Month: April 2021

This thing is strange and fascinating … and mesmerizing.

The Biden administration is offering a bunch of money to people build affordable housing. It’s worth a try. But I doubt it will work everywhere. There are going to be lots of pockets of NIMBY resistance.

On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump warned that Joe Biden would “abolish the suburbs” by forcing them to change housing regulations. Instead, as part of his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, Biden is offering them cash to open their gates voluntarily.

“It’s purely carrot, no stick,” said a White House official who has worked on the policy.

More broadly, Biden’s proposal would inject $213 billion — more than three times the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual budget of about $60 billion — into developing, maintaining and retrofitting affordable units over the next eight years, including both public projects and lower-rent private residences. That spending would be for both new and existing homes in cities, suburbs and small towns.

Subsidies are necessary, Democrats say, because the demand for cheap housing far outstrips the available stock, federal rental-assistance coffers only support about a quarter of the eligible population and it’s not currently profitable for developers to build lower-cost units.

“We’re talking about expansions in the supply of housing that go beyond incremental increases,” said Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who represents North Carolina’s Research Triangle area and is chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD.

In 2018, about a quarter of renters spent most of their income on rent, according to a Harvard University study. That was before the pandemic put additional financial strain on millions of Americans.

I live in what has become an insanely expensive neighborhood in which there are a number of low income housing units. We manage to live together quite peacefully. The more acute problem than people paying too much for their housing is homelessness and I’m not sure this will make a dent in it. Not that this isn’t worth doing, of course. It might take some people off the streets who are currently living in their RVs and cars. But the homeless problem often also runs into the even bigger problems of drug dependence and mental illness and that’s going to take a holistic approach that includes housing but isn’t limited to just that.

It’s a huge issue and I haven’t seen anyone who has an answer. All I know is that it’s a grotesque embarrassment that in a country with so much wealth and so many resources our cities have people living in squalid encampments on the sidewalk. Something has to be done.

Trump likes to brag about how he’s the “greatest” everything. And it’s always a lie. But in one specific case, which he never acknowledges, for obvious reasons, it’s true. Jonathan Chait’s story about Trump’s fundraising scam opens with this:

Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.

Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular expose of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.

He goes over the New York Times story I wrote about below and then makes this further observation which I think is sharp:

Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.

Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.

It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”

Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him.

They do. Why so many people worship this corrupt, phony, weirdo is beyond me.

I mean, really?

This report from Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times about the GOP small donor fundraising apparatus is a blockbuster. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Trump campaign was scamming its loyal supporters, but the scale is unbelievable. They ended up refunding many millions but it’s unknown how many people got bilked out of “recurring donations” they didn’t realize they’d signed up for.

“Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out. As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, It introduced a second prechecked box.”

The story compares the right wing WinRed donation platform, modeled on the successful Democratic site ActBlue, and it’s clear that the Republicans were grifting. WinRed itself is a product of Trump affiliated henchmen who made their platform for profit, unlike Act Blue, and kept fees even for refunds.

And the way the Trump campaign ran their fundraising operation was insanely aggressive and unscrupulous. The article also compares that to the Biden campaign and the differences are monumental. Biden’s team also refunded donations for various reasons, which is normal in all campaign, but the sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign — a loan which required that the people loaning the money go to a great deal of trouble get money back they didn’t consciously agree to “loan” in the first place. Millions of people didn’t realize they were signing on to future money bombs and recurring donations that ran into the thousands of dollars. It’s unknown how many just let it slide and allowed the Trump campaign to keep the money because it was too complicated to try to get it back. A lot of Trump donors were elderly.

The scam grew through the course of the campaign as Trump is reported to have been livid that they weren’t collecting enough money:

The small and bright yellow box popped up on Mr.Trump’s digital donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.” The box came prefilled with a check mark.

