In case you were wondering

 

The grift family strikes again

 

Because of course

 

I wonder who will use that bed.

Emolumentum

 

It's a huge grift

 

NYT trying to regain some of its good reputation?

This is from the editorial board of the Times.

When President Harry Truman left office in 1953, he did not even own a car. He and his wife returned to Missouri by train and lived for a time on his Army pension. He refused to take any job that he regarded as commercializing his public service, explaining, “I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former president of the United States.”

[...]

[Donald]Trump’s hunger for wealth is brazen. Throughout the nation’s history, presidents of both parties have taken care to avoid even the appearance of profiting from public service. This president gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign governments and celebrates the rapid growth of his own fortune.

[...]

Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him.

He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

[...]

This tally focuses on Mr. Trump’s documented gains. The $1.4 billion figure is a minimum, not a full accounting. [...] When The Financial Times asked Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, about its estimated value of the family’s crypto gains, he said they were probably even larger than the news organization thought.

Our accounting also does not include other ways in which the president has encouraged influence seekers to make donations that benefit him politically, including to his planned White House renovation.

[...]

A hotel in Oman. An office tower in western India. A golf course on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These are a few of the more than 20 overseas projects the Trump Organization is pursuing, often requiring cooperation with foreign governments.

[...]

Paramount, for example, agreed to pay the president $16 million for what he claimed was the deceptive editing of a 2024 Kamala Harris interview. The editing was a normal part of journalism. Three weeks later, the Federal Communications Commission approved an $8 billion merger with Skydance.

[...]

Amazon paid far more for the rights to “Melania” than the next highest bidder — and far more than the company has previously paid for similar projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chairman and one of the world’s richest people, has many reasons to curry favor with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. One that has become public: A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm — two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.

  NYT

Remember when the Times did a huge expose about Trump's finances and connections to Russian mobsters in his first term? If not, don't feel old. It just didn't gain any traction at all. It was incredible.

It is impossible to know how often Mr. Trump makes official decisions, in part or entirely, because he wants to be richer.

I'd guess virtually EVERY TIME.

The demands of avarice gradually corrupt the work of government as officials facilitate the accumulation of personal wealth. Worse, such a government corrupts the people who live under its rule. They learn by experience that they live in a society where the laws are written by the highest bidder. They become less likely to obey those laws, and to participate in the work of democracy — speaking, voting, paying taxes. The United States risks falling into this cynical spiral as Mr. Trump hollows out the institutions of government for personal gain.

I don't know who's on the NYT editorial board, but they should expect a backlash. I assume they do.

Why no report?

 

Trump family grift

 

The original deal.

The family that grifts together

 

Kingly riches

 

America for sale

 

Nice work if you can get it

 

But Hunter Biden!

 

Trump 2.0

Donald Trump’s family business is breaking ground on an accelerated project in Vietnam as the country’s government seeks an updated trade agreement with the United States.

The U.S. president’s tariff threats have driven Vietnam to seek a new arrangement with America, potentially including efforts to combat trade fraud, as the White House inches closer to a July deadline when Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff measures will snap back into place.

  Independent UK

 Trump family graft.

[Trump] previously ordered a 90-day pause of his order imposing sky-high tariff rates on many countries, including Vietnam, which is set to face a 46 percent tariff on all exports to the United States on top of the Trump administration’s 10 percent across-the-board import measures.

[...]

[A] $1.5 billion Trump Organization development project outside of Hanoi has seemingly blown through the typical approval process, leaving locals enraged at the government and the president adding another layer to the onion of alleged self-dealing and kickbacks that has defined all four years and four months of Trump’s presidential tenure. According to documents published by the Times on the Trump Organization’s Hanoi development, the project skipped typical environmental reviews and cut short a local public comment period — one that had been dotted by fired-up local residents who’ve been informed that their land will be sold for less than half the value of what the parcels would have been worth prior to the alleged land grab.

[...]

Wednesday’s groundbreaking for the project took place just three months after the initial documents were filed, a process which experts told the Times usually takes at least two years. Some steps were reportedly skipped entirely, while others were still underway.

[...]

The area set to be developed for the project includes farms and nearly four square miles of riverbank property, all together totaling “hundreds” of residences.

One local, Le Van Truong, 54, was quoted byThe New York Times as saying he could lose farmland as well as the local cemetery holding five generations of his ancestors.

Will those farmers be able to get immediate relocation in the US like the Afrikaners?

Fun fact:

In one anecdote, the paper even noted that “the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War” and saw a 200-pound bomb recovered recently.

[...]

