Late Wednesday afternoon, Dana Mattioli, Drew Hinshaw, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal reported on the tawdry grifting of Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. and now Trump’s ambassador to Greece. Panicked about how much money she owed on her American Express credit card, Guilfoyle reached out to Eric Deters, who wanted the administration’s help with tax and legal issues. Deters had promised Guilfoyle as much as a million dollars if she was successful in getting him the help he wanted.

With her confirmation hearing for the ambassador post coming up, Guilfoyle begged Deters to pay $100,000 to American Express. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on the secure messaging app Signal, the Wall Street Journal reporters explained. “Please.” She reiterated over text: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” “Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work,” Deters wrote. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce.”

In their months of correspondence, Guilfoyle often complained that he was not being careful enough. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” She wrote: “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.” And later: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Looking back today at stories of corruption involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and so on, Chris Hayes of MS NOW explained that Trump’s inner circle “works a lot like a crime family…. [E]veryone gets their fiefdoms. They can get their beaks wet. But they’ve always got to make sure they’re giving the boss his due.”

On Tuesday, Samantha Subin of CNBC reported that just days after Palmer Luckey joined the Pentagon’s new Project Meridian, set up to report on the military’s future needs, the company Luckey co-founded—Anduril—landed a $2.9 billion contract with the U.S. Navy. And today, Reuters reported that Kalshi is investigating suspicious trades having to do with Trump’s selection of Katie Zacharia as the new White House press secretary.

Americans don’t like corruption, and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans, Trump has launched an all-out offensive to solidify his base. That offensive includes spinning the Iran War, calling for a public execution, attacking immigrants both rhetorically and in real life, and shifting the United States against the defense of international law and allying with authoritarian governments.

On Wednesday, October 7, Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz hit the highest level since the war on Iran began. Shortly after noon yesterday, October 8, Trump tried to spin the situation there to make it sound like he was in control. He posted that “Iran is in a very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily,” that the U.S. blockade is still in effect, that oil is flowing “in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait,” and that the administration is having “productive discussions” with Iran. He added: “[W]e will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd. IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

In an interview with far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appealed to the MAGA religious base with a promise that the execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass shooter who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be public. An active Army officer when he committed the murders, Hasan was court-martialed and sentenced to death.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted that a livestream of the execution would be a rallying cry for terrorists.

The backlash against Hegseth’s plan has been swift and bipartisan.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), who served as a paratrooper and Army Ranger and is now on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, said: “Pete Hegseth has taken our military’s tradition of selfless service and flipped it on its head. With this public execution, he is degrading the culture of our military and turning a culture of service into one of vengeance and spectacle, performed for cameras and attention on social media. The Fort Hood shooter’s actions were horrific. Responding to it by livestreaming a violent execution is not an answer. A public execution only gives our adversaries fodder for anti-American propaganda that makes us less safe. Pete Hegseth’s self-absorbed hunger for power, attention, and violence is disgusting and beneath the office he holds. He is not fit to lead.”

The idea was “beyond disgusting,” Senator Tom Tillis (R-NC) wrote. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Trump then tried to rile up his supporters by turning them against an invented “enemy,” a tactic that is Authoritarianism 101. On Wednesday the FBI said it had prevented an attack on Minnesota’s Mall of America by a teenaged American-born U.S. citizen of Somalian descent whom they had been monitoring since December 2024 and to whom an FBI agent sold the assault rifle and ammunition for the attack.

At 4:30 on the afternoon of October 8, Trump wrote: “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue. Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help—and leave the rest to us!”

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly referred to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complained that Democrats were not “rounding them up and putting them in jail.”

On Thursday, October 8, Priscilla Alvarez and Michael Williams of CNN reported that on Tuesday, the leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) verbally told agents across the country to ramp up their arrests by another 1,000 people a day, bringing arrests back to 3,000 daily.

