Jay Kuo, another blogger on Substack who has thousands of paid subscribers (I get the free version of his newsletter), wrote something this week that caught my attention and I’m going to share some of his ideas with you today. His essay captures two important political stories from this week and highlights the deep problems the GOP faces. His article, entitled “Two Peas in the GOP Pod,” focuses on two individuals: TFG, who was found liable (to the tune of $5 million) in a civil lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll in New York City; and Representative Anthony George Devolder Santos (“Skippy”), who was indicted later the same day in the same city on 13 counts of fraud, money laundering, and theft of public funds. NB: No one else (to my knowledge) calls Santos “Skippy.” I just think he kinda acts like a “Skippy.”
NOTE: Although I’m using Kuo’s essay to frame what I write today, I am not simply parroting his words. You can read Kuo’s essay here:
I’m not going to go over the fine details of the allegations against either man. That information is readily available online. If you haven’t been paying attention to this, now is a good time to start.
As soon as you start to look at these two cases, the similarities jump out at you.
Malignant Narcissists
To read more about Malignant Narcissism, you can start with this source: https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-recognize-a-malignant-narcissist-4164528
TFG and Skippy are both narcissists – which basically means that they have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek the spotlight and want people to admire them. According to the Mayo Clinic, people with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. One of the problems with people who have this disorder is that it is against the nature of this affliction to recognize that they have it. That would mean admitting that there is something wrong with the way they process the world around them, and narcissists can’t accept that conclusion.
The malignant narcissist is an extension of general narcissism. The malignant narcissist exhibits all the traits of a run-of-the-mill narcissist, with the added factor that he actually enjoys lying, manipulating, and using other people to get the things that they want. I’ll add that, in observing TFG and Santos, they not only enjoy it but they believe that they understand the world better than anyone around them. Their only regret is that they were caught. Among the enhancements that characterize malignant narcissism are paranoia, a sense of entitlement, and a need to win at all costs.
I’ll pause for a moment to let you reflect on how TFG and Skippy both exhibit the traits of malignant narcissism.
One factor you may not have picked up (it happened only yesterday, so you can be excused if you didn’t catch it) is found in a recorded interview with Santos released in some audiotapes yesterday. Here’s the story behind this: a documentary filmmaker, Blake Zeff, was talking with Santos for several months about a potential documentary. He ditched the project when it became clear that Santos expected to be paid for taking part in the documentary (subjects of news documentaries don’t normally get paid for participating in the story; no one else Zeff interviewed on Capital Hill said anything about being paid.) Tacitly acknowledging that this was a little sketchy, Santos said they couldn’t have a conversation about payment while he was in his Congressional office – they would have to take it elsewhere.
A particularly narcissistic part of these released tapes is when, in response to a question, Santos acknowledged that he had given some thought to running for President. Really?
NB: I am not a psychiatrist and I have not personally assessed the mental health of either man. But you know, if it walks like a duck . . . .
Shell Games
We all have a visual of the shell game that has defrauded countless tourists for decades. The sidewalk hustler with his table of inverted cups and a small ball or pea uses razzle-dazzle to confuse his marks and take their money. Sometimes the act includes a shill, who “wins” and thereby encourages a new mark to take a gamble. The marks always lose in the end. You’ll notice that the regular passers-by don’t play the game; they know it’s a ruse and they plan to keep their money, thank you very much.
Both TFG and Skippy have a history of hiding and manipulating the details of their financial lives. Skippy never provided good information about the source of the large income and loans to his campaign that he revealed on federal election disclosure forms. The mysterious Devolder Organization popped up out of nowhere, received significant funding from unnamed sources, gave most of it to Skippy, and then shut down. His campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, is connected to a web of interlocking companies and consultants. Marks’s quarterly reports about Skippy’s campaign frequently listed expenses of $199.99 – one cent under the amount that would have required itemization.
If this doesn’t remind you of a shell game master TFG, you haven’t been paying attention. For decades, he used hundreds of companies to operate the umbrella Trump Organization, thus evading significant income taxes and misrepresenting the true value of his holdings for his own financial gain. Watch him shuffle the cups.
This shell game resulted in a recent jury verdict in Manhattan against the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax-related fraud, for which TFG’s CFO, Allen Weisselberg, went to jail. In April, TFG was presented with a 34-count criminal indictment on similar charges.
Con Man
The two men share another disturbing talent: the ability to play the long con in order to get and keep the dollars flowing.
For TFG, the cons are nonstop, from Trump University to the Big Lie. TFG lies constantly and is constantly rewarded for it. If he gets caught, he shrugs it off, pays a fine, and moves forward. Frequently he pays the penalty with the donations he gets from hapless donors who still believe he’s telling the truth. He used the Big Lie to generate what the January 6 Committee labeled the Big Rip-Off, resulting in over $250 million in donations to his PAC. For a long time, the RNC was paying TFGs legal bills. If you donate to the RNC, you should know that you are paying TFG’s lawyers.