Even that was more aggressive than what the Biden campaign would do in 2020. Biden officials said they rarely used pre-checked boxes to automatically have donations recur monthly or weekly; the exception was on landing pages where advertisements and emails had explicitly asked supporters to become repeat donors.

As the months went on, they quietly changed it from a monthly to a weekly contribution and the pitch became more and more obscure, culminating in this mess:

The credit card companies told the Times that they were inundated with complaints and requests to cancel cards:

The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.[…]

“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered repeated WinRed charges from donating to Mr. Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone.

The unintended payments busted credit card limits. Some donors canceled their cards to avoid recurring payments. Others paid overdraft fees to their bank.

The guy who ran this grift was a Jared Kushner acolyte, unsurprisingly.

Here are just a few of the stories in the article:

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”

Jeff Kropf, the executive director of the Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation, a conservative group, said he had been “very careful” to uncheck recurring boxes — yet he missed the “money bomb” and got a second charge anyway.

“Until WinRed fixes their sneaky way of adding additional contributions to credit cards like they did to me, I won’t use them again,” he said.

But it wasn’t just WinRed, it was the campaign. And according to the Times, all the GOP campaigns are doing it. The two Georgia runoff campaigns were particularly aggressive.

Keith Millhouse, a transportation consultant in California, intended to donate once to Mr. Perdue, with the aim of keeping Republicans in control of the Senate. He wound up a recurring contributor and called the practice “repugnant” and “deceptive.”

“I’m busy like a lot of other people during this Covid era and I just wanted to get in, make a donation, get done and move on to what I needed to do next,” he said. “I thought I had done that. Then I find out that, you know, I’m getting these other charges.”

He canceled the repeating charge when he saw the reminder email. But by then WinRed had already processed his second $100 “bonus” contribution. He figured it was not worth the hassle to protest. “Don’t try to sucker it out of me,” he said.

I wonder how many people like him are out there.

Still, they hold Dear Leader blameless:

But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about $200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

That makes me want to cry. This is a man who is known for being a predatory con artist in his business career, behaved totally corruptly as president and took advantage of his own supporters and these people still love him and hold him blameless. I will never understand it.

By the way, he’s still doing it:

And after Mr. Trump’s first public speech of his post-presidency at the end of February, his new political operation sent its first text message to supporters since he left the White House. “Did you miss me?” he asked.

The message directed supporters to a WinRed donation page with two prechecked yellow boxes. Mr. Trump raised $3 million that day, according to an adviser, with more to come from the recurring donations in the months ahead.

And all the other Republicans are too, including Mitch McConnell. I guess they figure their supporters are suckers and deserve what they get.

TPM put it together:

Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) political career has been imploding for longer than we knew.

It really began with the June 2020 indictment of Joel Greenberg, a buddy of his and associate in ways that we’re still coming to fully understand. But a fuller picture of the charges that Gaetz may face has not become clear until this past week, when the New York Times broke the revelation that federal prosecutors are investigating Gaetz over potential sex-trafficking charges relating to an alleged relationship with a 17-year old.

Gaetz denies the allegations, and has yet to be charged with any wrongdoing.

A TPM review of Gaetz’s behavior since June 2020 reveals significant changes in his tumultuous personal life. But what didn’t change was former President Trump’s happiness to keep him around for political purposes, even as a top Justice Department official tried to shy away from the Florida Republican.

Below are key takeaways from Gaetz’s activities since the federal investigation began.

A frequent part of Trump’s political operation

Per the Daily Beast, the investigation began as early as January 2020, when Secret Service agents became aware that Gaetz was accompanying Greenberg to a Florida panhandle tax facility.

But, based on what we know at the moment, the earliest that then-Attorney General Bill Barr became aware of the investigation was after the June 2020 indictment of Joel Greenberg, a Seminole county tax collector who reportedly abused the powers of his job in a multitude of ways and is now under indictment for sex trafficking. Politico reported that Barr began to be briefed in summer 2020 on the probe, and, from that point, began to try to dodge Gaetz whenever he could.

