what a whopper! Like turds in a sewer, Trump presidency books just keep bobbing down the pipes. I am one of the bastards that is mad enough to read/study most of them, as they provide possibly the greatest education in raw corruption ever.
This particular instalment to the excremency is one of the best, most original, revealing & standout of them all. It focusses specifically on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, it’s “club”, & the motley-spew of wheeler-dealers, cronies, scammers, criminals, millionaire-morons, gimps, dubious foreign actor opportunists, spies & security threats, in addition to the swilling dark money, bribes, backhanders, “donations” & “fundraisers” that plague this Palm Beach pustule.
The reporting & research is exceptional, & the truly brilliant author/researcher quadrant have gone further than any on this strata of the subject.
Away from the bane of Trump, if you want a thorough analysis into the intricacies of modern day corruption, this is a superb compendium.
It also has novel, even comic -like qualities, reads beautifully, & rings in the receptors for the sheer lunacy, improbability & record-shattering awfulness of it all.
The gaudy, tacky, shifty, slovenly, huckster, unhinged, bullshit-artist extraordinaries & smattering of celebrity plastic surgeons, massage-parlour moguls & preposterously out-of-touch millionaire weirdos & fuck-ups, milling-around an alternative anomaly, grifting their guts-out in gimmicky garbage like some garrison of gilded ghouls, bleeds into surrealism. It is just astonishing.
The Pricktator & his rotting-offal asylum of idiocy & mega corruption are more representative of a classic, third-world, banana-republic-despot stereotype (not that America’s ALEC ravaged, REDMAP ravined, & dark-money chocked shitstem can at all claim the higher-ground).
If you had a dollar for ever time you uttered “unbe-fucking-lievable” whilst reading The Grifter’s Club, you would be nursing bundles.
Anybody wanting to see this turd in jail – or upset the con he holds over still convinced supporters – will also want to read this book, as it contains a lot of seriously loaded/treasonous coverage that will not go down well with a large swath of his deceived disciples (because he is completely conning his own core base, at their expense, & dissing them for it).
& that brings us to two of the most fulfilled & diligent investigations of the book – the Cindy Yang, back-door, cash-for-access to foreign “Chinese business people” (i.e. “Chinese whoever”) direct to Trump/Mar-a-Lago, & the bizarre espionage, infiltration, “national security breach” with the probable Chinese spy, the hapless Yujing Zhang.
The Grifter’s Club goes into the most incisive, lengthy & detailed study of these events, characters, & there aftermaths that I have read so far, period. Fantastic journalism.
Every security official in the US should read it.
The other character that we receive cutting-edge intelligence on is the super, super-dodgy Guo Wengui, AKA Miles Kwok, the “dissident Chinese billionaire” & fugitive. The information unearthed suggests that Kwok is most probably a Chinese spy, masquerading as a hostile Chinese defector. He certainly has set himself up well. Not only has he long been a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, but he has an intensely close relationship with Steve Bannon, whom Guo has also been funding. Bannon, who Trump so criminally, & so disgracefully, actually pardoned – for defrauding millions of dollars from Trump supporters through his We Build the Wall scam – is just as happy to wallow in foreign Chinese cash as Trump is (he was arrested for the fraud scam whilst sunbathing on Guo’s million dollar super-yacht, a place he seems to spend an extraordinary amount of time with Kwok judging by the wealth of photographs).
Cash for access.
Foreign money dumping, favours & bribes.
The “selling of the presidency”.
The desecration of national security for personal profit.
Corruption & treason.
A criminal regime.
Politics as a purely profit-gaining exercise.
Sadly absent from the book is another Trump Achilles’ heel, thrice convicted paedophile & Trump advisor/fixer George Nader. In fact, Nader was interdicted & arrested whilst en-route to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago by the FBI. He was caught (again) with multiple materials of child pornography & other sexual obscenity (bestiality was reported) – heading to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago! He has now been convicted & is serving his second prison sentence for child sexual abuse related crimes (his third conviction for the latter). It never stopped Trump, or his team (including Bannon), from working at length with the man (Benjamin Netanyahu also has had a long & enduring relationship with Nader, as has MBZ of the United Arab Emirates). Trump seems to be drawn to child abusers & sex-traffickers, as he spends so much time around them & their enablers – Jeffery Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Roy Cohn, John Casablancas, Alan Dershowitz, Tevfik Arif, Roy Moore, Gerald Marie, Alex Acosta, Bruce Castor, & now veteran abuser of boys – George Nader.
Just a completely amazing streak of work. Its worth reading just for the chapter “It’s Just Nukes” alone. 95% of this guys supporters would peel off in horror if they knew what this fucking maniac was doing to “their country”.
The Grifter’s Club is an absolute triumph.
Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff, Jay Weaver, 2020, Hodder & Stoughton, 191 pages.
