The corruption on display by the Trump administration just keeps growing. Metastasizing, actually.
A reader recently sent me a video that reported on a little-noted element of ICE’s efforts to acquire warehouses. There’s been a lot of pushback from locals who object to the purchases on the grounds that they will be barely-veiled concentration camps, but I had not previously encountered a different objection, an itemization of the obscene overpayments being made— sales prices that are wildly inflated over assessed values and/or recent, previous acquisition costs, with the identity of those profiting from these transactions difficult to determine.
The woman in the linked video asks a reasonable question: who’s benefiting from this boondoggle?
It’s difficult to grasp the astonishing degree of corruption of the Trump administration–not just the official favors being done for the president’s billionaire cronies (the tax cuts and official permits and terminations of investigations begun under previous administrations), but the numerous outright bribes from foreign countries and domestic fat cats. (The Center for American Progress estimates the Trump family has taken in 1.8 billion in cash and gifts.)
This outright looting has certainly not been accompanied by any moves benefitting the American people. It’s a shame that the length of Trump’s meandering, bloated and mendacious State of the Union speech kept so many people from seeing or hearing the Democratic rebuttal presented by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger–as a recent post from the Contrarian reported, it was a concise and effective 13 minutes.
Spanberger began with three simple questions: Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?Is the president working to keep Americans safe — both at home and abroad? Is the President working for YOU? She proceeded to point out that Trump’s reckless trade policies have cost American families an average of $1,700 each. (Despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are paid by foreign countries, they aren’t–as every economist, liberal or conservative, has pointed out, they are a tax on Americans, intended to offset the revenues lost thanks to the deep tax cuts for the wealthy.)
Spanberger also highlighted the escalating closures of rural health clinics, thanks to provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
And tonight, the President celebrated this law — the one threatening rural hospitals, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and driving up costs in energy and housing. All while cutting food programs for hungry kids.
Spanberger–who was an intelligence officer with the CIA before entering politics–then turned to the question of public safety, pointing out that ICE’s time spent sowing fear is time “not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.” Worse still, Trump has destroyed America’s reputation as a force for good in the world–outcomes she attributed to the appointment of “deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions.”
Turning to the third of her questions, Spanberger ticked off the multiple grifts of an administration that she quite accurately accused of being the most corrupt in memory. Not only is Trump enriching himself, his family, and his friends at a scale that is unprecedented–“cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms”–there’s the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, and the embarrassing plastering of his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital.
Spanberger ended her thirteen minutes by reminding her listeners that We the People have the power to stop the desecration of the American Idea. We have the power–and the obligation–to put an end to what is truly a massive theft, not just of our funds, but of America’s founding philosophy.
As she concluded,
George Washington warned us about the possibility of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” rising to power. But he also encouraged us — all Americans — to unite in “a common cause” to move this nation forward.
That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.
It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.
If we’ve learned anything from the slow drip of the Epstein files, it is that a class of wealthy and entitled individuals consider themselves above the laws that govern us “little people.” That sense of impunity has now led to unprecedented corruption and the wholesale looting of dollars meant to provide for the public good.
“It’s time for a change” has never been a more powerful slogan.
real estate is trumps corps mindset. if theres a reason why windtowers in view from the beachfront is a issue,look at beach front,and who demands the attention. the whole project 2025 heads are looking to cashout every cent they can for themselves or their well of rip off buddies from the government/taxpayers. theres gold in them thar hills. taking national parks under the idea of housing. whos?.
now they expand the network to the med.using the military to subdue resistance? ya gotta look under the rug on the whos who of this issue. kushner and company,lutnick ,thiel etc made thier buck and demand we give them more,,no matter how. if the talk is right, the rich want thier own style of government. building of such places now exist. honduras has given them a island. but maybe they want bigger,Greenland. afterall, money can warm anything up. its a takeover by the rich,and those chosen by them and elected today. ignorance is keeping hid what is in plain site. those who deny or say no way. hey WAY!. ya might want to piece it together,and read between the lines. this is the rich taking by force. and they dont care who or how many they kill to get it.
data centers will be the fine tuning of getting us in line to accept it.