It’s not clear whether the Secret Service or Barr ever informed Trump of the probe. But in any case, the former president and other senior White House officials do not appear to have taken steps to avoid the shady man child:

July 24, 2020: Trump signs an executive order on prescription drug pricing. Gaetz appears at the signing ceremony.

Aug. 24, 2020: Gaetz delivers an address at Republican National Convention. “You cannot cancel a culture that loves its heroes,” Gaetz proclaimed. “We know that to make America great again, we must first make something of ourselves.”

Oct. 26, 2020: Gaetz and Trump appear onstage at a rally in Ocala, Florida. Trump accidentally refers to Gaetz as “Rick Gates.”

Oct. 23, 2020: Gaetz appears at a rally with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in Pensacola. “We don’t build walls because we hate the people on the outside, we build walls because we love the people on the inside,” Gaetz intoned.

Dec. 21, 2020: Trump holds a meeting with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and members of Congress to support his bid to overturn the 2020 election. Gaetz is present.

January 28, 2021: Gaetz says that he spoke to Trump and got his help writing a speech to denounce Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) for voting yes on impeachment at an event in Wyoming.

The Florida man who started it all

The crux of the case seems to be Gaetz’s close friendship with Greenberg, the former Seminole County tax collector with perhaps the longest and wildest rap sheet TPM has ever seen. Their close relationship goes back years, and spans the period during which Greenberg is accused of trafficking a minor. The Gaetz probe, per the Times, is an outgrowth of the investigation into Greenberg.

June 2017: In an interview with WFLA News, Gaetz says Greenberg should run for Congress.

July 8, 2017: Greenberg tweets a picture with Gaetz and Roger Stone.

Late 2017/early 2018: Greenberg brings Gaetz to the Seminole County tax collector’s office and shows him around, according to multiple reports.

January 2019: Facebook video shows Gaetz and Greenberg with others celebrating DeSantis’ directive to end the ban on smoking marijuana.

June 2019: Greenberg’s wife posts to Facebook a slew of pictures of Greenberg and Gaetz together in D.C., including some at the White House with Donald and Melania Trump, and at the Capitol.

June 22, 2019: Greenberg tweets a picture with Gaetz in front of the White House.

July 4, 2019: State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) gets voicemail from Greenberg who handed the phone over to Gaetz who told her she was the future of the Democratic Party. Most of Trump’s allies were attending Trump’s “Salute to America” in D.C., but these two were hanging out in Florida.

June 9, 2020: Gaetz is the first to contribute to Greenberg’s reelection campaign, with $1,000.

June 23, 2020: Greenberg, who was allegedly involved in an array of criminal behavior, is arrested.

August 19, 2020: Greenberg is indicted for alleged sex trafficking of a child. The indictment alleged that Greenberg engaged in this behavior between May and November of 2017.

Gaetz’s oftentimes confusing, rapidly changing personal life

Meanwhile, the hallmark of Gaetz’s personal life has been his theatrical yanking back of the curtain to publicly reveal the people who he says are most important to him — people that nobody had ever heard of before.

That goes for the individual he describes as his son, Nestor Galban, who Gaetz revealed the existence of as a point of debate over children of color during a House committee argument, and his fiancée, Ginger Luckey.

August 30, 2018: Palmer Luckey, brother of Gaetz’s future fiancée and tech millionaire, donates $2,700 to Gaetz’s reelection campaign.

Early March-ish 2020: Luckey has declined to say when she and Gaetz met, but tells the Daily Mail that the day after they did, Gaetz took her to Kimberly Guilfoyle’s birthday party. Guilfoyle’s birthday is March 9. And on March 8, Trump threw a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, which Luckey said her mom “dragged her” to.

June 17, 2020: Gaetz and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) get into a fight at a House Judiciary Committee hearing over the wellbeing of Black children, specifically in regards to policing. “Are you suggesting that you’re certain that none of us have non-white children?” Gaetz asked, after Richmond made comments about being the father of Black children.

