Donald Trump's Greatest Con

Is anyone even the least bit surprised by the news, via the The New York Times, that Donald J. Trump lost nearly a billion dollars in a single year, and that he has, in all likelihood, used this massive loss to avoid paying federal income tax for 18 years?

Among his other distinctions as a candidate — race baiter, misogynist, liar, bully, and so on — Trump is America’s most flagrant practitioner of what economists call savage capitalism.

What does that mean?

Here’s how the Pope (that loser) put it recently: “Savage capitalism has taught the logic of profit at any cost, of giving in order to get, of exploitation without thinking of people.”

He’s not brilliant. He’s simply another in a long line of robber barons, born rich and endowed with clever tax attorneys.

Don’t take my word for it. Trump trumpeted his ethos during his otherwise incoherent debate against Hillary Clinton. Not paying taxes, he told Americans, was “smart” because any money paid to the government would be “squandered.”

On what? Frivolous expenditures such as school lunches for kids living in poverty and medical care for injured veterans and seniors, and emergency relief for victims of natural disasters. Oh, and repairs to all those roads and bridges Trump constantly complains are crumbling.

No, the GOP nominee would rather devote his millions to the true necessities: gold-plated toilets.

And what if you were one of those nine million Americans who lost your home in the housing crash — the one Trump rooted for publicly? Well too bad for you. Sorry you and your kids were displaced. Sorry you wound up homeless. Because hey: that’s savage capitalism. If guys like Trump are to defecate into gold-plated toilets, sacrifices must be made.

Trump’s surrogates, who appear to operate on an ethical template that falls somewhere between mob boss and piranha, have tried to spin this mess to suggest that their man is brilliant.

He’s not brilliant. He’s simply another in a long line of robber barons, born rich and endowed with clever tax attorneys. All he’s doing is what savage capitalism allows him to do: exploit a system rigged by and for the affluent.

What makes Trump uniquely despicable as a public figure is the way he has catalyzed the twin plagues of prejudice and plutocracy. He fools white working class Americans into believing that he speaks for them by giving voice to their paranoia, their grievances, their sense of dispossession.

But he could care less about their economic fate. He just wants their votes.

You can’t divine his intentions from his demagoguery. You have to pay attention to how he does business, and what he proposes to do as president.

After all, if he wanted to create thousands of high-paying jobs, he could have done so years ago, by (for instance) having his garish suits and ties made in the United States. Instead, he has the work done by cheap foreign labor.

If he truly cared about all those “little” guys and gals at his rallies, he wouldn’t be so quick to stiff the hundreds of small business owners and workers who helped build the properties he merrily bankrupts.

It’s all there to see in the tax plan he’s proposing, which promises huge tax cuts and even bigger loopholes for guys like him, while the rest of the country gets trillions more in debt.

Trump doesn’t have a conscience. He has a cash register. The folks who flock to his rallies think they’re laughing with the guy. But he’s laughing at them.

Even Trump’s alleged charity is informed by his greed-is-good creed. His “charitable foundation” doesn’t give money to the needy. It’s a Ponzi scheme in which he uses other people’s donations to buy ugly portraits of himself, and to pay his legal fees.

Trump doesn’t have a conscience. He has a cash register. The folks who flock to his rallies think they’re laughing with the guy. But he’s laughing at them. They’re the losers who play by the rules, the suckers who still haven’t figured out free market Darwinism — that for every winner there must be a loser.

A huge winner like Trump, of course, relies on millions of losers.

His shameless chicanery is the very reason so many Americans feel ripped off and enraged. His greatest con, in fact, (among the multitude that constitute his career) is that he’s exploited this rage to fuel his rise, by shifting the blame onto brown people, public servants, foreigners, and so on.

He’s converted savage capitalism into civic savagery.