I think it is a good idea to point out, early and often, that the t*ump/MAGA crime syndicate is taking taxpayer dollars away from social services to pay for his war of choice, and to enrich themselves at our expense. And is adding trillions to the national debt.
Funny how we don’t hear much about that from the MAGA GOP.
Abigail was wellspoken, but she’s a spook. There was a whole class of spooks dumped into the Democratic Party as the old guard retires. Don’t forget, the CIA/Mossad was behind the Epstein Pedo Backmail ring, using little girls and boys as bait to catch the world’s elite, including Trump.
The reason Israel fired first into Tehran is that Khamenei was surrounded by his top leadership. Has the oligarch-owned media asked how Israel knew the exact location of the Ayatollah? How did they pluck Maduro out of a military compound at night? How is the IDF targeting Palestinians in what is left of their homes in Gaza?
If the FBI/CIA wanted to stop the grift in the USA, Israel, Syria, or Venezuela, it would be ended immediately. Hey, what about all those drug traffickers bringing smack into our urban cities? 😉
The government is not for the people. We pay $1 trillion a year in interest on our debt, which nobody wants to buy anymore. That is almost as much as the $1.5 trillion we pay for the War Department. MAGA was sold on the “peace candidate.” Trump was going to bring down the deep state. LOL
If you’ve been watching Tucker Carlson, he’s destroying the MAGA inner circle. He will be cut off soon.
The clarity in your message is encouraging and so important. Thank you, Sheila, and I hope all Americans read this. I include my grandchildren in that wish – it’s their future he is destroying, as well as ours. Ahhh, this certainly is not the America I grew up with.
““It’s time for a change” has never been a more powerful slogan.”
Asking “Who’s Benefitting” should be added to that statement; evidently Republicans were not benefitting enough from Musk’s firing of thousands and Trump’s profits from this presidency which has cast him into the Billionaire level isn’t enough so they resorted to the same successful profiteering as George I and George II by declaring a war somewhere in the world. The current Trump/Netanyahu war on Iran has no actual planned action going in or coming out and are not getting their usual expected support from U.S. allies; UK, France and Spain have passed on this one and Trump’s lost love, Kim Jong Un of North Korea is now against him. A dangerous, locked and loaded enemy to have. Trump has ordered the best of our military to quickly work their way through our stockpile of weapons ASAP with American National Guard troops employed elsewhere to keep Americans on our streets in line with ICE and Border Patrol troops. No plan to evacuate anyone from the globally targeted sites of Iran who Trump has now warned might actually target the United States in direct retaliation for their middle of the night war attack which killed children in school. The decision of our “boots on the ground” in Iran is yet to be decided as they offer inflated prices for warehouses to turn into concentration camps for immigrants here at home.
We are long overdue for that change referred to; Impeachment with removal of Trump from office and imprisonment for his convictions postponed during his 2024 campaign. We are operating ass-backward on all levels of all issues we are up against; what are the billionaires benefitting from the destruction of the nation they have bought and paid for and are they footing any of the bill for this Iran war? We are in the cross hairs of the evilest of nations known to mankind…and those gas prices are moving up an an increasing rate.
GRIFT is Trump’s middle name, has been for decades, plain and simple. He’s just never had this kind of opportunity before.
On a different note, who do you think his sitting somewhere in the Kremlin, with huge smile on his face, as his very long term strategy plays out? Putin put Trump in the W.H.in ’20, and went after Ukraine soon after, now he’s seeing, as we all are, the not so gradual dismemberment of his main foe. Like that now old cartoon said “He gets me,” and he certainly did. Trump, and cronies may be getting richer, but he’s still the biggest looser.