June 18, 2020: Gaetz announces the existence of a 19-year-old who he describes as his “son,” Nestor, on Twitter. People publishes a story in which Gaetz reveals that Nestor Galban is the son of his ex-girlfriend. Galban lived with Gaetz off and on, the congressman said, starting when Galban was 12, after he immigrated from Cuba. Gaetz says that he never formally adopted Galban, and that Galban’s biological dad is alive. Pictures started resurfacing of social media posts in which Gaetz referred to Galban as his “helper” in 2017 and a “local student” in 2016.

September 30, 2020: Gaetz says Galban has become a U.S. citizen.

December 10, 2020: Gaetz posts a picture with Luckey under a painting of Ronald Reagan at the White House. The two are not publicly known to be dating at this time.

December 30, 2020: Fox News’ Judge Jeannine Pirro breaks the news that Gaetz has proposed to Luckey in a tweet with a picture of the two. Gaetz retweets the photo, thanking Pirro for “sharing the moment” with them. Gina Loudon, a rightwing radio personality, tweets out a video of the proposal from “the most beautiful place in the world,” Mar-a-Lago.

December 31, 2020: Daily Mail publishes a story in which Luckey says that she saw the proposal coming, has been Gaetz’s “travel buddy” since her company went remote in March and that they’ll get married sometime between now and 2024.

March 22, 2021: Gaetz prompts controversy when he says he let Galban go on spring break in Panama City, which at the time was experiencing a severe COVID-19 outbreak.

He’s a mess. But you can sure see why Trump likes him so much. Or, I should say, liked. He pointedly hasn’t said a word about his most loyal henchman since he got into trouble. But then, everyone knows that loyalty only goes one way with Trump.

Jordan Weissman at Slate observes:

Joe Biden may have lucked into the perfect moment to become president of the United States.

It’s not that he’s been dealt an easy hand, exactly. The coronavirus hasn’t disappeared. Vast numbers of Americans remain unemployed. The conservative movement is busily waging a state-by-state war on voting as it embraces an ever-more-explicitly anti-democratic philosophy. There are plenty of epochal challenges that demand a deft response.

But by now, it’s pretty clear that Biden is going benefit mightily from tailwinds that were blowing well before he stepped into office, which could in turn help him achieve the sort of historic presidency he is clearly aiming for.

Take Friday’s big news about the economy: After a winter hibernation, the job market roared to life again in March, as employers hired 916,000 workers, the most since last August. Depending which outlet you read, the numbers crushed, blew past, or just plain old beat analysts’ expectations. The country is still missing some 8.4 million jobs compared to before the crisis, but the recovery seems to be back under way, possibly for good. As Bank of America’s chief economist put it, “The tide is turning.”

Let’s hope. There is much work to be done and still significant political undertow.

Biden’s rescue package may not have turned around the economy all by itself, but his administration’s aggressive stance on vaccine distribution and production increases seems to be wrestling the coronavirus to the ground. That in itself is a figurative shot in the arm to a sick economy.

Just as Trump spent years taking credit for the economic recovery begun under Barack Obama, Biden will receive credit for whatever successful moves Donald Trump’s team of misfits made. Whatever.

“If it weren’t for the sense of urgency created by COVID, and the way it has changed America’s perception of government spending, ” Weissman writes, “it seems unlikely Democratic moderates in Congress would be entertaining anything” as ambitious as Biden’s $2 trillion economic modernization plan. That and polling that shows Americans overwhelmingly behind Biden’s plans.

The fact that the White House treats decarbonizing the economy as equivalent to modernizing national infrastructure make Biden’s vision not just politically but environmentally timely. If he can enact it, decades of waiting his turn to be president could pay off not just for his legacy but for us all.