On Thursday afternoon, as ICE agents in New York City surrounded a Dominican man and his five-year-old son in a car, one of the agents fired several shots. It is not clear how badly injured Oscar Belgal is; he was shot in the neck, treated at a hospital, and then moved to an ICE facility outside of New York. His son was not hit by a bullet. New Yorkers immediately began to protest, calling for an end to ICE. New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, both Democrats, have demanded ICE stop operations in the state. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused. “No, we’re not putting a pause on enforcement,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’re not. In fact, I’m not sorry.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South-African-born jurist and former chief of human rights at the United Nations. There she led a U.N. commission that concluded Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians. She is currently a judge at the International Court of Justice. The committee’s message with their choice seemed pointed: Pillay has promoted peace through her protection of international law, they said, and the committee chair said the award was “a message to those who are attacking” international law. The committee said Pillay was “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted that the “Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” calling Pillay “a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”

Hours after the prize announcement, Humeyra Pamuk, Steve Holland, and Anthony Deutsch of Reuters reported that Trump’s administration was imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on judges and prosecutors before; now it is sanctioning companies that provide services to the court itself.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Netanyahu, as well as Russian officials including Vladimir Putin. Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.”

Sanctioning the ICC sets the U.S. against its allies in Europe, who are increasingly worried about hybrid attacks from Russia, attacks that avoid direct war while destabilizing another country, methods like cyberwarfare or disinformation. Today, after ten years of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, Trump openly allied the United States with Russia against Ukraine.

Three weeks ago, by large bipartisan votes, Congress passed new sanctions against Russia and countries that were continuing to use Russian oil and gas and gave Trump sweeping powers to expand those sanctions. At the time, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said: “This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. It will ensure America’s adversaries, not only Russia, but also China and Iran, suffer for their coordinated campaign of aggression.”

But today, Trump used the law for the opposite of what Congress apparently intended: “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”

The Treasury Department promptly announced it was issuing a temporary license to permit Russian diesel to sell on the global market. The sales will likely do little for U.S. oil prices, but they will funnel money to Russia for its war on Ukraine.

Trump’s smash-and-grab suggests concern he will lose the midterms. The latest poll from the Pew Research Center shows that 68% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency. Cook Political Report has moved 18 more House ratings toward the Democrats. Myah Ward of Politico reported that 26% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 think the Republican Party should break with Trump in order to win in November. In Kansas on Wednesday, more than 100 prominent Republicans launched a coalition called “Republicans for Hamilton” to back Democrat Adam Hamilton for the U.S. Senate. Their announcement referred to “a growing network of everyday Republican voters…who are ready for change.”

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who conducts focus groups with voters, says Trump’s campaign ads boosting himself have backfired: people hate them. They object to using taxpayer money for them by a margin of 86 to9. Furthermore, Longwell finds that Trump 2024 voters in Florida whom Trump needs to energize for this election, really hate them—the word Longwell used is “revulsion.” One said: “We need to get rid of all these people. Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next ten years, it’s probably best to wash these people out, you know, so you can get cleaned—clean slate.”

Trump’s rant about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize

 

“Last time they gave it to a young lady who’s a fabulous person and she said she didn’t deserve it that I deserved it and she gave it to me and I said wow what an honor. I settled eight wars, another one is coming. I got all the hostages back. I did things that nobody else has ever done. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you the facts. No president probably has settled any wars. I settled eight wars and big ones, big ones. Saved millions and millions of lives and when Maria gave me that Nobel Prize she said not only should he get it for this year but there’s never been anybody in the history of the Nobel Prize that deserves it more. I did. I settled eight wars and I’ve stopped maybe the total obliteration of the world. Because Iran will never have a nuclear weapon and that’s a positive thing, very positive thing, and other presidents should have done it before me or somebody should have done it. So I don’t know what their decision is going to be. They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me but I—whether I get it or not I have done far more and I think it would be a great discredit to them and I’m not saying that out of scorn. I’m saying that when you settle eight wars and nobody’s ever—I’ll bet you if you look at the Nobel Prize—look Obama got it and he didn’t do anything, he still doesn’t know what he got it for, he got it when he got elected right at the beginning, and he had no idea why he got it. Well in my case, I said I didn’t know that they’re doing it but you’re right it is about that time. But I was very honored to receive it indirectly last time by the recipient who said nobody in history deserves it more than President Trump and since then we’ve done a lot. Since then I’ve settled, think of it, eight wars and got all the hostages back and stopped a lot of wars from happening by using the powers of tariffs and lots of other things as a threat against certain countries so that they did not partake in killing people. “

COMMENT:  You cannot read this and still believe he’s sane.

