Trump’s Empire of Lies and Loot

The morbidly rich hide behind patriotism, drown us in lies, and strip the nation bare while we’re told to blame our neighbors...

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest
and most fatal ailment of all republics. —Plutarch

People wonder out loud why the Trump administration would lie to us so frequently and so egregiously when the truth is so obvious. Just in the past few days:

— Cosplay Kristi claiming that Senator Padilla was “lunging” at her.
— JD Vance proclaiming that Los Angeles is filled with “rioters egged on by the governor and the mayor.”
— DNI Director Gabbard telling Congress under oath that the intelligence community does not believe Iran is building a nuke, then saying the opposite to the public on social media.
— Republican congresspeople and the Speaker of the House repeatedly promising that their billionaire-tax-cut legislation won’t cut Medicaid as they revive Reagan’s lie that tax cuts for the morbidly rich will help out average working people.
— Stephen Miller’s wife claiming that “The number [of fraudulent Social Security claims] is 40 percent” when in fact it’s so small as to be functionally meaningless.
— Trump attacked Iran despite that country posing no threat to the US whatsoever.
— ICE claiming the father of three Marines that they beat to the ground and pounded on was trying to attack them with a Weedwhacker, when in fact video shows no such thing.

The dirty little secret about fascism, authoritarianism, or whatever else you want to call the form of government Trump’s trying to impose on the United States is that it’s not even remotely legitimate governance on behalf of We the People but instead is merely a setup to steal everything that’s not nailed down.

Trump himself, after all, has already made at least a billion dollars off his presidency in just the first five months, his son Barron just made at least $40 million, and his other sons are cashing in on deals with foreign governments that run into the billions. It’s a haul worthy of Midas — or Putin.

Experts estimate that between 15 and 30 percent of the entire GDP of countries currently under authoritarian rule like Russia and Hungary is being skimmed off the top for the benefit of the leaders and their morbidly rich friends. The Nazis famously looted the wealth of Jewish and “socialist” families and businesses and transferred that wealth to Hitler’s friends, as did Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, and Suharto back in the day, and el Sisi, Erdoğon, Khamenei, Mbasogo, Aliyev, etc. in modern times.

This is the model that Trump and the people surrounding him are following.

It goes by many names, as mentioned: fascism, authoritarianism, autocracy, oligarchy, etc. But at their core, all are simply modern reinventions of the old reign of warlord kings, where the people who hold the power use that power to enrich themselves while keeping everybody else poor.

How else to explain the GOP’s destruction of the American middle class over the past 44 years as over $50 trillion has been looted from average working people and shifted into the money bins of the morbidly rich? It’s theft, pure and simple.

And when people are being systematically robbed and finally figure it out, they usually try to rise up and throw off the chains the morbidly rich have tried to fasten on them.

Father of the Constitution James Madison was explicit in a speech he gave at the Constitutional Convention in 1787:

“If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of rich property owners],” he warned, the American citizenry would “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and independence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted; in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy, in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

As Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson — who died in bankruptcy — similarly explained in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

He added with the warning that if we were ever to end up with an oligarchic government that was run, directly or indirectly, by wealthy predators who’d seized our government, America’s working people:

“[M]ust come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four. . . and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

After all, as Jefferson noted in a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington:

“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

Those riveting the chains on the necks of our fellow laborers today are the goons and troops Trump and Stephen Miller have sent into America’s cities to try to provoke the kind of unrest they can use to shut down all opposition and further rig the 2026 and 2028 elections. In this, they’re aided by the bought-and-paid-for Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court.

And make no mistake; they are dead set on crushing our opposition to their theft.

Trying to justify their agents wearing masks to hide their identity, as Heather Cox Richardson points out, ICE’s acting director lied to the American people, saying:

“ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

In fact, as Richardson points out:

“[Y]ear-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024.”

So, why do they constantly lie to us, whether it’s to justify gutting Social Security and the IRS, having unidentifiable goons kidnap non-criminals off our streets, harassing people arriving at our airports for their writings, or pushing through another $4 trillion in tax gifts to Trump’s billionaire supporters?

While the “philosophers” of the hard right try to justify the brute force of the state being used against working class people and the poor to the advantage of the morbidly rich with terms like “economic freedom,” “market discipline,” “the dark enlightenment,” and “personal responsibility,” what they’re really defending is a rigged system where wealth is extracted upward and dissent is punished with savage efficiency.

It’s really just simple theft, with — like in the days of King George III — the iron fist of the state as the enforcer for and protector of the morbidly rich predators.

As Puff Daddy famously rapped, no matter how elegant their editorials and rants on Fox “News” and their elaborate political rationalizations may be for crushing unions, cutting billionaire’s taxes, and allowing monopolies to flourish, in the end, “It’s all about the Benjamins.”

Louise’s Daily Song: What’s the Real Price of the Lies Trump’s Billionaires Tell?

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