All The President’s Men Are Stealing From You

This is one of the greatest grifts of all time.

Image: AP Photo / Evan Vucci)

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – Don’t look now, but we’re all being robbed blind.

It’s no secret Donald Trump is hoarding taxpayer funds, exploiting the power of the presidency and the immunity he was granted by the Supreme Court in its disastrous Trump v United States decision to enrich himself.

A few examples off the top of my head:

• The tin-pot dictator is allegedly selling pardons, and maybe even accepting kickbacks on his overpriced vanity projects.

• He sued both the IRS and the Department of Justice for billions – suits that will most assuredly be settled by the government because he’ll order his appointees to do so.

• It’s also likely that he’s using his tariffs and military adventurism in Iran to deliberately manipulate the financial markets, profiting off the movement. (Even MAGA is noticing.)

Is he capable of all this and more? If you answered “no,” I have a monorail to sell you.

But it’s not just him. Pete Hegseth may be attempting to profit off the Iran War:

In the weeks leading up to the initial Feb. 28 attack on Iran, Hegseth’s financial broker inquired about a multimillion-dollar investment in BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active ETF, according to the Financial Times.

The Financial Times cited three people familiar with the incident, who claimed the inquiry arrived on behalf of a “high-profile potential client” and was “flagged internally at BlackRock.”

The investment never materialized because the ETF was “too new.” But it surely warrants further investigation – smoke, fire, and so forth.

Donald’s sons, Don Junior and Eric, invested in a janky drone company just in time for war in which drones are valuable hardware.

A new military drone company called Powerus, backed by investors including the president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, is planning a strange corporate move: merging with a Florida golf course holding company to create a publicly traded drone business.

Powerus says it builds autonomous drones for military and high-risk environments and wants to scale production to more than 10,000 drones a month. That’s a massive bet on a rapidly expanding market. The Pentagon has already launched initiatives like its Drone Dominance program, which plans to spend about $1.1 billion to buy hundreds of thousands of American-made drone systems by 2027.

You can expect that in the near future Powerus will close a deal with the Pentagon to provide drones for use against Iran. Duh. This is one of the reasons why I don’t believe Donald will end the war any time soon. He’s not the kind of grifter who leaves money on the table.

And it’s not just the war. Howard Lutnick and his sons could be profiting off Donald’s tariff regime, but not the way you might think. While the commerce secretary effusively supports his boss’s ridiculous tax hikes on consumers, he may have attempted to profit off the failure of the policy as well. It’s a typical investor move to play both ends.

WIRED reported last year:

A financial services company led by the sons of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, is creating a way for investors to bet that President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs will be struck down in court. Traders at the firm’s investment banking subsidiary, Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., say they have the capacity to buy the rights to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential refunds from companies who have paid Trump’s tariffs, according to documents viewed by WIRED.

Boiled down, if American importers sue the government after the Supreme Court overturned Donald’s use of emergency powers to implement tariffs, Lutnick’s sons would profit from those suits. The strategy was to buy from importers the rights to any potential government refunds, betting that the government would pay out a sum larger than the cost of purchasing the rights. In other words, if an importer paid a million dollars in tariffs – taxes – to the government, Cantor Fitzgerald would pay the importer, say, $300,000 then collect the full $1 million refund, making $700,000 from the U.S. Treasury in the process. It’s a risk, but it’s also a devious hedge against Donald’s tariffs.

My guess is all this is just the tip of the grifting iceberg. This is what we know about. And we won’t have a clear view of the full scope of the scams until voters make the smart choice and hand Congress back to the grownups, the Democratic Party. After that, let the investigations and subpoenas fly. The Trump regime can’t keep getting away with this. The evidence is too obvious, and the cost in lives and treasure is too great to ignore – or to allow ourselves to be sidetracked by the both-siderism and lesser-of-two-evils gibberish that emerges every election year.

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