The Big Beautiful Obituary

Billions of people around the world rejoiced today as Donald J. Trump died after a lengthy period of suffering that he inflicted upon humanity. He departed the world of the living and returned to Hell, from whence he came, enabling the rest of the world to enter into peace.

Trump’s corruption, incompetence, and malevolence were legendary. He will be remembered as the worst President of the United States ever, and the only President with four criminal indictments and two impeachments. He was deserving of many more indictments and impeachments, but a broken system of government allowed Trump to go unpunished his entire life. Trump held the office of President for two hellish, non-consecutive terms, with a four year intermission of relative normalcy and sanity within the era of Trump dystopia. Trump spent most of his two terms golfing, ranting on social media, posting childish memes, vacationing at his gaudy properties at taxpayers’ expense, vandalizing public architecture, and committing war crimes. Through stock market manipulation, graft, and extortion disguised as political fundraising, Trump was able to enrich himself by billions of dollars during his presidencies, in violation of custom and the Constitution. Throughout his tyrannical, treasonous misrule, Trump prioritized self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, fealty to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the persecution of minorities, and the looting of national treasure.

During his first term, more than a quarter million Americans died needlessly due to Trump’s mishandling of the Covid 19 pandemic. Trump also appointed three corrupt, partisan hacks to the Supreme Court who took away reproductive freedom from over a hundred million American women, eliminated voting rights, and expanded presidential power and immunity to absurd proportions. After Trump’s suspicious reelection in 2024, with the help of this supreme court, Trump’s first act was to pardon the cop-beating terrorists who had helped him stage a coup d’etat in 2020. Trump would later try to create a slush fund to “reimburse” and reward these January 6th insurrectionists.

Trump ran for a second term to avoid prison and succeeded due to massive vote suppression and money from undisclosed donors. In this second term,Trump appointed a Rogues’ Gallery of sycophants to dismantle the institutions to which they were appointed. He appointed fascist oligarch Elon Musk to an illegal extra-governmental agency which indiscriminately fired federal employees and abolished organizations mandated by Congress. More than 600,000 people died, two-thirds children, after he shut down USAID. Trump also illegally imposed tariffs and waged war against Iran without consultation with Congress or allies, both of which were economically disastrous for the whole world but benefited him personally through insider trading. In violation of many court orders, Trump’s Justice Department blocked release of the “Epstein Files” which would have proven Trump’s participation in sex crimes against children. Trump’s signature legislative achievement was what he called “The Big Beautiful Bill”, which gave tax cuts to billionaires, cut healthcare, funded the largest secret police force in history, and created a vast network of concentration camps, among other crimes and travesties. Trump used his secret police forces to occupy and terrorize American cities, culminating in the murder of several American citizens on American streets in broad daylight.

Prior to becoming President, Trump was a failed businessman who pretended to be a successful businessman on television. Trump was a profoundly stupid man who managed to bankrupt casinos and go bankrupt multiple times despite being born a rich, over-privileged “nepo baby”. Trump had a long string of scams and business failures including Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump University, and Trump Vodka, and Trump Water. Throughout his life, Trump’s immense ego compelled him to plaster his name on everything he could, regardless of the appropriateness or legality. Trump’s scams continued unabated during his presidency, with the introduction of Trump sneakers, Trump watches, Trump coins, and other crap. Trump is survived by a large family of shameless, grifting morons like himself, including his slutty, mail-order wife Melania, and his obnoxious, degenerate children.

Trump was a person who stole from charities, scapegoated innocent people, made fun of the disabled, denigrated legitimate heroes, raped women and children, and murdered non-combatants overseas in wars of choice. He was a pedophile, a rapist, a career criminal, a confidence man, a Russian asset, an extortionist, a money launderer, a serial adulterer, a drug abuser, a pathological liar, a white supremacist, a misogynist, anti-intellectual, homophobic, Islamophobic, and Xenophobic. Donald Trump was a petty, hateful man with no redeeming qualities. He was completely lacking in taste, decency, empathy, virtue, wisdom, and common sense, and was the embodiment of all seven deadly sins. However, Trump possessed a strange, inexplicable charisma, much like Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson, enabling him to become a highly successful cult leader, grifter, and Autocrat.

