The problem is that Trump's voters seems not to care if they are cheated by Trump. This is abnormal and needs to be faced.This is cult like behavior.

There is a very unhealthy propensity of Trump voter indifference to if they are cheated by Trump in material assets. This is the psychology of a cult and not of a political leader whom has a normal interaction with his followers. The following article demonstrates some of the problem. Even worse are the idiotic trade war tariffs which only 'tax' a high proportion of Trump's base, while not costing China, the EU or whatever "devil" Trump conjectures up. The basic psychology is abusive and highly abnormal.

Here is exhibit A

https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/02/19/trump-has-now-shifted-19-million-from-campaign-donors-to-his-business/amp/

Quote

Trump Has Now Shifted $1.9 Million From Campaign Donors To His Business

Dan AlexanderForbes Staff

Money & Politics

Supporters go wild as President Trump arrives for

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DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Billionaire Donald Trump still has not donated a cent of his own to his 2020 campaign, opting to fund the effort with money from supporters around the country. At the same time, Trump’s private companies are continuing to charge the campaign for expenses like rent and consulting, according to the latest federal filings. That means that since January 20, 2017, the day Trump officially declared his intent to run for reelection, his campaign has put $1.9 million of donor money into the president’s private business.

“This is a man, who when he first said he was going to run for office, was saying that he was going to do this all out of his own pocket,” said Karl Sandstrom, a Democrat who served as a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1998 to 2002. “And now he’s taking money from others and putting it in his pocket.”

Forbes first reported on this arrangement more than a year ago, when Trump had already shifted $1.1 million from his campaign to his business. The amount of money has continued to swell since then.

None of Trump’s businesses have accepted more cash from the campaign than Trump Tower Commercial LLC, an entity that holds office and retail space inside the president’s most famous New York City building. So far, the reelection effort has paid $1.3 million to Trump Tower Commercial, in which the president maintains a 100% interest. The Republican National Committee, working in coordination with the campaign, shelled out an additional $225,000 from September 2017 to January 2018. Of the $1.5 million that Trump Tower Commercial has received from the Trump campaign and the RNC, $113,000 came in the last three months of 2019, the most recent period on record.

An entity named the Trump Corp., which is also owned entirely by the president, has taken in $259,000 of campaign funds since January 2017. The president’s latest financial disclosure report, filed in May 2019, describes the Trump Corp. as a “management company.” FEC filings show it is charging the campaign for legal and IT consulting. It is not clear what specific services the Trump Corp. has provided. Nor is it clear why the president’s reelection campaign is apparently relying on a management company for help with legal and technology issues. The Trump Corp. collected $12,000 in the final quarter of 2019.

The next-biggest beneficiary is the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The president’s second home on Pennsylvania Avenue has taken in $126,000 of Trump campaign money, according to an analysis of FEC filings. Those payments, however, seem to be slowing down. From October to December of 2019, the campaign paid no money directly to the D.C. hotel.

The campaign did, however, hand about $60,000 to an entity called the Trump Hotel Collection in the final three months of 2019. Those funds covered the cost of facility rentals, according to FEC filings. It is not clear which facilities the campaign rented. Trump’s financial disclosure report shows that the Trump Hotel Collection is the operating name for an entity called Trump International Hotels Management LLC, which does business in New York and Hawaii. Through a series of companies, the president owns 100% of Trump International Hotels Management LLC, according to an analysis of his disclosure report.

More campaign contributions headed to Trump Plaza LLC, which leases a parking garage, retail space and two brownstones near Third Avenue and East 61st Street in Manhattan. So far, Trump Plaza LLC, which the president owns outright, has collected $84,000 from the campaign, according to FEC filings. The documents list those expenses as “rent,” though they do not specify exactly what the Trump campaign is renting. The reelection effort does not seem to be using Trump Plaza LLC’s retail or parking spaces. In November 2018, a Forbes reporter stood outside of the brownstones for 14 hours to ask residents whether they had seen any sign of the campaign inside those buildings. None of them said they had. A 2016 Trump staffer, however, said campaign officials sometimes crashed at a Trump Plaza apartment.

There’s also money flowing into a business called Trump Restaurants LLC. That entity, in which the president holds a 100% interest, appears to be charging the campaign to rent a small souvenir stand in the basement of Trump Tower. Every month, the campaign pays Trump Restaurants LLC $3,000, which suggests annual payments of roughly $600 per square foot. Gucci, which rents a bigger, better location inside Trump Tower, is paying $460 per square foot annually, according to an analysis of a debt prospectus obtained by Forbes. One New York City real estate expert previously said the campaign’s rates seemed high, but two others pointed out that small spaces often charge higher rents on a price-per-square-foot basis.

