Don’t forget the sexual assaults.
Sorry, “alleged” sexual assaults.
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True, but we don’t deserve to have them doing it in our yard.
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OK, all three engines. And the DVD player. But that’s my final offer.
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He’s basically gone full televangelist at this point.
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Really random aside, but is this twigging other people out as well?
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My take:
10 He owes the Russian Mob [operated by Putin] billions… & he knows they don’t fuck around.
20 Making money is his way of Keeping Score, so, he never will have enough.
30 GOTO 10
Grifting is who he is & what he does, & he is actually very good at it. He has more grifts than a sheet-pan of baklava has layers.
If he weren’t very good at it, he would have landed in prison long ago & probably be in for life because of repeat offenses.
Being a Rich Man’s Pup didn’t hurt, either.
Well, I would feel bad for the crew of that plane. Certainly not for the passenger[s].
And that would be the birth af a new religion.
It’s already a Cult, as it is, so it just needs a few more worshipers to ignite.
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I know there are some Aeroflot planes that aren’t currently being used.
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It’s a common ligature. In this case, I agree, it’s a bit jarring. Without the ligature, it looks perfectly fine.
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I would disagree here.
Your metric for success seems to be ‘not landing in jail’ which is fair enough but another metric would be - did you actually get any benefit out of it?
And so far as anyone can tell Trump would still have been better off just leaving the money he inherited invested in the stock market and playing golf 24/7.
It also shows that the fundamental thing that makes grifts successful is not the skill of the grifter but the greed of the mark.
Usually a grifter has to project a false image of wealth in some way to appeal to the mark. They need to persuade them that they are leaving a genuine Stradivari or diamond ring as collateral or whatever the con is. In Trump’s case, he started rich.
And as others have pointed out, once you’ve got enough people deeply enough invested, they will help you grift others, if only by not speaking up about your grifting them.
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“If you borrow $1-million from the bank, you’re at the mercy of the bank; if you borrow $100-million from the bank, the bank is at your mercy”.
American and European banks spent decades loaning Biff money until they finally had the courage to admit he was a deadbeat and an incompetent businessman. During that time, they helped prop up his fake image as a great tycoon, an image that (with an assist from reality TV) helped to convince 10s of millions of rubes to vote for him.
Except for dysfunctional banks like Wells Fargo and Deutschebank, by the time they gave up on him it was too late. And he quickly found funding from Putin’s pet oligarchs to replace those loans.
This phenomenon works on a smaller scale too. It’s the “glass floor” syndrome, where certain people (usually white cis-het males from affluent backgrounds) are simply not permitted to fail despite being caught out time and time again in fraud or incompetence.
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Kleptocrats don’t invest in maintenance.
It’s one of the major reasons the Russian Army sux.
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Life would be boring if we all agreed with each other all the time. 
Not being in jail would be a benefit.
I’ve been in there before [pay yer damn tickets, people!] & I give it zero stars.
In any case, his ability to afford the lawyers to keep him out of jail implies success at making money. Of course, some of those Land Sharks might see representing him as Good Publicity or Prestige.
Yeah, I’ve read that before, & seems to me it just goes to prove what a stable genius he is when it comes to business. I think his grifts are what he does… and I count ‘stiffing the contractors’ as a grift.
Doesn’t hurt for the Mark to be gullible, either.
Either way, he has a never-ending supply of 'em.
I’m pretty sure if he doesn’t find a way back into the WH, the Russian Mafia is gonna call his debts due & payable. The best he can hope for is for the jet he is on to vanish from radar over the ocean somewhere.
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What goes up, must come down.
Wasn’t that a plot point in Gilda?
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He’ll probably want one with extended range to avoid refueling stops in places with extradition treaties.
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