Donald’s Rubes

There’s room for compassion here

How low?

It costs a lot of money to be one of Donald Trump’s supporters. When they’re not paying his legal bills, they’re being scammed into buying gold sneakers and NFT trading cards. And then there are the silver coins he’s selling. [Act now while supplies last.]

During the 2016 campaign it was still newsworthy (although obviously not disqualifying) that my uncle was forced to pay $25 million for defrauding students at Trump University or bankrupting casinos and airlines, or failing to sell Trump-branded steaks, vodka, and bottled water.

Now it’s simply taken for granted that Donald is a grifter who used (and plans to use) the presidency for his own personal enrichment. The normal reaction to this auctioning off of our national dignity should be to condemn Donald.

It’s easy to mock these easily-deluded marks, especially since so many of them espouse the same kinds of bigotry Donald traffics in—or have shown themselves willing to overlook it. I can understand why so many people engage in the schadenfreude of watching Donald’s social media stock tank—taking considerable amounts of his supporters’ money with it.

The stock enjoyed a bit of a rebound after days of rapid devaluation, ending the trading day at $12.79 a share. Months ago, it peaked at almost $80 a share, and since then has lost 84 percent of its value. In other words, if you bought $1,000 worth of Trump Media Stock at its height, it would now be worth about $160. The art of the deal, indeed.

We need to remember, though, that not all of the investors in Trump Media are the worst among us. Although many of my uncle’s investors are neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists, many of them are poor, elderly, ignorant or some combination of the three. These are the kind of people who are often victimized by scam artists like Donald.

They’ve bought into the myth of Donald as business genius that has been shoved down our throats for decades. A lot of them believe he wrote The Art of the Deal and that the character depicted in “The Apprentice” was a realistic portrayal of the man he is.

Donald often tells the fable of a woman who rescues a snake from freezing in the snow. As she warms him, the snake bites her. The woman asks the snake how he could have repaid her kindness to him by killing her, and he explains that it is simply his nature.

The people who cheer him on when he tells this story, the people who throw their many away by donating to his campaign or buying his media company stock never seem to realize that Donald is the snake and they are the woman.

It might be tempting to dismiss the pain of Donald’s supporters who’ve lost their life’s savings or retirement accounts because they trusted this grifter. But we should remember that Donald doesn’t care if he bleeds every single one of his supporters dry. He doesn’t care if they can’t afford it or if they lose their retirement savings because they put their trust in him. He only cares that he emerges from the Truth Media debacle unscathed, which he will because there’s always somebody there to bail him out.