Donald Trump’s Covid Relief Boondoggles—The Greatest Rip-Offs In American History
Donald Trump was the most fiscally irresponsible politician to ever occupy the Oval Office, and with the passage of time the evidence for that proposition becomes all the more overwhelming. For instance, now comes a blockbuster expose in Rolling Stone (of all places) of the ghastly scams and blatant rip-offs which flowed almost immediately from the Donald’s $2.2 trillion CARES act, which was rushed through the Congress literally sight unseen in the last week of March 2020.
This excerpt from the piece by writer Sean Woods tells you all you need to know. During the hours of initial Covid panic after March 16th the White House was literally in control of the process and could have written its own ticket, but the Donald and his minions didn’t care about how many hundreds of billions of Uncle Sam’s borrowed dollars slopped over the sides because they had an altogether different objective at top of mind.
To wit, they had pronounced the floundering economy that existed as the Donald entered the fourth year of his flukish term as the Greatest Economy Ever. From the Oval Office on down, therefore, the Trumpites were determined to validate that groundless proposition, come hell or high water. If the very structure of the greatest giveaway in history—new spending for instantly stood-up programs which were standards-free and enforcement-free and which amounted to 45% of all existing Federal spending—-was a massive invitation to fraud and thievery, the Trumpites paid no never mind.
Indeed, Woods relates the story of an intrepid whistleblower named Haywood Talcove who tried to urgently warn the White House that cyber thieves were mobilizing everywhere to rob Uncle Sam blind. But in a very telling manner he was given short-shrift by Trump’s top economic aide, Larry Kudlow, a half-assed supply-sider who held that deficits don’t matter when Republicans are in power and that tax cuts—even if financed 100% with borrowed money—are the be-all-and-end-all of economic policy.
Accordingly, the level of complacency about runaway Federal borrowing and spending in the Trump White House was truly astounding. Never before had so much “free stuff” been pumped into the American economy by Washington with such utter disregard for the integrity of the public fisc:
Talcove understood that he had to act. So he called the White House, trying to warn of the threat. No response. Finally, after weeks of trying to get through, one night while he was playing with his kids, he got a call from an unknown number. It was Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. “I’m like, ‘Mr. Kudlow, I really need to warn you that you have to do something about identity verification,’” Talcove recalls, “’or it’s going to be the biggest fraud in the history of our country.’” (Kudlow didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
He says he talked to Kudlow for about 15 minutes but couldn’t get him to budge. “Kudlow’s like, ‘The money has to get out quickly. You can’t have speed and security,’” Talcove says. “But I’m like, ‘That is bullshit. Sir, that’s just not true. Now you’re never going to get the money back.’”
There you have it. In the Trump White House the purpose of policy generally and this hideous cornucopia of giveaways specifically was to glorify the Donald and his manifold works. An Egyptian Pharaoh could not have been more profligate:
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