Breaking the Spell

Can a HALF BILLION dollar judgment revive the zombies?

In the last few weeks, Trump has been ordered by judges and juries to fork over more than half a billion dollars in civil penalties and damages. He’s lost access to his business, and so have his sons. Of course, he’ll appeal and drag it all out (see last week’s issue on The Waiting Game), but something about this moment feels like a tipping point.

The MAGA cult is essentially a cult of Mammon. Trump’s comfortable white middle-class adherents (who, contrary to popular opinion, outnumber his low-income followers) worship Trump not only because he’s released them to air their politically incorrect grudges. The fake billionaire represents their idea of what it looks like to inhabit the highest possible echelon of the American Dream.

Trump is simultaneously the poor man’s idea of rich and the truly rich man’s idea of a waterboy, the useful tool who will press their deregulatory schemes in Washington. As apostle of Mammon to the rabble, he can appear to be shaking up the system, while codifying forever tactics for manipulating and amassing capital unimpeded by the U.S. government. In his first three months in office, Trump quietly deregulated the financial industry, stripped Obama's climate change rules from fossil fuel producers, and, before the year was out, lowered taxes for the superrich. And he still played to the cheap seats.

On the stump, he croons like Frank Sinatra - syrupy, Rat Packish. Every campaign stop stadium platform is a flashback to The Sands in 1962. It doesn’t matter whether what he says is fragmented, demented, or psychotic. His followers roll over, blissed out, insensate.

They’re the people for whom the chefs in Vegas sprinkle actual gold flakes on truffled fries. The essential MAGA cult member is a wannabe high-roller with an eye to the wallet. Trump knows his followers will pay $399 - but maybe not $400! - for the gold Never Surrender High Top Trump sneakers. They will fork over $99 - but not $100! - for another new Trump product sold on the same website, Victory 47 cologne. (Trump would be the 47th President if elected this year.)

The Trump brand is gilt, “classy.” Aspirational. The price tag is always a penny short of the rounded dollar. The MSNBC/NPR elites just don’t get it. In New York, according to the Times, prices for condos in Trump-branded buildings rise after residents rip the gold TRUMP letters off their facades.

In MAGA world, private property is sacred ground and believed to be under siege by cultural Marxists. Mar a Lago is the divine central temple. The most devoted supplicants live in gated communities and mingle on golf courses among people who don’t like books and distrust those who read them.

But in the last few weeks, Trump’s claim on being Mammon’s shaman has weakened. Courts and juries have adjudicated him out of more than half a billion dollars. His sons are barred from operating the family business. A woman from outside the family has been put in charge of overseeing it. Whether or not he ever pays up on that looming debt, almost all of his donor cash is now going to cover legal fees in the four trials ahead.

As Ivanka Trump wrote in her 2009 book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life, the most important lesson she learned from her dad is that perception is more important than reality. Political Trump has relied on that adage since he sailed down the golden escalator blaming Mexican rapists for America’s problems, and even more after J6 and the Big Lie.

The centrality of the perception of wealth to the Trump brand is why in 2005, the future president sued writer Tim O’Brien, demanding $5 billion over O’Brien’s claim that Trump was not at all a billionaire but worth somewhere between $150 and $250 million. In 2009, a judge threw out the case, and an appeals court in 2011 affirmed that. It took six years for the suit to die, while the slow wheels of justice - besides bleeding the author and publisher of spirit, cash, and time - allowed Trump to maintain and amplify the underlying lies, in this case, his billionaire brand.

MAGA eyeballs glaze over at that episode and all factual history that doesn’t align with the myth of the self-made billionaire. Countless words have been written about the MAGA cult and how difficult it is to deprogram zombies impervious to logic and reason. Even among the supporters who clearly do know better, like Elise Stefanik, admitting the folly of years of investment in a conman will be hard to choke out.

What if the MAGA crowd were forced, like the character in A Clockwork Orange, to keep their eyes and ears open and watch the true arc of their leader’s failed business career? Could the cult collapse under the facts of the $916 million bankruptcy, the nepo-baby bailouts handed out by Big Daddy Fred, the fact that he drove small Atlantic City vendors into bankruptcy by never paying his final bills? What about video outtakes of Trump’s stimulant-abusing rages and racist and sexist repartee locked in a vault by Apprentice producer Mark Burnett? What about the accounts of the Trump University victims, post-2008 financial-crashed men and women suckered into an upselling scheme that was supposed to teach the great man’s business secrets? The closest they got to that capitalist ark of the covenant were selfies with life-size cardboard Trumps snapped in rented Marriott meeting rooms.

Is it possible de-gilding the T will break the spell?

Conventional wisdom says only conviction and prison can begin to dispel it. The most recent polling on Trump supporters from Bloomberg and Morning Consult in eight swing states a few weeks ago found that 53 percent of his supporters would drop off if he is convicted in any case, and 55 percent wouldn't be able to stomach voting for him if he is sentenced to prison. As I wrote last week, I believe Trump’s trademark delay tactics will prevent those outcomes before the election.

But the fraud penalty will gut the Trump Organization — the last material basis for the perception of a man of great wealth. The Wall Street Journal says the ruling “threatens to handcuff” the entire business operation. Without it, the brand depends on his increasingly seedy political shows.

Who will pony up to manufacture talismans like magic golden sneakers and bottles of Victory 47 if the Trump Organization goes down? His followers in the media and on social platforms are bellowing that the judgments are political, echoing his witch-hunt cry about an angry black woman coming after white man money, hint-hint, grab your guns and lock the doors. Cue Jonathan Turley weighing in at the Hill on the “obscene award” that is “testing” New York’s judicial integrity.

This weekend, righties like Monica Crowley were cheering on ridiculous rumors that Truckers for Trump would stop delivering cargo to New York City to punish the city for dethroning the king. A trucker tweeting as Chicago Ray reported that “I've been on the radio for over an hour and I've talked to at least (10) Truckers who are gonna start refusing loads of Monday for (NYC) ...I talked to (3) guys that I work with who texted the boss and told him no (NYC) Truckers are (95%) Trump... it'll get overturned on appeal… “ [sic throughout].

I met the founders of Truckers for Trump when the group was threatening (as hollowly as now) to barricade the city of Cleveland against Antifa in 2016. In an earlier Freakshow issue, I told the sad story of the founders, a middle-aged couple who had made life decisions based on a mega-church pastor’s warnings that Obama would throw them into FEMA camps.

For now, the MAGA cult clings as tightly as ever to its dear leader. They are even joined, in a show of cross-cultic support, by a pair of millionaire Scientologists. Supporters Grant and Elena Cardone announced over the weekend they would be crowdfunding to defray Trump’s $355 million civil fraud judgment. At the time of writing, the campaign had raised $63,517 from over 1,500 donors.

That’s almost enough for a round of gold-flecked truffle fries at Mar a Lago.