The definition of insanity: who keeps funding the Trump Organization?
For nearly half a century, Donald Trump has dined out on being an idiot’s idea of a smart person.
His idea of having taste, class and wit has been shouting about having taste, class and wit, and if you do that loud enough, there will always be rubes who believe you. To be clear, I’m not talking about people who buy his Trump-branded tat. As we can see on several occasions, there were vanishingly few people who actually did that until he ran for the presidency, just look at the catastrophic embarrassment that was Trump Steaks.
No, the idiots that Trump was conning by crowing about his supposed “billionaire lifestyle” with his luxury penthouses, shoes that cost more than most cars, and his gold toilets were other business people caught up in his slipstream of bullshit. It’s one thing for ordinary folks to see an advert for Trump-related stuff and go “huh, him off Home Alone 2, let’s see what he has to say”. It’s not particularly smart, and it’s the reason why America is falling into a fascist dictatorship right now. However, anyone who’s been to America will tell you that the place is built on 90% advertising, so it stands to reason that some of it will work.
No, the real marks were people who are also wearing tailored suits, snorting mountains of cocaine and, as the files are showing, developing close personal relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, all because their idol was doing the same.
It’s extremely funny that Patrick Bateman has become such an icon to “disenfranchised outcasts” who “live life on their own terms” because the man spends a decent chunk of the original novel of American Psycho twerking for Trump’s attention. That class of folk were the real people who fell for his lies to the tune of losing several billion dollars over it.
The best examples of this come from the podcast Trump Inc, which in 2019 uploaded an in-depth expose on Deutsche Bank, which had spent decades pumping money into Trump’s failing schemes.
What was the relationship between Trump and Deutsche Bank?
Yeah, turns out that by 2019, files found by the New York Times showed the Trump Organization in debt to Deutsche Bank to the tune of $350million. Was this really the Berlin financial institution falling for Trump’s con artistry, hook, line, and sinker?
God knows several other respected financial institutions did. However, he was also, as we all know, going bankrupt far more often than he had any real financial triumphs. This was a man who regularly pointed out an unhoused person who stayed outside Trump Tower to his daughter with the words, “That man is $300m richer than me”.
All this to say that these financial institutions may be stupid to have bought into his con in the first place, but they will always go where the money goes. For decades, money was not going towards the Trump Organization, and after a while, American banks stopped entertaining approaches from the Trump Organization. They’d been burned before and knew that funding whatever scheme they had cooked up would never return dividends in a million years. So why Deutsche Bank? If you look at some of the people they were associated with, suddenly the whole thing starts making sense.
Now, right from the off, the history of Deutsche Bank is one pockmarked with alleged corruption. To be fair to them (and you really don’t have to be), they might not have been taken in by Trump’s supposed charm and charisma; they just knew a crook when they saw one.
According to David Enrich, the then-financial editor of the New York Times, Deutsche Bank had been allegedly laundering money for Russian oligarchs and money men with deep ties to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin for decades. Then suddenly they started palling around with Trump? Quelle surprise.
Thus, you start to see the layers of the Trump con at work. On the surface, it’s people falling for his lavish lifestyle. The further down you get, the depressing the truth is. That these people are all criminals and Trump, despite being one of the most powerful people in the world now, is so bad at being one that several different organisations have him by the short and curlies.
Modern life really is rubbish.