For Ronald Reagan it was the ball turret gunner and the welfare queen, stories he told repeatedly. Reagan claimed the former tale of WWII heroism was true. It came from a movie. The latter tale he used to stereotype Black people. Linda Taylor was real and of mixed race. And a lifelong con artist. Decades later, the country would hire one as president.

Post-Reagan and before Facebook, chain emails would spread across conservative networks through multiple forwards. Eager All-American propagandists trafficked in lies, distortions, and smears easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and hit Send.

A couple of tweets this morning remind us how central phony stories and imaginary threats have become to sustaining right wingers’ self-image as scions of virtue manning the barricades against threats to everything America holds holy.

Roy Edroso points out a tweet by podcaster Michael Hobbes. Fake stories on the right are enough of a thing to deserve the term trope.

For Donald Trump, stories involving crying men and someone adressing him as “sir” were sure to be made up. Daniel Dale spent four years keeping track of them.

Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election — “straight up-is-down reversal of verifiable reality” — proved deadly this year. But “the nation’s truth problem goes far beyond a Trump problem,” Dale says in a CNN video. “It is a long-term problem for the United States that millions of citizens have fallen deep down a conspiracy rabbit hole.”

What began as Reagan’s misremembered anecdotes now fuels talk of civil war and breakup of the republic.

The habits of self-deceit formed over decades now supply the justifying narrative behind the right initiating violence against domestic “communist” foes just as the George W. Bush administration used lies about Iraq to justify its preemptive war.

Manufacture a violent “commie” strawman and you can justify terminating his command with extreme prejudice. In the name of freedom, naturally.

A dog and his unicorn:

Dogs may be man’s best friend, but apparently, a unicorn — a stuffed purple one at that — is a dog’s best friend.

Animal control officers were called to a North Carolina Dollar General store after a stray dog kept coming into the store and beelining for the toy aisle.

“He went straight for the unicorn, the same one every time,” says Joe Newburn, a supervisor at Duplin County Animal Services.

“It was so strange, one of the strangest calls I’ve ever dealt with,” Newburn adds.

Samantha Lane, the officer who responded to the Dollar General store’s call, was so taken with the dog’s devotion to the unicorn that she bought the $10 toy for the dog. According to Newburn, the canine was happy to head off with Lane once he had his beloved stuffed animal.

Lane brought the dog to a Duplin County Animal Services shelter, where workers named him Sisu after the dragon cartoon character in Disney’s new film, Raya and the Last Dragon.

“The only thing we can think is that he came from a home where he had a similar stuffed animal or kids in the home did,” Newburn adds.

Workers at the Kenansville store (about 80 miles from Raleigh) told animal control officers that they caught the Lab mix darting into Dollar General every time a customer exited. Each time the stray dog made it in, he went to grab the same plush purple unicorn toy.

“Finally, they had to lock the door and called us,” Newburn tells PEOPLE about how animal control became involved in this playful pooch’s story.

Newburn says the shelter has received numerous calls from people interested in giving Sisu — and his beloved unicorn — a forever home. And it looks like it’s time for the pair to pack their bags because, according to a Friday Facebook post from Duplin County Animal Services, Sisu and his stuffed animal have an adopter and will be moving out of the shelter soon.

Dollar General spokesperson Crystal Luce tells PEOPLE that Dollar General plans to send a “few extra purple unicorns for the adoptive family,” a thank you gift to animal control officer Lane, and a pet food donation to Duplin County Animal Services.

“We are glad to see Sisu is happy with his new toy!” Luce added.

Shortly after Sisu arrived, the shelter posted a picture of the pup and his unicorn on their Facebook page with a caption that read, “This is what happens when you break into the Dollar General consistently to steal the purple unicorn that you laid claim to but then get animal control called to lock you up for your B & E and larceny but the officer purchases your item for you and brings it in with you.”