Donald Trump was an insufferable, sadistic child who was sent to New York Military Academy because he was uncontrollable and no other prep school would admit him. Trump was a poor student who bullied and cheated his way through all his schooling. His own mother called him a monster. He reportedly paid somebody to take his college entrance exams for him. One of his professors at The Wharton School of Business described Trump as the dumbest student he ever had. He graduated near the bottom of his class, and then lied about this ranking the rest of his life. Trump concealed his educational records, his business records, his medical records, and his tax returns.

Trump was mentored by his slumlord Klansman father Frederick Trump Sr., red-baiting attorney Roy Cohn, and hypocritical bible-thumper Norman Vincent Peale, some of the worst human beings who ever lived aside from Donald Trump himself. Roy Cohn taught Trump to accuse all of his political opponents of Communism and to abuse the legal system to rip-off employees and punish critics. This helped turn Trump into the most litigious individual in history. Donald Trump’s father Fredrick, who made a fortune from fraud and corruption of his own, helped Donald avoid military service in Vietnam by bribing a doctor to falsify medical records. Despite his five deferments, Donald Trump imagined himself a great military genius. Trump famously went on to belittle the service of military personnel, calling them “suckers and losers”, and used the military as cannon fodder.

Trump was diagnosed with a psychiatric condition known as “Malignant Narcissism”, the worst possible type of personality disorder combining elements of grandiosity, entitlement, paranoia, sadism, and psychopathy. He also developed severe dementia at the end of his life, which served to worsen his already horrendous personality. In his final year, the dementia caused him to lose all inhibition, and he would swear profusely in public and openly call for genocide against his perceived enemies.

Trump’s legacy is the destruction of democracy and the rule of law in the United States of America, and the destruction of America’s power and reputation. He ruthlessly exploited every flaw and loophole in our Constitution, leaving America a failed state. His cruel, senseless policies and wars of aggression triggered world-wide economic catastrophe and impoverishment. Trump betrayed America’s allies, embraced dictators, and ended the NATO alliance which had kept peace and stability in the world since the end of World War Two. Trump enriched himself and his cronies by billions of dollars while increasing inequality beyond that of the Gilded Age of the previous century. Donald Trump caused untold misery, destruction, and the deaths of millions of people in the United States of America and around the globe. The incalculable harm, the lifetime of egregious non-stop lying, the wanton cruelty and insatiable greed, all qualify Donald J. Trump as the most evil and despicable person who ever God suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Trump’s body will be disposed of secretly to avoid grave site desecration and to prevent the forces of evil from regrouping around his wretched memory. Family of the deceased requests that large donations to The Trump Organization be sent in lieu of flowers. The joy triggered by his demise is only slightly tempered by the swearing in of soulless, scheming sycophant J.D. Vance as his temporary replacement. World-wide celebrations are expected to continue for weeks despite reported shortages of Champagne, fireworks, and confetti.

Here is how to report news, via a New York Times journalist:

This is all purely factual, but these are also facts that allow anyone who isn’t a fascist and/or a sadist to draw the appropriate conclusions.

I don’t believe the extent to which sadism is fully appreciated — that is, a sexual orientation which consists of getting erotic pleasure out of inflicting pain, or witnessing pain being inflicting on others — because sadism is a key component of the devolution of the American right wing into fascistic authoritarianism..

I know it sounds awfully judgy to conclude that Pete Hegseth et al are perverted freaks, who see extreme violence not as a tragic consequence of the nature of modern state, but rather as sexual enhancement tool, but the evidence for this proposition is all around us, and growing every day.

***

The social ubiquity of stupidity remains relatively unappreciated and under-analyzed, although it would seem that the Trumpist era is rapidly doing its best to remedy this situation.  Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief essay on the subject, now more than 80 years old, remains one of the few notable exceptions to this rule.  Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis in the year before Donald Trump’s birth, but at this historical moment his words resonate perhaps more powerfully than ever:

In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

This is, given Bonhoeffer’s fate, eerily similar to the conclusion Hannah Arendt reaches about one of the chief architects of the Nazi mass murder, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.  Adolf Eichmann’s crime, per Arendt, is at its core “the inability to think.”  Eichmann is guilty of genocide and stupidity; or more precisely he is guilty of genocide because of his stupidity.  His malevolence is a product of his stupidity, and vice versa.  History may well reach a similar judgment about the man who is even now leading America into catastrophe.