TFG doesn’t follow through on the commitments he makes when he raises money. He asks people to contribute to “win” a meal with him at Mar-a-Lago, although there’s no evidence that there has ever been a winner in this competition. He promises a “triple-match” for donations to his PAC; such a match would violate campaign finance laws and the promise is never fulfilled. His donors are either unaware of this or they don’t care. He sells cheap trading cards online, gleaning more cash from his star-struck fans.
Skippy also misleads the public, through misdirection and outright lies. Before he was elected to Congress, he profited from GoFundMe and other fundraising campaigns for nonexistent charitable causes. He benefited from bogus claims of Jewish ancestry and built a fake resume that included nonexistent jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, built on fabricated stories about his educational background. He continued this pattern as he sought national elective office, falsifying information on his campaign disclosure documents in a variety of ways to cement his election to Congress in 2022.
Russian Money
People like TFG and Skippy are easy marks for foreign adversaries; because of their insatiable quest for money, they can be quickly bought, easily controlled, and fully owned.
TFG’s ties to Russian money have been fully explored in other sources. In the 1990s, TFG was facing financial ruin but was saved only through an influx of money from the oligarchs. In 2014, TFGs second son, Eric, said that his father’s business didn’t need to ask banks for the money it needed to build a golf course because “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Understanding the financial relationship between TFG and the Russian oligarchs is essential to understanding the things he did while he was POTUS. Contrary to what Fox may have told you, the Mueller Report didn’t exonerate TFG of these charges; it simply (per the guidance of AG Bill Barr, see “protectors” below) said they could not prosecute him, although they would have prosecuted him if he had not been President.
Skippy’s money is tied to Russian oligarchs as well. Several sanctioned Russian billionaires gave the maximum contribution permitted to Skippy’s campaign
Lying
This has been the subtext of everything I’ve written in this essay so far. TFG’s lifetime of prevarication is well-known and documented. He goes on TV and denies saying something that has actually been caught in a recording. When they run the tapes he says they’re making it up. He claims accomplishments that he never achieved, and promises things that he doesn’t plan to deliver. It’s all transactional – he does whatever he needs to get through the next day – or hour, or minute. Inconsistencies don’t matter to him. If you bring them up, it’s because you’re a RINO never-Trumper. He labels anything he doesn’t like as “Fake News.”
Skippy’s lies are blatant and easily refutable. He can’t escape the evidence that he is lying about everything – his ethnic background, his mother’s death, his education, his jobs, playing for a frickin’ college volleyball team – he just makes things up and thinks they should fly. At one point in a recent interview, he excused the lies he told to get elected by saying he didn’t think anyone would check.
Protection
Every criminal needs a protector to shield him from the consequences of his criminality. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is TFG’s protector. After the second impeachment, in 2021, McConnell decided not to ask his caucus to convict TFG, apparently thinking that he could still get some political mileage from TFG’s MAGA base. The result is that TFG is running again. Another protector is former Attorney General Bill Barr, who regularly put his finger on the scales of justice for the former President by mischaracterizing the Mueller Report and resigning from the Justice Department rather than speaking out against TFG’s election denialism.
Skippy’s protector is Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Skippy’s transgressions were well-known even before he took office, and McCarthy could have marshaled the required 2/3 vote to expel him. He would have gone away. But Skippy was useful to McCarthy – he provided one of the votes providing the narrow margin that gave him the gavel. McCarthy couldn’t risk his slender majority in the House by expelling Skippy after that. A House vacancy is filled through a special election, and Skippy’s Long Island constituents, who have often voted for Democrats, are so angry at being misled by his lies that they would likely elect a Democrat in his place – thus lessening McCarthy’s margin by one. A loss of one vote would have cost McCarthy both the speakership and the lame debt ceiling bill that passed the House this week.
“Witch Hunt”
TFG and Skippy both claim that they are the victims of a witch hunt. But the analogy isn’t a very good one. The “Witches” in Salem (my 8th great-grandmother, Margaret Stephenson Scott, was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692, in case I need to establish my street cred here) were innocent women living on the margins of society. The people of Salem used the faith of impressionable people to attack these outsiders and manipulate the system to hurt those they didn’t like, and it was probably about real estate at its core. Sound familiar? The term “witch hunt” could be more accurately applied to the meritless pursuit of Hillary’s emails, her role in Benghazi, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or the bogus House GOP committee to investigate weaponization of the federal government – a weaponization they are actually promulgating through this committee. There were no witches in Salem, just as there is no crime behind the investigations I mentioned in the previous sentence. Prosecutions focused on TFG or Skippy are in pursuit of actual witches.
I agree with Kuo’s argument (in the essay I referenced at the beginning of this post) that Skippy is what you get when you let TFG skate on the accumulated serious breaches of both law and protocol that he has engaged in over the years. Skippy is pretty young to be in Congress – he’s only 34 years old. For much of his adult life, he has watched TFG get away with a series of grifts and con jobs, getting rich and becoming POTUS in the process. Narcissists, by definition, have unjustifiably high opinions of themselves; it’s not surprising that Skippy concluded that he’s the next iteration of TFG. It’s not too much of a stretch to assert that if TFG had been held accountable, Skippy would never be sitting in room 1117 of the Longworth House Office Building in Washington.
The two malignant narcissists would be sitting in Rikers.
Another home run!