Ivanka Trump got off very easy during the four years of her father’s nightmare reign. For whatever reason, people seemed to feel that despite the fact that she was inappropriately ensconced in the White House doing God -knows-what she was off-limits. I didn’t agree. I wrote quite a bit about here over the years, here and on Salon. She’s a grifter and a fraudster, just like her father. The whole family is.

They are all currently under investigation by two different prosecutors in the state of New York and I suspect the number of civil lawsuits coming their way numbers is at least in double digits. We’ll see how that goes. But in the meantime, it appears that government auditors have found out that her pet project was poorly managed and her public statements were lies. Surprise.

Erin Gloria Ryan at the Daily Beast gives us a delightful rundown of the latest in Ivanka’s long line of scandalous malfeasance and fraud:

For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, I wasn’t sure what Ivanka Trump, “senior adviser to the president,” actually did all day long.

She apparently attended meetings; to what end, we’ll never know beyond what suspicious “sources familiar with Ms. Trump’s thinking” told The New York Times. We know she was conveniently on vacation during national crises, that she embarrassed herself in front of world leaders. We know that she spoke in a whispery Stepford voice in interviews with Fox News and a deeper, Glenne Headly’s last line in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels voice at campaign rallies. We know that she was photographed often, and for those photographs she frequently wore sleeves so heinous that they may have violated the Geneva Conventions.

I admit that it’s not very feminist of me to critique the work of a woman by resorting to superficial observations. But it’s hard to engage substantively with a person whose work, time and time again, has proven to be nothing more than superficial. There is no substantive engagement to be had with window-dressing.

I also must admit today that I was wrong about Ivanka Trump. All this time, I’d been thinking of her as a deeply mediocre child of legacy wealth, a veritable American princess of unearned stature, who emerged from a four-year stint in the Trump White House with one sort of cool piece of legislation to show for it. In reality, she has emerged from her four-year stint in the Trump White House with nothing to show for it. I regret the error and have learned my lesson.

This week, a new Government Accountability Office report on the First Daughter’s signature legislative accomplishment was, to use government jargon, a bit of a mess.

The Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018 had noble intentions. Under the WEEE, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was charged with helping administer a $265 million grant to support micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises globally. Half of the grants were supposed to go to businesses owned and controlled by women, and the other half to support the “very poor,” with some overlap expected between the two categories.

This act dovetailed with Ivanka’s brainchild “W-GDP,” which, according to Politico, was sold as a way to “codify gender analysis and deliver targeted finance across the women’s programs of 10 U.S. Government agencies.” In other words, make sure that some of our international aid money was helping female business owners.

Ivanka loved W-GDP. Or, at least, she loved giving herself credit for all its accomplishments. She tweeted about it 50 times and gave countless speeches touting its effectiveness. She celebrated the six-month and 12-month anniversaries of W-GDP with speeches in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. In November 2020 she called herself W-GDP’s “founder” and said that it was her advocacy that got the WEEE signed into law.

She claimed multiple times that W-GDP had reached “12 million women.” On July 30, 2018, Ivanka even implied that the $265 million program might hold the key to world peace, tweeting, “When women are empowered to reach their full economic potential, countries thrive and stability and peace prevail!”

W-GDP and its accompanying grant programs were the entire basis of Ivanka’s tenuous claim that she was somehow a champion of women. She may have been working for a man credibly accused of sexual assault and misconduct by dozens of women and done nothing to support the women who accused her coworkers of gender-based violence. She may have remained silent when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos gutted protections for sexual assault survivors on college campuses.

She may have done nothing to promote access to comprehensive reproductive health care for women domestically or abroad (because, by the end of her father’s term, she was “proudly pro-life”). She may never have spoken out in favor of the regulation of pollutants that can harm child-bearing women more than any other demographic, or against the egregious Black maternal mortality rate in the United States, or against reproductive coercion of undocumented women by Trump officials. But at least she had the grant program, and its commensurate bragging rights. Free-market feminism.