In a prescient essay entitled “The Triumph of Stupidity,” published in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany, the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted:

Given a few years of Nazi rule, Germany will sink to the level of a horde of Goths.  What has happened?  What has happened is quite simple.  Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest. . . .  The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

This morally and politically toxic combination of brutality and stupidity was on full display at the beginning of the war on Iran in March of 2026, when the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth indulged publicly in sadistic revels about all the destruction and death he and his boss raining down on the people of that nation.  In a particularly disgusting display, Hegseth treated his audience in a grotesque description of Iranian sailors drowning in the Indian ocean, after their ship was torpedoed by the US Navy.  It was revealed the next day that the ship was largely defenseless when it was attacked, because it had been participating in an international naval exercise at the invitation of the Indian government.   A few weeks later, Hegseth used a press conference to continue his onanistic fantasies about dropping bombs on his fellow human beings, despite the fact that one of these exercises in “lethality” had already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, after the apparently accidental bombing of their classrooms:

I witnessed lethality.  I met a junior airman as the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac, who, when asked what they needed, she simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, more bombs, sir, and bigger bombs.  We will happily oblige her.

Indeed, reading World War II-era authors such as Arendt and Russell today, it’s difficult to avoid being struck by how many top Nazis and Trumpists share the same basic social profile, which is to say they were and are lifelong catastrophic failures, who failed upwards under conditions that turned out to be ripe for such people to ascend to positions for which they were farcically unqualified.  This description fits people like Eichmann, Himmler, and many other Nazis to a tee, with the very best example being, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.

On the Trumpist side the examples are equally plentiful, from Hegseth, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to, most crucially, Trump himself:  a man who spent decades managing to be a human disaster of astonishing proportions, despite inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars, and all the immense privilege that goes with such good fortune in our society.

 Jim Bakker is dead, at the age of 86.

Among the grosser religious grifters of American history, Bakker was a pure thief, someone who may or may not have really believed in his version of far-right Christianity, but who really truly believed in money. Luckily for him, no matter what horrible things he did, no matter what horrible things he said, no matter how much money he stole, the idiots were always happy to fork over more to the man who said the things about the end of the world that they really want to hear.

Bakker grew up in the far-right version of the American church. Born in Minnesota in 1940, Bakker was in the Assemblies of God, a far-right version of evangelical Protestantism founded at a convention in Arkansas in 1914. It was both politically conservative and dedicated to holiness ideas of Christianity that largely rejected the parts of the modern world it didn’t like. New technologies like the radio? No, no, that was good, modernism allowed us to spread the word of God. But women’s rights? What a horror. So these movements always had to try to balance the technological transformations that opened up hearts and minds and wallets to Jesus while rejecting all the social changes those technologies wrought. Bakker didn’t pioneer that balance—people such as Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson had started that process decades earlier, but Bakker would have to deal with that on television and he managed it easily.

Bakker attended North Central University, an evangelical Bible college in Minneapolis. There, he met Tammy Faye LaValley. Jim and Tammy Faye would eventually become the First Couple of Evangelical Grifting. They married in 1961 and dropped out to become evangelist preachers. Who needed a degree to learn the Big Grift?

They spent the next few years moving around, speaking at revivals, and building connections in the growing New Right that sought to connect evangelical Christianity with far-right causes. It’s important to remember that before the 1970s, voting rates among hard-core evangelicals weren’t very high and they weren’t much of a political force. Many thought that engaging with something as sinful as the government was below them, especially when both political parties seemed to represent a secular nation. Bakker worked hard to change that.

In 1966, Pat Robertson, who along with Jerry Falwell, really did more than anyone else to build this far right political coalition, hired Jim and Tammy Faye for his Christian Broadcasting Network. CBN was really just getting its legs and viewership wasn’t very high. But the Bakkers could now speak to the masses.

They started a children’s show with puppets, like a far-right version of Mister Rogers, if Mister Rodgers was focused on getting kids’ parents to fork over their cash before Christ came back to smite the sinners. Your cash could guarantee you would be on the right side of that equation. Come on Over was a big success, one of the first CBN had. Finally, extremist right-wing parents could indoctrinate their kids by placing them in front of a television with puppets and not be exposed to that also quite Christian but also sane Fred Rogers. Impressed, Robertson hired Jim Bakker to host another show—The 700 Club. This would become the signature show of CBN for decades, though not with Bakker. He and Tammy Faye were ready to go on their own and Robertson didn’t want to be overshadowed either.

