Let’s talk about con men. The way confidence men work is that they retell you a dream with pieces you vaguely already have in your mind, and then promise you that your feelings are correct and justified, and any bad feelings you have can be put on another group of people who are economically just like you. Then the confidence man says you are a special snowflake, and he knows how to make those things line up for your success. This results in the mark giving them resources—usually cash. When confidence men are at the top of the game, they simply rig the game while funneling money up the pyramid scheme to the very top. The trick for them at that point is distancing themselves enough to be able to plead plausible deniability in the conspiracy to defraud you of your money.

When a confidence man is super successful, he can get that distance by having lower-level wannabe scam artists buy into his Amway-like product with the promise that they, too, can make his kind of money—provided they sacrifice a little first. Every single less-than-competent MAGA candidate throughout the nation wants a little taste of that fundraising power Trump has. Trump’s fundraising is, at this point, transparently unscrupulous. Like everything with Trump, the campaign scammery is so crass they’ve even stooped to lying about “meet-and-greet” events in order to keep the small-dollar donations flowing in.

On Wednesday, reporter Sam Stein Masters would love a chance at getting some power and money, and he has sufficiently kissed Trump’s swampy ring in order to get an endorsement. Masters’ ability to fundraise for his unpopular campaign hasn’t gone so well of late. But as Stein points out, just because you are being let into the con, doesn’t mean you get to have anything more than a sliver of the profits.

Oh my, that is a pretty steep cut Trump is taking out of the ol’ Blake Masters fundraising haul! And here’s a very important reminder: this fundraising is just about squeezing money out of working Americans. The people who are really funding dirtbags like Masters have the budget and are using it accordingly.

Donald Trump’s fundraising, whether for his hotels, his campaigns, his lawyers, or his Big Lie, has always been a confidence game where the suckers are the MAGA types who believe that Donald Trump and his brand of Republicanism will provide everyone with a golden toilet bowl to sit on for the end of their days. There are ongoing investigations into his organization’s use of other people’s money. The world of bigots and low-level scam artists attaching themselves to Trump’s garbage fire wagon are under the impression that in getting the blessing of the Donald, they will be able to get into a coveted position from where they will then be able to make bigger bucks being a corrupt GOP official. That’s the whole scheme. That’s the Republican Party.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.