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Coffee Break: Tawdry Trump Gang Corruption Wave Cresting?

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POTUS Trump’s second regime is setting records for graft while establishing a tawdry, tacky aesthetic that is not going over with the public at large.

This is happening even as the progressive Democratic party continues to purge its corrupt “let’s just get back to brunch” establishment (new progressive wins in Colorado just last night), but the one thing they got right was warning everyone that Trump has absolutely no class and no shame.

Let’s start with the aesthetics, get into the gossip, pass through the corrupt pardons, and then tally up the biggest financial scores and scams.

Drowning in Kitsch

Like his alleged favorite author, Trump has a taste for starting illegal wars and displaying tacky trash:

Simplicius summed it up in his latest piece “The Kitschification of America.”

Key quotes:

For those unfamiliar with the term, kitsch represents a kind of cheap, low effort aesthetic that is often a mishmash of pop-culture sediment scraped lazily together and popularized in the 50s and 60s for the sake of consumerist memorabilia in the form of little gewgaws and cheap souvenir shop trinkets.

Not to get too pedantic or pretentiously sciolistic, but kitsch is in some ways the embodiment of a culture of excess, a culture that has reached its zenith, its peak flowering phase, and has begun to wilt, shedding its invasive spores haphazardly over the once-virgin garden. It is the exaltation of “memeified” cultural tokens to the point of parody, which had come long before the invention of internet ‘memes’. It purposely calls attention to itself, to become a kind of self-mockery in the way “irony” had become a modus vivendi under the thankfully-brief ‘hipster rule’ of the aughts. It resonates even in the chosen names: Golden Dome, Golden Age, Make America Great Again, a strange kind of spiritually inert alchemy in reverse—turning what was once real gold, into fool’s gold and other debased byproducts.

Considering these facts forces you into an understanding of how Trump’s aesthetic vision for America reimagines the nation as a kind of Potemkin village of kitsch memetics long unbound from the core cultural groundings that had actually once given these ideas life.

The reflecting pool and Freedom 250 state fair debacles are the most obvious expressions of the Trump aesthetic of attempted spectacle so choked by graft it only results in obvious, embarrassing failure.

A Reflecting Pool Even Narcissus Can’t Love

Let’s start with 4,000 words worth of pictures:

Joe Conason sums up the slimy situation elegantly for Alternet:

Having failed to consult scientists — whose wisdom he always disdains — the president made the pool’s problems worse by increasing the impact of climate change. Turning the pool dark heated it up and made it even more hospitable to algae growth.As the Cultural Landscape Foundation noted in a lawsuit filed to stop the painting of the pool, it is an “aesthetic injury” — like so many Trump projects — that will “fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity and dignity of the current memorial landscape.

Although Trump and his minions have lied repeatedly about the Reflecting Pool, claiming it is crystal clear when everyone can gaze upon the murky results, he now needs someone to blame. Having botched this entire process with embarrassing stupidity and venality, he insists that the renovation scheme failed because of “vandalism.” Indeed, he has claimed that numerous vandals have been apprehended.

MS Now has reported that only one of the six arrests Trump claimed actually occurred.

The WaPo reports that the one person arrested is a former Olympic cyclist “David Hearn said he touched the pool’s detached liner but “didn’t destroy or break or peel anything.”

One of the contractors in question is also worth a look:

Things are going so great for the classy gentleman above that CNN reports he’s hired a crisis communications firm to help tell his story.

We should also join the throngs lonely curiosity seekers attending Trump’s Great American State Fair State Fair intended to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Is There Anybody Out There?

Fast Company titled their piece “The unbearable emptiness of the Great American State Fair” and subtitled it “A celebration in the nation’s capital looks more like a liminal space.”

The article is mostly quotes from social media, so let’s close this pathetic section with more pics, this time from TMZ:

Now let’s get back to that notorious Truth social account and the eyebrow-raisingly attractive young woman reported to be behind it.

Eva Braun Much?

Gossip like this is best served with video, let’s get salacious, y’all.

Daily Beast has some allegedly Freudian deets (or what they call “The Twisted Truth”) for those in a hurry or limited to text:

The brother of White House aide Natalie Harp claims that her “infatuation” with President Donald Trump stems from her difficult relationship with their father.
…
“While much of the media has focused on questioning whether her relationship is something scandalous, that is not where my mind goes personally. Maybe it is because I just can’t imagine something like that, but to me this is 100 percent an infatuation based on an unfortunate shared ideology of U.S. exceptionalism,” Preston told the Daily Beast.

As much as Trump’s lecherous buffoonery might be great for clicks, his policies and the package they’re wrapped aren’t popular with the American people.

With Polls Like This Trump Might Lose the GOP Senate Majority

The NYT/Siena Polls have the numbers for those who still believe these things reflect consensus reality:

Republicans are hampered by the unpopularity of President Trump and his diminished standing on the economy, while most of the Democratic candidates are so far running ahead of their party’s own struggling brand, the polls show.
…
In the polls, the average of the Senate races in those six states was a tie, with 47 percent for both Republicans and Democrats. The shift shows how far the political environment has tilted in the Democrats’ direction ahead of the midterm elections.
…
Voters across all six battlegrounds were thoroughly frustrated by rising prices — and many blamed Mr. Trump. Only 36 percent of voters approved of his handling of cost-of-living issues, including an abysmal 24 percent among independent voters.

