This article was originally published by John W. Whitehead at The Rutherford Institution It has been republished with permission from the author. Please contact the author directly for republishing information.
“Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Call it what it is: a heist.
The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight.
But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so “we the people” don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain.
We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing.
The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind.
You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.
For the Trump family, the presidency isn’t public service. It’s an all-access pass to wealth, power, and privilege—an ongoing exercise in how to squeeze maximum personal gain out of public office.
Taxpayers foot the bill for this massive grift: security for President Trump’s extended family, luxury travel, private business ventures, weekends at Trump-owned golf resorts, and vanity projects with a hidden price tag for the privilege of bearing Trump’s name.
We pay for it. They profit from it.
Even Congress is in on the game.
In a blatant act of political pandering, Senate Republicans are trying to slip a provision into an ICE funding bill that would direct $1 billion in taxpayer money toward Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom—bypassing debate and oversight.
A billion dollars.
Not to lower your grocery bill. Not to fix your healthcare. Not for infrastructure that serves the public.
For a ballroom.
A taxpayer-funded space where donors, insiders, and elites can gather and trade access—while the average American is left outside looking in.
The grift has become so obvious, Americans are finally taking notice.
Poll after poll shows the same thing: people are fed up.
Not just with the economy but with a president who seems more focused on himself, his image, and his vanity projects than on the people he’s supposed to serve.
A Washington Post poll puts it clearly: disapproval with Trump’s job performance is rising, with 62% unhappy about his job as president, 76% dissatisfied with how he’s dealing with the cost of living, 72% unhappy about his handling of inflation, 65% against his handling of the economy, and 66% opposed to the war with Iran.
They’re right to be unhappy.
While Americans struggle to make rent, pay for groceries, and stay afloat, the government is bankrolling ballrooms.
But here’s what most Americans are missing: the ballroom isn’t just a vanity project. It’s a distraction.
So are his plans to redo the East Potomac Golf Course.
So is his repainting of the Reflecting Pool.
So is the spectacle of him staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
So are his endless, bombastic, outrage-driven, manic, headline-making Truth Social posts.
Trump is good at pushing people’s buttons. He knows exactly what will outrage, distract, and drag people into one more pointless argument.
The bigger and louder, the better. That’s the show.
And while we’re watching Trump’s bread-and-circus antics, something else is happening.
The real damage to our republic is being buried—delayed, redacted, denied.
This shell game keeps our attention fixed on Trump’s costly antics while his partners-in-crime use the diversion to lock down the country and strip us of what’s rightfully ours.
It’s not just one elaborate ruse, either, but a series of cover-ups and obfuscations meant to keep us from looking too closely or asking too many questions about what’s really going on.
What began as a scramble to redirect public attention—from questions about Epstein to war, White House spectacles, immigration crackdowns, and culture-war theater—has become an ever-widening web of manufactured distractions and diversions.
Consider what’s happening behind the scenes.
Investigative reports reveal that the Trump administration has refused to fully disclose the extent of the damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. military installations.
Satellite imagery has been restricted. Access has been limited. Reporters are forced to rely on foreign aerial images and secondhand accounts just to piece together what’s happening.
And the lack of transparency doesn’t stop there.
Reports suggest the Pentagon has downplayed casualty figures of U.S. troops killed or wounded during the Iran war.
Oversight of DHS, ICE, and private contractors is being curtailed.
Human rights abuses are mounting, while accountability disappears behind a wall of secrecy.
They don’t want us looking too closely—because the less we see, the easier it is to take from us.
We’re meant to watch the show—not the government ledger.
When we can’t see the damage—at home or abroad—we can’t measure the cost. But we’re being asked to pay, and the price is mounting daily.
The same man who bankrupted his own businesses is now running the same play on the U.S. government.
Consider the Trump economy by the numbers. They tell the real story.
The government is spending more than it takes in. By a lot.
The national debt is now bigger than the entire U.S. economy. For the first time since World War II, the debt has surpassed 100 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
This is no small thing.
The federal government is now spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects.
And interest payments on that $31 trillion national debt are consuming one out of every seven dollars spent by the government. As Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor, warns, “That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.”
We don’t need an economist to spell it out for us, but there are ample warnings about the toll Trump’s costly policies are taking on the economy.
As Douglas Elmendorf, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, explains, rising debt fuels higher interest rates and inflation, driving up the cost of mortgages, car loans, and everyday life for ordinary Americans.
This is not sustainable.
While both political parties share responsibility for decades of fiscal mismanagement, the Trump administration has accelerated the crisis through a toxic combination of reckless spending, tax giveaways, and costly, unauthorized wars.
Promises to “drain the swamp,” balance the budget, and restore fiscal discipline have given way to ballooning deficits and trillion-dollar spending packages dressed up as economic revival.
Even the administration’s so-called cost-cutting measures fail to hold up under closer scrutiny.
Despite the propaganda pushed by DOGE and its supporters, nothing about the Trump administration has added up to savings for the American people.
Instead, Americans are seeing cuts to healthcare, education, housing assistance, and programs that provide economic stability.
At the very moment Americans are struggling to make ends meet, the Trump administration is spending big—at taxpayer expense—on projects that appeal to Trump’s ego, stoke his vanity, consolidate his power, reward his allies, or entrench the police state’s machinery of control.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Trump is playing golf while America burns—and he keeps striking the match.
While “we the people” are paying more for everything, Trump is getting richer off the presidency—at taxpayer expense.
