Donald Trump has not given up control of his for-profit businesses as he pretends at the task of playing president. Members of Trump’s transition team or, more likely, government ethics officials were at least able enough to convey how grotesquely improper that was, to the point where Trump was obliged to pantomime handing those companies’ management over to his adult children, but he did not financially divest from those companies, as literally every other modern president was expected to do as a matter of basic norms.
The whole thing has been a charade. A fraud. And as we hear, every month, of new instances in which government agencies, the military, the Secret Service, or the thoroughly toadying vice president have been forced to put government money into Trump’s businesses and therefore his own pockets, the pretense that Trump is somehow uninvolved with this grift of his own making is at this point barely pretensed-at.
The New York Times cites current and former White House officials to report that Trump “spends more time talking about his properties in private than he does in public, and even as president, remains intimately involved with club minutiae, like knowing all the names on his Mar-a-Lago membership roll.” To spell that out: Trump’s private business invites well-heeled supplicants to pay cash to Donald’s for-profit club. Trump is intimately involved with learning all the names that have given him those cash infusions.
View the complete September 10 post from the Daily Kos not he AlterNet website here.
Donald Trump was coming off a bruising few years: His casino and real estate business had teetered on the edge of collapse, awash in debt. His marriage to Ivana Trump had disintegrated, and his relationship with model Marla Maples had fallen apart.
A new report from the New York Times on Tuesday revealed fresh details about the years-long friendship between President 