Jim and Tammy Faye decided to start their own broadcasting network to compete with CBN. Trinity Broadcasting Network began in 1972 with another married pair of evangelical grifters, Paul and Jan Crouch. TBN was quite successful, but not with Bakker. It turned out that Bakker and Paul Crouch hated each other and could not find a way to work together. It seems that no one really liked Jim Bakker. He was a complete slimeball and grifter, even among other grifters.

So the Bakkers left again to start their own syndicated show. The PTL Club began in 1974 and over the next fifteen years would be perhaps the most popular Christian show out there. Even my Lutheran mom watched it. She bought their records too. She later denied this and I was outraged by these lies. She finally admitted that she liked their singing and OK, sure, she did buy them. But to be fair to my mom, I’d be embarrassed by this fact too. Incidentally, it doesn’t much surprise me that the mainline Protestant churches and even the Catholic Church is in decline, since so much of the larger cultural Christianity that even they consume come out of the evangelical world. So why not just become an evangelical, especially when it intersects with white supremacist and resentment-based politics that you also share and wish your liberal Lutheran or Episcopalian pastor would articulate?

 

The whole PTL grift was amazing. And let’s be clear—they rose fast. In 1972, they were living in a trailer. By 1978, they were millionaires. First, Tammy Faye was so ridiculously over the top and campy that it should have been impossible to take her seriously. There’s a good reason that she became something of a gay icon later in her life. After the decline of her empire, she started claiming that she was always just about love and acceptance, which was both a total lie and an impressive shift in her personal grifting, though grifter she 100% always was.

But Jim, he was just a giant nothingburger. He had a certain charisma I guess? And I suppose he had the kind of male authority that makes these evangelical idiots give over their money. But he was just a wet noodle. I dunno, the 70s and 80s were weird times in American culture and who knew who could get big in an era where spirituality was up in the air and a lot of semi-charismatic hustlers could profit off the yokels.

And to be clear, this was all about the cash. They didn’t even hide it. Bakker had a dream—build a Christian theme park and separate more fools from their money. That became Heritage USA, built in Fort Mill, South Carolina. It was hugely successful! For awhile there, it was the third most popular theme park in the United States, only behind Disney World and Disneyland. By 1986, five million people a year were paying money for this!

Heritage USA included everything you’d want—a hotel, rides, prayer rooms, a skating rink, and of course a place for the Bakkers and friends to broadcast. Bakker had started promoting this back in 1978. He called Heritage USA a “total living center” that would eventually attract residents to live there in various villages based upon supposed American themes, ranging from “Old New England” to “California contemporary.” He also stated it would “never be finished until the coming of the Lord.”[1]

The morons just forked over the cash. Evangelicals are such easy marks. Jim Bakker knew that inherently. By the late 70s, he was drawing in over a million a week in donations on the PTL Club. Of course people asked him about the money. I mean, it’s not hard for even the media to see a grift like this and be awestruck that the hoopleheads and the yokels would fall for it. But the TV evangelists were ready for these kind of questions. They simply bathed themselves in the glory of Christ and said they were channeling their personal lord and savior. Bakker responded to the use of the media to raise all this cash that “I believe if Jesus was alive today, he would be on TV.” Sure, OK.

I always love the mental gymnastics people like this do over the inconvenient parts of the Bible like the rich man going through an eye of the needle and Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple and such. But people make the Bible say whatever they want it to say that fits their personal desires and politics and if that means just ignoring the parts that don’t reinforce what you are already doing, hey man, whatever. The fact that these people will do this while also saying that the Bible is literally God’s word and must be followed to the letter is extra amazing though.

Bakker also got directly involved in politics, completely blowing up the line between church and state, not that he cared any more about this than Falwell or Robertson. In 1980, just eight days before he was to announce his presidential run, Ronald Reagan went on TV to give an interview. The interviewer was Jim Bakker. The exchange, as reported in Rick Perstein’s astounding compendium Reaganland is remarkable. The parts quoted by Perlstein go like this:

Bakker: “Mr. Carter said some things that are right. But doesn’t appoint an evangelical Christian, and he doesn’t act like an evangelical Christian. And this has bothered us all.  But your stand all the way back, on all these issues that are so important to our, so important to us—

Reagan, interrupting: “Do you ever feel that if we don’t do it now, if we let this become another Sodom and Gomorrah, that we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?”