In an emailed statement to the Times regarding the Vietnam project, a White House spokesperson said: “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.”

Sure, Jan.

The White House also insisted there was no conflict of interest because the president’s sons run the business.

LOL. Can you say, Hunter Biden?

Erasing all doubt about the project’s ties to official relations between the U.S. government and his own, Vietnam’s prime minister Pham Minh Chinh said at the groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday that the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.”

Retraction to come.

UPDATE 05/29/2025:

Trump family grift 24/7

Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president.

[...]

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a series of apparent scams that have redirected fans to fake pages and compromised the social media accounts of other Trump relatives.

The incidents have begun to rattle some of Trump’s allies within the crypto world. They’re warning that his family should shelve a project that they say creates unnecessary political risks and reflects poorly on the industry.

[...]

“It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”

[...]

Government watchdogs have also warned the intertwining of politics, policy and the Trump family business poses new conflict of interest concerns as Democrats try to paint him as a “con artist” in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. It comes as major crypto firms face ongoing criticism that the market is rife with scams and consumer abuse.

   Politico

That's a business right up Trump's alley.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Don's ass in court today

New York fraud case against the Trump Organization - sorting out the penalties phase.

UPDATE 03:07 pm:

UPDATE 06:56 pm:

Sad!

Readying Trump Crime Family case in New York

Trump, per a transcript of a deposition he gave in April in the New York attorney general’s office’s civil case alleging he inflated his net worth, was asked if he was “currently the person with ultimate decision-making authority for the Trump Organization.”

“My son Eric is much more involved with it than I am. I’ve been doing other things,” the former president replied. “And I guess you could say on something major, final decisions, whatever. But I’ve been much less involved in it than ... over the last five years, five or six years than ever before.”

There was “a little whiff of him throwing Eric under the bus there should any charges press further on.”

  HuffPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

As the World Burns

Can we have a mud pit installed at the Capitol for when the political tit for tat turns physical?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Unprecedented

I assume we'll be seeing more clips from this documentary during the remaining January 6 hearings, but maybe not.  It reminds me of the documentary that accidentally caught the kidnapping and conspiracy against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.  Only this one might not be so favorable to the subject of the film.

And here's a very interesting clip from the first of June:

Hey, here's a surprise (I jest)

Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker found that violations by Westminster Management and the company JK2 were “widespread and numerous.”

[...]

The wide-ranging case dealt with issues from maintenance problems such as mold and rodents, to fees charged to the consumers.

Daneker found Westminster charged illegal fees thousands of times.

[...]

Maryland law only allows landlords to charge up to $25 to process an application. But the properties in the case charged between $35 to $50 to at least 15,289 consumers, according to Daneker’s decision.

Westminster and JK2 also charged tenants $12 “agent fees” related to court filings, for costs the companies had not actually incurred. The companies did this more than 28,000 times, with the wrongly charged agent fees totaling more than $332,000, the judge wrote.

In addition, the companies charged tenants at Dutch Village and Pleasantview in Baltimore $80 “as a pass-through fee for court costs, even though the amount incurred was only $50.”

“This occurred a total of 2,642 times over the course of more than two years,” Daneker wrote.

[...]

Kushner — the son-in-law of former president Donald J. Trump — and his brother Joshua each held 50% interest in JK2, according to the legal filing. Westminster is the successor to that company.

[...]

The judge found that tenants were misled frequently about the conditions of the apartments before they moved in. Often, they were only shown model units and weren’t allowed to see their actual apartment until move-in day.

One man described his experience at the Charlesmont apartments in Dundalk in 2014. He was shown a unit that looked like it had just been remodeled, but the unit he got “had dirty carpet and smelled like a litter box.” His kitchen ceiling collapsed the night he moved in. Management never made repairs despite repeated complaints, so the man bought supplies at Home Depot and fixed the ceiling himself. His employer paid for the carpet to be cleaned.

[...]

While finding many violations of consumer protection laws, Daneker did not agree with all of the allegations of the attorney general’s office’s Consumer Protection Division.

She found the division did not establish that the companies violated the law by misrepresenting their ability to provide maintenance services. She also said they were not committing some violations during the entire period alleged by the division.

The Kushner Cos. characterized the decision as vindicating Westminster, which it owns.

  Baltimore Sun

Totally exonerated. Always claim a win.

Westminster has repeatedly alleged that [the] case was politically motivated.

In her ruling, Daneker found no evidence of that.

“The evidence does not establish differential treatment or selective enforcement based on any politically motivated basis, as opposed to motivation to protect Maryland consumers,” she wrote.