The Trump Horror Story Continues

Many articles from professional media continue to show how incompetent and corrupt the president and his administration are. The Washington Post writes about the $517 billion in small-business loans the Small Business Administration has made with relief funds from the federal Paycheck Protection Program. That program was intended to help people stay at work and be paid during the pandemic. The taxpayer-funded program has been swarmed by crooks, liars and thieves who blew the loan money for new cars, trips to Las Vegas and so forth. WaPo writes in an opinion piece:

“Those anecdotes are sketches of the problem involving the Trump administration’s handling of the PPP. They are small tales in a larger emerging horror story.

A Post in-depth analysis of data on $517 billion in emergency small-business loans handed out by President Trump’s team at the Small Business Administration uncovered errors so numerous that White House boasts of the PPP’s economic impact are nothing more than spin and hot air.

The analysis found the SBA claimed that many companies had ‘retained’ far more workers than they actually employed. ‘In some cases,’ the article said, ‘the agency’s jobs claims for entire industries surpasses the total number of workers in those sectors.’

Looking closely at more than 875,000 of the borrowers, the analysis found that “zero” jobs were supported, or no information was listed at all.

So Trump’s claim that 51 million jobs were “supported” by the PPP is unsupported by facts. 

Trinity Episcopal Church outside Houston retained, praise the Lord, more than 500 jobs, thus saith the SBA. The church says it has 12 paid staffers.

And according to the SBA, the manufacturer International Dunnage of Thunderbolt, Ga., saved more than 500 jobs. Not so. The company said it has just seven employees and two owners. “I don’t know where you got the 500,” owner David Crenshaw said in an email to The Post.

The Trump administration is where, Mr. Crenshaw.”

Believe it or not, the crooks, liars and thieves actually include team Trump’s ‘best’ people in the Small Business Administration itself. Sometimes, the SBA just makes stuff up about saving non-existent jobs. Some of the saved jobs are fake, but the tax dollars aren’t.

But wait, there is even more -- we’re lost in the ether!

The WaPo article goes on to point out that it is even worse than just this. Analysis of the loans indicate that nearly all are going to white-owned businesses, in part because banks already have these people as customers. Apparently, banks are not interested in helping business owners of color with the complicated paperwork.

As WaPo puts it, “what makes this spectacle all the more galling is the lack of effective oversight and accountability by either Congress or federal regulatory agencies. Business complaints and critical reports such as The Post’s analysis are lost in the ether. .... As Congress unleashed $2 trillion to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and questions were being raised about the steps needed to prevent fraud and abuse and how to track the money — to know where it is going — Trump royally declared, ‘I am the oversight.’ That’s it. Pray we make it to Election Day.”

Other sources in addition to WaPo are reporting on fraud in the PPP program. The scope of the fraud is not yet clear, but it is beginning to look to be widespread.

What are they thinking, or are they?

By now, who and what the president is should be clear. He is a chronic liar, a crook, stunningly incompetent, completely immoral, an extremely powerful enabler and defender of corruption and lies, and probably a traitor working for Putin. All of that, maybe excepting the Putin treason allegation, should be clear to most people by now.

Despite that, most of the president’s supporters believe that little or none of it is true. If they did, many or most supporters presumably would no longer support him. This seems to reflect reality. The relentless propaganda, spin and lies from the president and his enablers about himself and his actions has created a fake reality that millions of people actually believe is true. To them, truth is lies and lies are truth.

That is how poisoned, deceived and dangerous that a significant slice of American society has become.