The Trump grift-o-meter, at this link!
As time passes, more people are noticing how much of a corrupt politician and thief that Trump is. The take of grifting for Trump and his family is estimated at well above $2 billion since Jan. 2025. That’s a really big pile of grift! One commentator notes that deflections and deceit shield and normalize Trump’s corruption. The MAGA demagoguery war is a deliberately constructed, dense fog of lies and grievance. The purpose is to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms, brown-skinned invaders, tyrannical socialists and other MAGA myths and lies. Meanwhile elites in power and their allies rob us blind.
A former MAGA influencer is talking about how most influencers were paid under secrecy agreements that kept MAGA’s pay-for-demagoguery scheme quiet. Apparently the influencer, Ashley St. Clair, wasn’t on the payroll. She demagogued for free. So, now she is talking about MAGA’s war fog that has kept us distracted and disinformed from the galaxy-scale corruption now well underway with the elite feeding frenzy on our federal government and us.
Why Ms. St. Clair decided to turn against Trump and MAGA isn’t fully clear. Apparently it had mostly to do with her making a baby with Elon Musk, followed by a nasty dispute. Maybe Musk refuses to change smelly diapers. Some reporting had it that Musk allegedly tried to keep the child secret, then a custody and support fight followed. Then St. Clair was targeted by a wave of pornographic AI‑generated images on X. She responded by suing xAI. In return, xAI sued her. It sounds awfully tawdry and messy, sort of like Musk himself. But she does have evidence that most online MAGA influencers are paid by wealthy MAGA operatives or funds. Link, link
She refers to the MAGA man system as a “cult”. Publicly, she says she turned against Trump and MAGA because she hit personal rock bottom, became disillusioned with the movement’s abuses, especially toward women and minorities, and wants to expose a cult‑like, pay‑to‑play propaganda machine she once helped power. What a whacky world we live in!
According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms, some of which are some run by former White House officials, run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or GOP legislative messaging for a flat fee, or on a per-click basis. Capitalism is wonderful, isn’t it? One could think this is an example of pay-to-play politics. Rich MAGA people are paying a small army of morally rotted people to keep us all riled up and distracted from the real job of MAGA governance, i.e., taking as much wealth and power from us and the public interest as they possibly can. Not legally can, possibly can.
Don’t forget, Trump was corrupted and weaponized the FBI and DoJ to shield and serve his crimes. They shield his corruption and that of his donors and allies. There’s a feeding frenzy going on and we are the food. That includes crime victims that Trump shafts for profit.
The Committee for Public Information
Lest we forget, there have been times when our federal government employed massive scale propaganda to con us into sacrificing our literal lives for a cause we didn’t want to support. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), or Creel Committee, was a U.S. government propaganda agency created in 1917 to mobilize American public opinion in favor of entering and fighting World War I.
The CPI used every major medium, newspapers, posters, films, pamphlets, and 75,000 “Four‑Minute Men” speakers, to constantly hammer home pro‑war messages and demonization of Germany. Its propaganda saturated public life with officially approved information. Historians generally judge the CPI effort to be highly effective. A Council on Foreign Relations study said it was possibly the most effective con job of large‑scale war propaganda the world had seen until that time. CPI propaganda successfully conned the American people by changing and minimizing public anti-war and neutrality sentiment. Link, link
CPI propaganda vs. MAGA demagoguery
How do the two compare? They are quite similar, but with (1) modern social media replacing the CPI’s 75,000 Four‑Minute Men speakers, and (2) the goal of hiding Trump and MAGA elites stealing from us by keeping us mostly distracted from what they are doing to us and our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. In general, CPI propaganda stuck closer to truth by exaggerating it instead of fabricating lies out of nothing, which is standard MAGA demagoguery.
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