But the GAO report auditing the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018, the legislative heft behind Ivanka’s hashtagging, found that the program was so poorly run that it’s not clear how many women it helped, who actually received money, and what the definition is of a business owned or controlled by women.

The embarrassing report made six harsh recommendations to USAID, among them “identify the total funding,” define what women-owned businesses are, and make sure that the data reported on the program is reliable in the future. In some cases, according to the report, money was distributed to programs that never reported on how the funds were used. In other cases, the program sent surveys about fund use to the wrong people, some of whom didn’t even work for the programs in question. In other cases, no follow-up surveys were sent to anybody at all.

For all the self-congratulatory PR she was doing on her own behalf, Ivanka may as well have been shoving $5 bills into Coke bottles throwing them into the ocean, shouting “help a woman!” after them as they crashed into the surf, before rushing off to a $1,000-a-plate “female empowerment” gala to give a speech about how much empowering she just did.

As the WEEE made its way through the House and Senate, media outlets printed what essentially amounted to unedited press releases about Ivanka Trump’s success as a global women’s empowerment pioneer. Fortune magazine implied that somehow Ivanka had saved the USAID program from planned cuts, misleadingly making it sound like Ivanka had convinced her father to increase global aid in the name of helping women, when in reality the program was designed to utilize funds that had already been allocated for foreign aid; the law simply earmarked a certain amount of money for “women’s empowerment.”

The Associated Press ran a glowing preview of the program’s launch, which was originally supposed to include appearances by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as representatives from the World Bank and Bank of America. “First daughterIvanka Trump, a White House adviser who has made supporting women in business part of her portfolio, led the policy process over the past year and a half,” read the article. Before the WEEE was signed into law, conservative website The Daily Signal claimed that Ivanka’s success proved that the key to empowering women was “free market policies.” The program hadn’t even been launched yet.“The Trump family is all launch party and no launch.”

That’s a lot of hullabaloo for a package of grants that—again, even if the program had turned out to be functional—would have comprised around two-thirds of 1 percent of the total foreign aid budget.

It’s not Ivanka’s fault entirely that her signature piece of legislation appears to be shit. She didn’t write the legislation. She wasn’t a program administrator. And a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers from Lindsey Graham to Rep. Lois Frankel supported it. But it’s fair to hold a person accountable for the program’s failings, after that person milked publicity from the law like a greedy dairy farmer about to run afoul of PETA. Credit and blame are a package deal.

Ivanka’s “all of the credit and none of the work” approach to global women’s economic empowerment reminds me a bit of her father. Former president Donald was famous for hiring contractors to do work on his properties, and then, after the work was complete, stiffing them on the bill. He was famous for overpromising and underdelivering; the skyline of Atlantic City and the Republican health-care plan we were supposed to get in two weeks for about four years serves as a monument to that.

All Trumps seem to be fans of what the elder Trump characterized as “glitz” or “flash,” superficial touches designed to dazzle the audience enough that they don’t notice that there’s nothing below the surface. The Trump family is all launch party and no launch.

And all that makes Ivanka’s selling the WEEE like a pre-construction condo even more repellent. Did she even bother to look into how the program was supposed to work, or was she so hungry for publicity that she skipped over that part? All of the speeches around the world that Ivanka gave under the auspices of empowering women weren’t actually supposed to empower women-plural, they were supposed to enrich woman-singular: Ivanka. Ivanka Trump didn’t invent cloaking grift in feminist-lite language, but she sure put her own Trump flair on it. The WEEE sounds like the sound a rider makes on a roller coaster of bullshit.

Ivanka Trump has been hiding in Florida since leaving her fluffy white office in the White House in January. But if past is prologue, we can count on her reemerging onto the national or international stage at some point, trying once more to further the notion that she’s got the solutions to centuries of global female oppression. She doesn’t. She never has. She’s a salesman selling charity to well-intentioned suckers.

Selling to suckers was her specialty when she was selling shitty condos for the Trump Organization too. It’s what she does.