks themselves.
Another classic aspect of this scheme is the vague, open-ended quality of the worthless promise typically made by grifters. Trump’s line is that he will fight against the fraudsters, when there is no evidence of the kind of widespread fraud he has been claiming. Of course, this opens the door to future fundraising appeals, as the soon-to-be former president and his team vow to continue their efforts.
Absent from every grifter’s pitch is any commitment to shouldering true responsibility. For donors, Trump offers a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition similar to one of his earliest grifts: the casino industry, where some of his businesses went bankrupt. I know. I know. Casinos are legitimate businesses offering “entertainment.” But if you look at the odds, which are always against the bettor, and casino advertising that stresses happy winners, you can recognize the grifting part. With other forms of entertainment, you risk a few dollars and hours on a show that might be a stinker. A casino can take your life’s savings in the same amount of time.
Trump’s personal grifting record also includes his infamous Trump University, which marketed “graduate programs, post graduate programs, doctorate programs,” according to a complaint filed by the State of New York.
It was not a university but rather, a high-pressure sales operation that brought people in with free seminars and then pushed them to sign up for courses that topped out at nearly $35,000. Former employees said this grift “preyed on the elderly and uneducated.” What they received were lectures and materials, some of which had been plagiarized, according to the New York Times. Although he contested the New York attorney general’s accusations of fraud, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits brought by those who said he had cheated them.
Another alleged Trump grift involved a multi-level marketing firm that sold people on establishing sales businesses they could run at home. According to investigators in Montana, participants paid on average, around $750 to earn $53 in that state.
A similar scheme found Trump partnering with a health company, helping to persuade people to pay thousands of dollars to begin selling vitamins. A Washington Post report on this endeavor quoted participants who felt cheated out of promised riches. A Trump attorney put the blame for the trouble on them, saying, “like with any business venture, you get what you put into it,” in a statement to the Post. Trump made $2.6 million for putting his name behind the vitamin company.
For many who became vitamin sellers, or Trump University students, the Trump name was persuasive. Here again, the grift dynamic is worth noting. Although he marketed himself as an enormously successful businessman, Trump’s companies had gone bankrupt four times, and independent proof of his claims to vast wealth has been hard to come by. One could argue, in fact, that his greatest achievement was selling himself as an immensely competent executive.
At the heart of this effort was not a business but a reality TV show – “The Apprentice” – that was, in the words of one producer, “a scam” because, for one, the boardroom shown was a set that had to be built to give the feel of a Trump “empire” that the show was trying to sell to the public. In reality, according to the producer, “If you walked around Trump’s actual office in Trump Tower you’d see the wood’s chipped, and what’s that smell?”
“The Apprentice” distorted Trump’s image in ways that no doubt helped him in a political campaign featuring countless misrepresentations and outright lies that, in turn, helped him get elected. As President, the lying continued as Trump sold himself as a leader. Now facing a return to private life, the “Election Defense Fund” is yet another means to a disguised end. As with all grifts, the suckers won’t get what they are paying for, but the pitchman will profit one way or another.