Bakker: “This is the most important election ever to face the United States. I really believe that. And with the controls on religion—I don’t think anyone knows what happened in our leadership. In the crushing of religion in this country.”

Reagan nodded in agreement and would run interference on Bakker’s bullshit for years.

Now, it’s not as if the IRS and other regulatory agencies weren’t wondering what was going on with all the cash. As early as 1979, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into where the money went. It filed a report in 1982 that demonstrated at least $350,000 Bakker said would go into foreign missions that instead went into his bank accounts and to pay for Heritage USA. Then in 1985, the IRS created an internal report noting that Bakker had used $1.3 million in donations for his personal gain between 1980 and 1983 alone. So there was plenty of hard evidence against him.

But see, this is where the Reagan administration stepped in. People such as Jerry Falwell and Ed Meese and others had built up the Reagan brand by appealing to evangelicals. There was no way they were going to alienate those people because the Bakkers broke the law. I mean, these were not people who cared about law breaking when it benefitted them! So the administration squashed the investigations.

Will it surprise you that Bakker liked to dip his Jesus pen in the company ink? Consent? What, was that for Satanists or something? In 1987, it came out that Bakker and his buddy John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped Jessica Hahn, a PTL secretary, back in 1980. They then gave her almost $300,000 as a payoff to shut her up. Bakker had a separate set of books to cover up the financial improprieties through PTL and other related activities anyway, including occasional rapes and coverups.

The Charlotte Observer did a deep dive report on Bakker’s activities. He denied it was rape and said it was consensual, though that doesn’t explain such a lucrative coverup (which is over ¾ of a million in today’s dollars). Hahn went all-in on her new-found fame, poised for Playboy, appeared on Married with Children, and lived a fairly wild lifestyle there for a few years. But that didn’t really help Bakker, whose fans had to reckon with him being a completely different person than he presented.

Then allegations about homosexuality appeared. There were plenty of allegations about this for years. Former PTL director Jay Babcock testified that he had sex with Bakker. The disgraced preacher responded by saying before cameras, “I’ll tell you before God I’ve never had homosexual sex with anyone and certainly not with Jay Babcock.” But PTL records also showed that Babcock had been paid $620,000 from the organization’s funds between the beginning of March 1986 and when Bakker resigned in March 1987. I don’t particularly care one way or another about the truth of this. What I care about is the hypocrisy, especially since Bakker was a virulent homophobe on his show and would remain so for the rest of his terrible life.

The entire TV evangelical world turned on Bakker after these allegations went live. Jimmy Swaggart went on Larry King and called Bakker a “cancer in the body of Christ.” Then a few months later, he got busted for buying sex in New Orleans. Amazing. Jerry Falwell went even further, saying Bakker was “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” I mean, OK, but maybe look in the mirror dude. Moreover, let’s not forget that Falwell was a huge Bakker ally for years before this. But it’s clear that Falwell saw an opportunity to eliminate a rival and consolidate his control over the TV evangelism world and so he just stuck a shiv in Bakker’s corrupted gut. Falwell also went on TV and named other men he believed Bakker had stuck his dick in, including other PTL employees.

Whether the other TV preachers were truly more upset over the sex or the financial stuff is unclear to me. My belief is that they were a lot more upset by the financial stuff, since that threatened their business model of ripping off the idiots.

My favorite ironic part of all of this is that when NBC made a movie about Bakker’s scandal, Fall from Grace, released in 1990, Kevin Spacey was hired to play Bakker! Turns out that was fairly appropriate! Bernadette Peters played Tammy Faye.

Bakker’s sexual encounters did not matter legally of course. All the disappearing money mattered a heck of a lot more and that’s why Bakker ended up serving time. In 1988, he was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. He tried to weasel his way out of it of course, since he was obviously guilty. He even had a psychological breakdown in the courtroom. Dollars to donuts this was staged, but the judge sent him to a facility for a bit and then the trial restarted. He was found guilty of all 24 counts. He was then sentenced to 45 years in prison and fined $500,000. That was quite a sentence. He appealed and a federal appellate court reduced it to 8 years. He served just about 5 and was released in 1994. Somehow Tammy Faye was not charged with any of this, which is crazy since she wasn’t nearly as dumb as she seemed and there’s no way in hell she didn’t know. She was however later charged with bankruptcy fraud and sentenced in 1996 to 27 months in prison.