Now that we’ve had some titillating fun and maybe raised some hopes, lets dive deep into the muck, because that’s where the money Trump and his gang are making is.

The Very Big Picture: Yo, Trump Is Banking, Fool!

The NYT sums it up, and Trump’s accomplishment as King Grifter is staggering. In fact one has to hope he’s going to be the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) when it comes to Presidential corruption. He has certainly blown past any predecessor:

Never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump…

Overall, Mr. Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.

Let’s get into some of the specific scores, they’re pretty sweet, if you’re criminally minded.

Savvy Stock Trader

Sludge details some incredible Trump trade timing:

The day before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, sending markets exploding higher, his investment accounts quietly purchased hundreds of stocks near the market low…

Trump’s accounts were actively trading stocks throughout 2025 while he was making policy decisions that moved markets, and the public had no idea.

On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing. The purchases included Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet, each valued as much as $250,000, along with scores of other companies. The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index’s history.

AI isn’t the only “innovative” types of finance Trump has profited from.

Crypto Been Berry Berry Good to the Trumps

The New York Times found much to make hay with in the POTUS’ 2025 mandatory financial disclosure and focused on his crypto windfalls:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses…

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
…
The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows.

Note the flagrant violations of the Emoluments Clause bolded above.

Reuters dived into how the Trump crypto profits were scored:

The $TRUMP meme coin is one of four Trump family crypto projects that have turned into a financial jackpot for the Trumps and a very bad bet for buyers…

While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members – notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

…the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April…

They also had a chart:

Not sure who couldn’t have seen that one coming, but Voidzilla (aka Coffeezilla) tried to warn the gullible a year ago.

But the Trump gang isn’t a one trick pony, although they are serial violators of the Emoluments Clause.

C’mon Don, Jr. & Eric Let’s All Go to Kazahkstan!

Kazahkstan may be a fairly remote and foreign country, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump family from making themselves right at home, per the NYT:

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

Now, let’s take our international tour with the Trump family, to Albania.

Off to Albania With Jared and Ivanka

Mother Jones has a summary of another Trump family caper that may or may not violate the Emoluments Clause, but it’s endangered the Albanian government.

The AP zeroes in on how the protests now threaten the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

In an interview with U.S. podcaster David Senra, Ivanka Trump said they discovered the site by accident.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” she said. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

The AP also profiles three of the leaders of the “Flamingo Revolution”, readers with time to pore over it (and those close to the scene) are encouraged to chime in with insights as to whether or not the whole thing is yet another CIA-style Gene Sharp inspired color revolution or something more organic.

Before we scrape Jared off the soles of our waders, Casey Michel’s in-depth profile for Mother Jones on Mr. Kushner and his various scams is highly recommended.

As is this TruthOut piece on Kushner’s diplomatic double dipping.

Pardon me for the pun, but there’s one more topic to survey before this epic is over.

Pardons Pardons Everywhere and Not a Crook in the Clink

Trump has also aggressively monetized his presidential pardon powers. It was reported last year by the NYT, Bloomberg, and the WSJ that $1 million can allegedly buy a pardon from POTUS Trump.

This might (or might not) explain some of his most random-seeming pardons of celebrity rappers and Obama-influenced wannabe new media titans or it may not. Maybe he’s a Lil’ Wayne fan and a big Ozy.com reader. Who knows.

Most recently the fraud conviction of Guo Wengui, a purported Chinese exile and Steve Bannon associate, has speculation churning that the pardon pen is about to be exercised again.

From Mother Jones:

Guo—a supposed billionaire Chinese dissident who claimed to know secrets of corruption among China’s leaders—had amassed a large, ardent following among that country’s diaspora.

…
The new organization was wildly ambitious. Guo and (Steve) Bannon called it a “government-in-waiting,” prepared to step in and run China following what they claimed was the imminent collapse of ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. At the same time, Guo was also seeking investments in GTV, an online streaming site he claimed would compete with companies like Amazon and TikTok, make investors rich, and air reporting that would fulfill his oft-stated goal: “Take down CCP.”

On the boat, Guo joined Bannon in reading a declaration of principles, told the former Donald Trump aide he loved him, and kissed him. Then Guo bit his own index finger and signed the declaration with his blood.
…
(Now) federal prosecutors are asking Judge Analisa Torres to sentence Guo to more than 30 years in prison for overseeing one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.” (In an order dated April 23, Torres delayed Guo’s sentencing, previously scheduled for Monday, until June 29.)

In 2024, a jury convicted Guo of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers. The New Federal State of China, the harbor ceremony, the nonprofits, and the media companies were all part of an elaborate con Guo used to “lock in” those supporters before hitting them up for investments, prosecutors said a sentencing memo last week.

Guo, who has been jailed as a perceived flight risk since his March 2023 arrest, continues to deny guilt. His lawyers argue, in their own sentencing memo, that his conviction was the result of the Chinese government’s “relentless and overwhelmingly powerful targeting of him.” The memo also suggests, without evidence, that Guo’s support for Trump, in particular his role in the publication of explicit pictures of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, contributed to his prosecution.

Yes, this has Hunter Biden tweeting that he’s actually innocent, the laptop pictures were all fake and by all means subscribe to his Substack for updates.

Gotta take the bad with the awful, I guess.

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