Newsflash: Trump White House WAS For Sale

Republicans and the Madness of MAGA Projection

Your Freakshow guide has often led you down behind the ferris wheel to the greasy tent where the can-you-believe-it’s-real MAGA grotesques are on display. We’ve gaped at swamp critter Ken Paxton, creepy butlers who serve the oligarchy, toxic masculine ape-men, right wing child molesters, and mad scary fake Christians.

One disturbing mental process links them all: Projection, in which people attribute to others what is in their own minds.

Projection is a hallmark of the MAGA personality: they unconsciously take unwanted emotions or traits about themselves and attribute them to someone else, so that they see in others all the venality, greed, corruption, deviance and cruelty in their own hearts. More than a thousand Republicans at all levels have been logged as child sex abusers, but a substantial number of righties insist top Democrats preside over a child trafficking conspiracy.

The role model for Republican political projection is Trump himself, who can only see his own lowest motives in others. Pathologically vengeful Trump, for example, could not imagine a political system that doesn’t involve jailing one’s opponents (never forget that he and General Mike Flynn first mainstreamed this now common form of banana republicanism in 2016.)

So Republicans are fixated on investigating Hunter Biden, ignoring the fact that Trump’s son-in-law walked off the White House lawn in 2021 for the last time, to collect a $2 billion payoff from Gulf Arab potentates. After years of investigations, they have never turned up a shred of evidence that President Biden was enriched off the dealings of his drug-addled son. But they’re impeaching him over it anyway.

Today, House Democrats released a 150-page document detailing how Trump used the White House for financial gain from foreign powers. The report, White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers and Premiers Paid off President Trump, holds up a mirror to Republican hypocrisy.

While President, Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments - likely only a small fraction of the total. China pumped a cool $5.5 million directly into Trump’s personal coffers via the Trump Tower and Trump International Hotels in DC and Vegas. Saudi Arabia poured more than half a million dollars into Trump’s well-branded corporate empire through his hotels.

The report is the product of a nearly seven years-long House Oversight Committee investigation into how Trump commingled his businesses and the presidency. Trump lawyers stonewalled and helped him pry open cracks in the American system to unleash a kraken of official venality. But the committee was making good progress after Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, flipped under pressure and started producing documents.

The report shows how besides taking foreign money from entities “around the globe,” Trump and his family - during the presidency - brazenly planned business developments in China and Saudi Arabia (the post-presidency Trump Doral golf course deal, for example) while Trump did significant presidential favors for the foreign entities that were paying his businesses.

The monetary value of those favors cannot be calculated, but they are significant. For example, he refused to sanction China’s bank for doing business with North Korea, stating in 2018, “I love China! The biggest bank in the world is from China You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower.”

For the Saudis, the report reminds us of how Trump signed a $100 billion arms deal, and tried to cast doubt on investigations into the monarch’s involvement in the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi. During his 2015 campaign he boasted of how the Saudis spent $40 or $50 million on his apartments. “I like them very much!” he said.

After House Republicans put the kibosh on the investigation when they took power in 2022, leads were slammed shut, and accounting firm Mazars got to keep the Trumpy secrets. “The foreign payments to President Trump identified in this report are likely only a small fraction of the total amount of such payments he received during his presidency,” the report notes.

No surprise, really: Trump always regarded the Presidency as a boon to his faltering personal fortune and brand. “The presidency became the fulfillment of a get- rich-quick campaign he reportedly described as the greatest infomercial in political history,” the report states, quoting former Trump consigliere Michael Cohen.

In his foreword to the report, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, wrote that the Democrats are putting together a package of proposed statutes to close loopholes Trump used to evade ethical norms. “No other president had ever come as close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of theFounders- an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of America First!”

The report is dedicated to the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the House Oversight Committee, with the words “The memory of the righteous is a blessing.”

Read it here: Trump White House For Sale