Tammy Faye finally left Jim. They divorced in 1992. But he would remarry. I guess he found another life partner in the grifting. Lori Beth Graham was also a televangelist, so I guess that explains it. They married in 1998 and adopted a bunch of children, who I mostly feel bad for and I hope they grew up and became decent, reasonably well-adjusted humans who are allergic to all religion.

Bakker is of course completely shameless. He never would go away, no matter what he did. It seems to me that still listening to Jim Bakker in the 21^st century is a sign of complete depravity, just totally lost to the crazy. But he still had his shows and people still gave him money. He spent his later life hosing The Jim Bakker Show. This was a combination of talking about the Second Coming of Christ (which shockingly never actually happens, who could guess) and selling survivalist products. His website actually advertises itself as “Prophetic End Time News.”[2] Bakker’s End Times prophecies so just happened to follow the current political positions of the Republican Party. I know how shocking that is to read!

Now, how was someone going to prepare for the apocalypse, when the world will go to hell before Christ comes back? Well, Jim Bakker could help you with that. He had his own food products that he called Survival Food. Basically we are talking about MREs here. Bakker sold this on the principle of why not “have parties when the world’s coming apart?” Why not indeed, Jim.

NPR decided on a taste test. It will not surprise you that the meals taste horrific. I mean, no one ever claimed that Jim Bakker fans had good taste in food, so why try on that front? And of course there were different tiers. You could get the 50 day meal plan for $154 as a starter. But if you were really committed, you could get the Peace of Mind Final Countdown Offer, which provided you with 31,000 servings of food for a mere $4,500. A bargain, when you think about how the libs are going to be begging you for food when Jesus comes back.[3]

And of course Bakker was a Covid truther. For men like Bakker, Covid was nothing but another opportunity to sling lies and make money on the idiots. He sold supplements made of colloidal silver as protection against the virus. As early as the spring of 2020, the New York Attorney General’s office moved on Bakker to warn him to stop making false claims about his cures for Covid. The Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration did the same. Even Republicans acted, or some of them anyway. The attorney generals of both Missouri and Arkansas filed lawsuits against Bakker.

But Bakker had high friend. He hired Jay Nixon. Yep, that Jay Nixon, the former Democratic governor of Missouri, to defend him. So great to see leading Democrats using their influence to such benefit! Nixon argued that these attorney generals just hated Christianity. He said, “Bakker is being unfairly targeted by those who want to crush his ministry and force his Christian television program off the air.” To be clear, the AG of Missouri who filed that suit? Eric Schmitt, now the far-right Republican senator from that state. There’s a man who just hates Christianity!

In fact, this did have an impact. By April, claiming at least that he could no longer accept credit card donations because of the suits against him, he urged his supporters to send him cash. No doubt they did. He had a stroke in May 2020 and mostly has stayed out of the news since then, so I am guessing that despite claims it was minor, it wasn’t so minor.

And now Jim Bakker is dead. Thus ends the story of one of the great grifters in American history. Bakker demonstrates what a combination of hypocrisy and a complete lack of shame can do for you in this country. In conclusion, it is a true wonder that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

The winner of Senate control would snatch one of the biggest tangible prizes of the midterms: control over President Donald Trump’s nominees. If Democrats are in charge, don’t expect many of Trump’s picks to move at all. “If the nominees are as crappy as his present ones, very few of them are going to get through. If he sends us a new [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth, I bet he wouldn’t pass the Senate,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Semafor in a pre-election interview. “It’s the quality of the candidate that matters. Thus far, Trump has a record of notoriously bad candidates.”

“very few” ????  WTF is this “very few” crap?

How about NOT A GODDAM ONE OF THEM.

Do not approve a single Trump nominee for anything at all, not one.

How about Schumer either grow a pair of balls or GTF out of the way?

 

She’s the one on the left.

New Assistant White House Press Secretary Beni Rae Harmony wearing a “fuck Joe Biden” t-shirt and holding a rifle.

 

This Bell Curve shows the distribution of IQ in the US population.  Average IQ is 100.  Note that HALF THE POPULATION is below 100 and some of that 50% is well below 100.  The region to the left of 100 is where Republican voters come from.