Former President Donald Trump has made his career off of conning others out of their money — and that's what his 2024 campaign is all about, biographer Tim O'Brien told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday.
O'Brien's analysis arrived on the heels of a New York Times investigation that revealed Trump has paid off $100 million in legal fees raised by stirring "rigged" election panic. Recent reports also show Trump is forming a new arrangement with the Republican National Committee to expand that effort.
"He has been at this game for a very long time," O'Brien said on MSNBC, calling Trump a seasoned hand when it came to "stripping average folks from their paychecks."
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O'Brien then listed off the financial gambits he said backed his claim.
"He ran a casino business in Atlantic City that busted average working class folks on the premise that maybe they would get rich," O'Brien said. "Some of them were going there for fun, but a larger sort of mojo of the business was selling a false dream to these folks."
Then O'Brien noted, "He wrote a book called 'Art of the Deal' that was meant to be a bible about how to be successful in business, when in the real world he's a serial bankruptcy artist."
O'Brien included in his list the reality television show that made Trump's a household name nationwide.
"He goes onto 'The Apprentice' and is presenting himself as a entrepreneurial guru to the masses and the hardest working corporate guy in America," O'Brien said. "He plays golf all the time and is not very bright."
Moreover, O'Brien said, as soon as Trump "figured out how to monetize his stay in the White House, he finds almost every avenue he can to grift again, whether it's his hotel near the White House or now, in a really grand mal, grotesque way, taking campaign finance donations and using them to pay his personal legal bills."
According to O'Brien, "the problem in all of this is there's not a good regulatory or enforcement mechanism available to go after him on this."
"Right," agreed Wallace.
"The Federal Election Commission is toothless," continued O'Brien. "There are no prosecutors, I think, ginning up a case on this, even though they went after George Santos, whose stuff looks like small-time change compared to what Trump has been doing."
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