Donald Trump is a confidence man, a charlatan, an unrepentant liar whose deceits have cost at least a half-million Americans their lives.
When Dustin Thompson was hauled before US District Judge Reggie Walton for assaulting the Capitol police on January 6th, his defense lawyer, Samuel Shamansky, argued about Trump:
“You had, frankly, a gangster who was in power. The vulnerable are seduced by the strong. That’s what happened.”
The jury didn’t buy the argument and sent Thompson to prison, as US District Judge Reggie Walton, who was overseeing the case, said:
“I think our democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn’t, in my view, really care about democracy but only about power.”
And yet Trump remains popular with about 20 percent of the American public, making up the majority of the Republican primary-voting base. But why?
There’s nothing new about charlatans and confidence men. Marco Antonio Bragadini(1545-1591) was one of Europe’s most famous: he convinced both a pope and the government of Venice that he could turn lead into gold and they financed a lavish lifestyle for most of his life.
William Thompson was America’s first labeled “confidence man” in New York in the 1840s because he’d approach wealthy men, pretend they were old friends, and ask them if they had “the confidence” to give him their gold watch for an hour: many did, and he ran the scam for years before being busted.
Donald Trump similarly convinced banks that he was had assets worth ten, twenty, sometimes more than fifty times their real value as was revealed in court this week. The self-proclaimed “king of debt” then used his borrowed money to support a lifestyle that reinforced everybody’s belief that he was truly rich.
After American banks refused to lend Trump money, he and his good friend Jeffrey Epstein turned to Deutsche Bank and managed to extract over $2 billion from that institution with the help of William Broeksmit, Thomas Bowers, and Justin Kennedy.
Broeksmit hanged himself in 2014, leaving a suicide note and paperwork tying him to the bank’s unit accused of laundering some $10 billion of Russian oligarch money along with over $400 million in questionable loans to Trump.
As stories about Trump’s finances began hitting the media in 2019, Tom Bowers (55 years old), who signed off on Trump’s loans, also hanged himself.
Justin Kennedy worked for Deutsche Bank from 1998 to 2009 and, according to the Finance Editor of The New York Times, David Enrich as reported by The Guardian’s Julian Borger:
“Drawn to Trump’s risk-taking and glamour, he [Kennedy] became a Trump confidant, sitting with the real estate impresario at the US Open tennis or in Manhattan nightclubs, and chaperoning huge loans to finance Trump’s real estate spending sprees.”
Kennedy was also the son of US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who, when apparently asked by Trump to resign to make room for Brett Kavanaugh, mysteriously complied and stepped away from one of the most powerful positions in America.
Without the help of these three men, Trump would almost certainly have ended up broke and destitute. He’d been sued thousands of times for nonpayment of his debts and was well known to New Yorkers as a hustler and scam artist with a long string of failed businesses behind him.
In fact, by the time of his bankruptcies in the 1990s he had squandered almost all the roughly half-billion dollars he inherited from his father and stole from his brother, nephews, and nieces (as Mary Trump will tell you) before being rescued by mobbed-up Russian oligarchs looking to launder ill-gotten gains via real estate.
NBC further saved him by making him the star of a reality TV show that was every bit as deceptive about Trump’s wealth and business acumen as were Bragadini’s exhibitions of gold he’d “transmuted” from lead.