Much richer.
Billions added to his fortune—while in office. His family’s wealth has exploded.
Trump’s net worth has surged to an estimated $6.5 billion. According to Forbes, Trump added $1.4 billion in a single year by leveraging the presidency for profit—fueled by cryptocurrency ventures, revived licensing deals, favorable legal outcomes, and a rush of foreign business interests seeking proximity to power.
Trump’s family is also cashing in, doubling their net worth since the 2024 election to an estimated $10 billion.
While the Trumps aren’t the first family to leverage the presidency for profit, as Forbes points out, “no first family has used the office to make as much money as Donald Trump’s.”
You know who’s not profiting?
We the people. Especially those of us that do not belong to the political and corporate elite.
For most Americans, life is getting harder.
Gas prices are up. Groceries are up. Healthcare costs are up.
Paychecks? Not keeping up.
And what is the government doing? Not easing the burden. Not restoring balance.
And Trump?
He jets off to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense. He golfs while dragging a full security detail along. He’s turning the White House—and by extension, much of the nation’s capital—into his personal domain, redecorating according to his personal tastes, with little concern for the wishes of the American people.
He lives like a king, while we pay for his excesses, one way or another.
He’s slashing government spending for programs that educate, protect, and support Americans, while building a $1.5 trillion war machine and boosting all aspects of the police state that treats us like suspects—locking us down and locking us up.
He’s building monuments to his own ego: a $400 million ballroom—now potentially a $1 billion taxpayer-funded monument to access and influence if Senate Republicans get their way; professional, taxpayer-funded golf courses that take the place of public parks; a new Trump-class “Golden Fleet” of battleships, costing $13 billion each.
He’s pushing for airports and train stations and other infrastructure to bear his name, then tacking on dubious licensing agreements for the so-called privilege.
At the same time, medical research is gutted. Job training gets cut. Environmental protections get axed. Disaster relief gets hollowed out. Welfare for the most vulnerable gets short-changed.
This isn’t just mismanagement. This isn’t just bad policy.
This is a system that takes from us and gives to the corporate and political oligarchic elite.
We pay more. “They” gain more.
Wars only make it worse.
Every missile. Every deployment. Every “operation.”
Paid for by “we the people.” Not just in taxes—but in higher prices, higher debt, and fewer services.
Pete Hegseth has been boasting that thanks to Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, the Department of War is running war like a business.
The truth is, they’re turning war into big business and cashing in.
In one of the most glaring examples of this, the Associated Press reports that Trump’s sons have, in his second term, expanded their business interests beyond hotels and golf courses to a broad range of investments that include cryptocurrency ventures, prediction markets, federal contractors making rocket parts, and rare earth magnets.
Conveniently timed to coincide with Trump’s war on Iran, his sons have also gotten into the drone manufacturing business, selling to countries in the Middle East eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.
As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, observed, “These countries are under enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want. This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war—a war he didn’t get the consent of Congress for.”
This is how you turn government into a profit machine.
Once again, we find ourselves confronted by the age-old debate over our national priorities and the choice between investing heavily in guns or butter—military might or domestic needs.
Once again, we find ourselves watching from the sidelines as big-talking politicians justify stealing from “we the people” in order to pad the pockets of the military industrial complex.
As The Guardian notes, to help pay for his expanded military budget, “Trump is seeking a 10% cut in discretionary domestic spending, chopping such popular programs as medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes.”
This is exactly the moral theft President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about: stealing from social and domestic needs in order to build up the military-industrial complex.
In Trump’s case, he wants guns and caviar: military might for the empire, wealth for himself, and less for America’s most vulnerable.
“We’re fighting wars,” Trump announced at an Easter luncheon. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare … They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s version of military protection is a costly display of macho posturing.
Rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War will cost taxpayers upwards of $125 million in new signs and stationery.
As Steven Greenhouse concludes for The Guardian, “In seeking a mammoth increase in military spending while cutting social programs, Trump is again showing how hollow his promises were about making life better for typical Americans.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene was right to course-correct. “I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome,” she said. “I have Trump Disappointment Syndrome.”
Trump Disappointment Syndrome is spreading.
This is, unfortunately, how the game works: less for us, more for them—paid for by “we the people.”
Yet just as important as the math involved in bleeding us dry is the conspiracy of distraction that keeps us in the dark about the theft in our midst.
That’s where the distractions come in: the ballroom, the golf course, the spectacles on the White House lawn.
Give the public something to watch. Something to argue about. Something impossible to ignore.
They want our outrage, not our scrutiny.
Keep the spotlight bright, so no one notices what’s happening in the shadows.
While the public watches the spectacle, the money is moving.
The spectacle is the decoy. The theft is the point.
The damage is being hidden—but the bill is still coming due.
We’re told this is policy. This is leadership. This is necessary for national security and the good of the country.
But what we’re really being given is a show, with Trump playing the part of the greatest showman.
The show has to be loud enough to keep the public’s attention. It has to be constant enough to keep us from asking the real question: where is the money going?
Because while we’re watching the show, the hold-up is taking place. The tellers are filling the bags with stolen loot. And they’re using the government as the get-away car.
That is how the con works.
As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how the machinery of the police state expands: not just through endless war, unchecked power, and a government that no longer answers to the people—but through insider profiteering, cronyism and corruption disguised as reform, efficiency and nationalism.
That’s the Trump hustle: while we’re being distracted by the spectacle, they’re emptying the vault.