CUZ IT’S WHAT THEY DO

The Second the Presidency Ends—the Trump Family Grift Begins

Of course the Family von Trump wanted to win. But now that they’ve lost, they’ll inevitably convert it into a scam of their supporters.

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Donald Trump may have lost but all that means is the grift is just getting started for the president and his large adult sons.

No, they are not going off into the sunset without one last, potentially eternal money grab. MAGA-world is going “activist” with #StopTheSteal. Needless to say, #StopTheSteal is really #StartTheGrift.

Trumpworld is down. They sense they’ve lost the election, but that doesn't mean they don’t think they shouldn’t continue to hold on to power, perhaps they don’t understand how elections work. Or more likely Trumpworld is trying to cash in before they cash out.

All of a sudden Trumpworld has decided to get into the protest business via the Facebook group #StopTheSteal, which has now morphed into other groups, because the civil war threats got the #StopTheSteal group banned. But the gist of the grift can be summed up best by what new member of Congress and complete QAnon lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Parler: “But the Democrats, Big Tech, and the Fake News Media are trying to STEAL this election. You and I cannot let that happen! This is the biggest VOTER FRAUD operation in American history...STOP THE STEAL.”

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Where there is stupid, you can bet the president’s large adult sons won’t be far behind, and they’re not. The president’s large adult sons may be terrible surrogates, but they are worse election lawyers, since they aren’t lawyers at all. But that won’t stop them from holding other Republicans “accountable” for not being more supportive of their father’s deranged voter fraud clams.

“The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote. “They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.” And then there was Eric. You will remember Eric as Junior without the charm. Eric whined on Twitter, “Where are Republicans!” He added about an hour and a half later: “Have some backbone. Fight against this fraud. Our voters will never forget you if your [HIS!!!] sheep!” Hell hath no fury like a child of a wealthy person scorned.

But the sons didn’t just tweet. They also spoke at protests. After all, they are the Robert Kennedys of Trumpworld, which should horrify everyone who remembers who Robert Kennedy was. Junior went down to Atlanta, and Eric went with inadvertent Borat movie star and free lawyer Rudy Giuliani to Philadelphia. Junior and Eric may not be the first sons come January but that doesn’t mean they can’t morph seamlessly from failsons into conservative grift sons. Will Junior host cruises? Will Eric run Mike Huckabee-style cruise pilgrimages to the Holy Land? This seems inevitable.

The adult failsons are joined by an army of the worst MAGA grifters, including Mike Cernovich, Charlie Kirk, and Pizzagate propagator Jack Posobiec. In some states, they want election officials to stop counting the ballots; in others they want election officials to continue counting. Like everything in Trumpworld these protests are a total and utter disorganized mess but they provide an excellent foray for the large adult sons to get involved in the conservative grift.

The story of the conservative grift is as old as time. Think of the Tea Party, which started out as a movement against taxes (well, sort of) and end up as AstroTurfed protests and a mailing list grift. That’s what we’re witnessing the birth of here. Trump already started doing this on Oct. 31. He started raising money for a protracted legal battle. As The New York Times notes, the campaign “recently began automatically checking a box to withdraw additional weekly contributions from online donors through mid-December — nearly six weeks after Election Day.”

While the Trump campaign tries to keep the Trump presidency “optically” alive, it has become abundantly clear that it’s not. You’ll notice that Bill Barr has all but disappeared from the scene, no longer able, at least for now, to cook anything up to obfuscate for the president. The president found his Jim Baker, and it’s his large adult failsons who are happy to crisscross the country shopping the most inane conspiracy theories from Sharpiegate to whatever else they can cook up. The reality is there's no there there, but that’s never ever stopped Trumpworld from crying foul. We don’t know how this will play out over the next few days, but the fact that Eric and Junior are involved means that it is destined to be deeply truly and magically stupid. Like Veep but without the likable characters.

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Molly Jong-FastContributing Editor

Michael TomaskyEditor

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