Trump's Last Stand

The Protection Racket

Yesterday I moseyed over to the penultimate Trump rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, where Republicans were hoping to inspire the base, get the guy off the couch and to the voting stations today. A tepid crowd munched chicken fingers and popcorn for hours at the Santander Stadium, waiting for the Orange Man as speakers blasted Beach Boys and Elvis and a long list of craven sycophants and MAGA hacks lined up to coattail their way into MAGA hearts. 

The human backdrop behind the podium was carefully curated: women had been herded onto a section of bleachers to hold hot pink Women for Trump signs to fill the camera frame behind a parade of white GOP men: Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Bill Hagerty, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (one-eighth the man he used to be, Ozempic should hire him as a pitch man when MAGA collapses) a half dozen Pennsylvania Congressmen, plus Senate candidate Dave McCormick.

The steady stream of testosterone was broken up by just one single woman in the first few hours: Patricia Morin, the mother of a Maryland woman murdered last year by a Salvadoran who had slipped across the border. Rachel Morin’s killer was on the lam from criminal charges in El Salvador. He was apprehended, arrested and charged in August of this year. 

Cases like Morin’s are tragic, horrifying, and extremely unusual in the demographics of American crime. There is simply no evidence that undocumented migrants are or ever have been on a crime spree. Even Greg Abbott’s regime in Texas has produced numbers showing that there is no basis to the claims. In Texas in 2022, native born Americans committed 90 percent of the homicides, while undocumented immigrants committed 5 percent.

But who cares about facts – especially when you’ve got a good yarn with which to sell yourself back into the White House and escape dozens of criminal charges and possible prison time yourself? 

Trump’s single theme from 2015 on has been to inflame fears about brown rapists and killers coming over the southern border, an image he has more recently embellished claiming they are leaving “the dungeons” of “shithole countries” and being sent across the border by occult forces (shorthanded to two syllables, “Soros” ) to “destroy our country.”

The Trump campaign has cynically recruited a grieving, broken mother to shill for his fear-mongering, racist, anti-immigrant plank. Her ordeal is unimaginable and her anger justified. “I have not chosen one side or the other,” she said, before blaming the Biden administration for her daughter’s death. “We’ve had an invasion of millions of people into our country. We don’t know who they are. One of those folks found their way to a small town in Maryland and was on the trail where my daughter was jogging….  If you choose Kamala Harris you are going to lose something.” 

A few hours later, Trump lumbered onto the podium, basked in the warm waves of “USA USA” chants and then invited Mrs. Morin back on the stage, where she broke down in tears again. Morin said Trump had reached out to her many times, while “I’ve never heard from Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.” The crowd, on cue, booed. 

The spectacle of Mrs. Morin being used for her tragedy by a criminally charged orc, adjudicated sexual abuser of women was, needless to say, nauseating. She was as much a prop as the gaggle of women waving pink signs for the camera, reduced to shills for Trump’s message that American women should vote for him for protection. “I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women,” Trump bleated a few days ago at a Green Bay rally. But his strategists didn’t think that was such a great way to phrase it, being that so many uppity nasty women seem to think they can do it for themselves: “They said, ‘We think it’s very inappropriate for you to say.’ I said, ‘Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country.’ They said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.’ I pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it. Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”

What kind of person manipulates a grieving mother for his own purposes, using her tears as an ad for his vile product? To “close the deal.”

As I wrote in my book on Trump and women, using women as props is a long time Trump ploy that dates back to father Fred using bikini-clad babes to sell Coney Island apartments. Boy Donald, born to money and surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, reduces all human interactions to equations of domination and submission that involve dollars and emotional if not literal blackmail. Trump never took personal pleasure in his yacht, or his gorgeous homes, or even in the gorgeous women he decorated himself with. All were just settings, props, extras. There is no human act that can’t be reduced to transaction. Everyone has a price. Money can buy love, sex, fealty, the presidency. He was and in many ways still is competing with a small group of other men, similarly immune to finding enjoyment in the fruits of success, over whose toys were bigger and whose couches had seen more babes. And the most notorious of that small group of men was the one he’d like his fan base to believe he was put on Earth to eradicate: Jeffrey Epstein. 

Which brings me to the overlooked news of the week: Journalist Michael Wolff released tapes of Epstein talking about his long relationship with Donald Trump. Epstein is of course the Banquo’s Ghost at the Trump party. In these tapes in his own voice, he describes Trump as his best friend for ten years of his life, during which they competed to lay the hottest models, and shared them around before discarding them. 

We already know these two men were twin flames, a type of 1980s dick –  or, as Wolff put it on a recent podcast, avatars of “rich man cruelty” for whom women were tools of “domination, competition and submission.” Maybe that is why this additional reminder, in the dead man’s own voice, hit Trump-drunk America with the force of a marsh-mallow shooter. 

But on the last day of the last campaign, it is very much worth remembering and sharing the facts of the long Trump-Epstein bromance, distilled here in four bite size bits:

1) Trump and Epstein were abusive modelizers TOGETHER, for years

2) Their falling out had nothing to do with Trump’s moral outrage at Epstein's predilections, and everything to do with Trump Money Laundering and a Palm Beach mansion they were competing for.

3) Epstein had pictures of Trump cavorting with young girls (Wolff saw them) that were probably in the safe when the FBI raided his NYC house. 

4) Epstein was AFRAID of Trump before he was jailed. As everyone knows, Epstein was arrested and died in prison while Trump was in the White House.

None of this is really new. It has been extensively and deeply reported on. “They were tight,” said one person who “spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution” to the Washington Post in July 2019, after Epstein was arrested getting off his private jet at Teterboro. “They were each other’s wingmen.”

The DIY sleuths on both the right and left sides of the conspira-verse like to claim journalists ignored this relationship. That’s not at all true. The depth and length of the relationship has been well-covered. The only thing that is NOT known - and never can be -  is exactly how many women Trump personally abused and in what grotesque, specific ways. And that’s because stepping up - as the several dozen who have done so know well - invites humiliation and MAGA menace. 

But the important conclusion to be drawn from the latest news is that the low-propensity thinkers at Q Anon and in MAGA world who believe Trump exists to exact vengeance for Epstein's victims are themselves victims of a terrific psy-op. And the cockeyed audacity of Epstein brother-in-arms Donald Trump claiming that he will “protect women whether they like it or not” is almost as remarkable as the fact that millions of deluded sheep will be voting for him today.