The Grift Goes On

And on and on

Looking out for the top .0001 percent

Donald’s presidency is not about governing. It’s about extracting as much money and power as possible for himself and his inner circle of grifters. It’s all a big grift.

This week, Donald got called out on one of his latest scams in a sit-down interview with Laura Ingraham of all people. Even she wasn’t buying his rationale for some of his policies”

INGRAHAM: Housing costs are still out of reach, another thing that your administration is trying to tackle… Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50-year mortgage idea. So a significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks and simply prolonging the time it would take for Americans to own a home outright. Is that really a good idea?

DONALD: It’s not even a big deal…All it means is you pay less per month. You pay it over a longer period of time…It might help a little bit, but the problem was that Biden did this.

It’s never Donald’s fault. Ever.

First of all, it’s sad that the average age of a first time home buyer is 40. Right now, the housing standard is a 30-year mortgage. If you buy a house at 40, you’re mortgage won’t be paid off until you’re 70. Obviously, because we’re not Donald and we can do basic arithmetic—if you get a 50-year mortgage, it won’t be paid off until you’re 90, so we’re talking about saddling people with a lifetime of debt.

It’s actually true that monthly payments would be lower on a 50-year mortgage, but not that much lower. On the flip side, though, how much will an extra two-decades worth of mortgage cost you? It turns out the extra cost would be staggering.

Mortgage lender Jordan Nutter broke down the numbers.

NUTTER: So let’s take a $400,000 loan on a 30-year term at 6.5%. You’re paying just over $2,500 a month for your principal and interest. However, if we do that on a 50-year term, you’re about $2254, which saves you about $273 a month, and you would think that’s great… So let’s look at the whole picture. On a 30-year mortgage in total, you’d pay roughly $910,000. The interest portion of that $910,000 would be about $510,000, okay? However, if you look at a 50-year term, $952,000 is going towards interest, which is a difference of $442,000… saving $273 a month to then pay an extra $442,000 for the life of the loan is ridiculous and in my opinion, not the way to fix this housing crisis.

I find the fact troubling that the interest payments would be greater than the cost of the house if you have a 30-year mortgage, but at least there’s the likelihood that your house will be worth more when you’ve finished paying off your mortgage than it was when you bought it.

On the other hand, who benefits (cui bono) from getting a 50-year mortgage? Not the home buyer who will pay almost $1 million in interest on a $400,000 house. The mortgage lender will benefit. That’s why Donald is pushing this, because a lot of mortgage companies will become much wealthier if they can scam enough people into signing up for a 50-year mortgage.

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Many Americans are struggling right now because Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were frozen. This happened during the government shutdown and because Donald proved himself willing to starve Americans, including millions of children, to force Democrats to capitulate. He could have, but decided not to, tap into the emergency funds to extend SNAP benefits.

As a way to cover his ass, Donald has promised Americans who are struggling a $2,000 pay-off:

Without tariffs, we would be, this country would be in such trouble as they were for many years. That’s why we owe $38 trillion. And one of the things we’re going to do, we’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people of about $2,000, and we’re going to use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt.

First of all, Donald’s tariffs have been a disaster, and if we were indeed taking in trillions of dollars, why is our debt still so high? Why aren’t those funds available to pay for SNAP benfits which, compared to $38 trillion is a rounding error?

Donald claims he’s worried about the national debt, so much so that he believes it’s a national security issue. But here’s the thing—he has increased the national debt more than every other president combined. There is no reason to believe he would send Americans $2,000 checks, but his claiming he will is nothing short of a bribe.

There’s a different kind of bribery we need to talk about. A few weeks ago, Donald held a dinner for leaders of the tech industry, during which he rambled on about his obscene and obscenely expensive ballroom:

We’re going to have a phenomenal ballroom. This is going to be one of the best anywhere in the world. There won’t be anything like it actually. . . . I have so many friends and so many of you have been really, really generous. I mean, a couple of you, I’m sitting here saying, “Sir, would $25 million be appropriate?” I said, “I’ll take it.”

What’s $25 million between friends, right? And yet, we must let American children starve. The so-called “donors” that we know of range from the aforementioned tech CEOS at Google, Amazon, Meta, to defense contractors at Lockheed Martin among others, and wealthy individuals like the Winklevoss twins. These donations come, not surprisingly, at a cost to Donald.

This week, the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen reported that ballroom donors have over $279 billion in federal contracts. This is neither an accident nor a coincidence. They also found that more than half of the companies that contributed to the ballroom fund have had federal probes into various wrongdoings, including everything from breaking labor laws to ravaging the environment. Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said in a statement,

[These donors] have massive interests before the federal government and they hope to undoubtedly curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from the Trump administration. Millions to fund Trump’s architectural whims are nothing compared to the billions at stake in procurement, regulatory and enforcement decisions.

Again, these are not donations—they are bribes. This is the definition of quid pro quo and Donald will be expected to pay up. We need to remember, as the people who are donating to the ballroom already know, Donald is for sale. He has always been for sale and, tragically for us, he is for sale to anybody willing to pay.