As long as the Trump campaign is paying fair-market rates, all of these transactions appear to be legal. When asked about the payments, a Trump campaign official ignored a detailed set of questions and issued a general statement. “The campaign pays fair-market value under negotiated rental agreements and other service agreements in compliance with the law,” the statement said. “The campaign works closely with campaign counsel to ensure strict compliance in this regard.”

The payments did not seem to trouble Bradley Smith, a Republican who served as an FEC commissioner from 2000 to 2005. “There’s no problem, so to speak, doing business with yourself, as long as you’re not giving yourself some kind of super-favorable deal that the public can’t get,” he said.

Even if a campaign were breaking rules by paying exorbitant rates, there’s not a lot anyone could do about it right now. The FEC, which examines such things, cannot take any official commission action unless at least four of its six commissioners vote to do so. Since Trump took office, three of the FEC’s commissioners have left their posts. Their seats—which demand presidential appointments and Senate confirmations—have yet to be filled.

“They can’t even meet without four members, because four is a quorum,” said Ann Ravel, a Democrat who left her post as a commissioner in March 2017. “They cannot ask the general counsel’s office to investigate anything. So if a complaint comes in, it will just sit there.”

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Let us review what was put up above

See this ?

The payments did not seem to trouble Bradley Smith, a Republican who served as an FEC commissioner from 2000 to 2005. “There’s no problem, so to speak, doing business with yourself, as long as you’re not giving yourself some kind of super-favorable deal that the public can’t get,” he said.

Recall how Trump was charging the Secret Service ? This alone falsifies what was said by Bradley Smith.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/trump-organization-profit-taxpayers-lying-secret-service-mar-a-lago-bedminster.html

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Report: Trump Organization Is Bilking Taxpayers and Lying About It

By Jonathan Chait

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump has been claiming that his Ukraine extortion scheme was motivated by an earnest concern about corruption. The president and his allies say they are so outraged that Hunter Biden made money off his relationship to a sitting vice-president that they held up military aid to Ukraine, and are opening an investigation into the matter now, half a decade later. “I probably have a legal obligation, Mr. Attorney, to report corruption,” Trump told the country yesterday.

Meanwhile Trump is engaged in massive personal, ongoing corruption. The Washington Post has obtained Secret Service receipts from Trump’s properties. It reveals a massive profiteering scandal.

There are several important takeaways from the Post’s report. First, it shows that the Trump Organization has flat-out lied about the benefits it gets from the government business Trump throws its way. Last year, President Trump briefly sought to host a G-7 summit at one of his properties. Eric Trump, an independent entrepreneur who operates at arm’s length from his father’s administration, explained that the move would actually save taxpayers a lot of money. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” he told Yahoo Finance. “If he stays at one of his places, the government actually … saves a fortune because, if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know, we charge them like 50 bucks.”

This promise turns out not to be exactly, or even approximately, true. In fact, the Post finds that the Secret Service routinely paid $396 a night for rooms, and on many other occasions, paid $650 a night. So unless Eric Trump is such a terrible businessman he underestimates the cost at one of the properties he is running by thirteenfold, he (on behalf of his father’s business) is intentionally deceiving the public.

Second, the Trump Organization appears to be overcharging the Secret Service for the use of its cottage properties. At Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, the Secret Service paid $17,000 a month for a three-bedroom cottage. “Since fall 2017, there have been 100 rental listings for homes with three or more bedrooms in Bedminster, according to the website Zillow.com,” the Post finds. “None were anywhere near Trump’s rate; the average rental rate was $3,400, and the highest rent listed on Zillow was $8,500.”

So the Secret Service paid twice as much as the most expensive available listing in order to sleep on Trump’s golf property.

Third, the federal government is withholding documentation about just how much it is spending on Trump properties. The Post pieced together its story from fragmentary receipts it was able to obtain. But the Secret Service has failed to fully report its spending there. While it’s required to report such expenses to Congress twice a year, it’s only filed two of the six required reports. What’s more, the reports it did file omitted key details. And other mandated avenues for disclosure, like usaspending.gov, omit any detail about payments to Trump clubs.

And finally, as one might infer from the lack of disclosure, there may be a lot worse stuff out there. The Post notes NBC News asked the Department of Homeland Security for records of Trump’s spending at his Washington, D.C., Hotel. DHS said it spent $159,000 there in Trump’s first year. But the record did not include the rate the Secret Service paid on those stays, or explain why it is spending money to stay there at all, when Trump’s Washington residence — you know, the largeish white house on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from Trump’s hotel — is already financed by taxpayers?

It stands to reason that, if these questions had innocent answers, Trump would be disclosing more information. Trump claims he has a “legal obligation” to report corruption by people who happen to be running against him for president, but he is refusing even to comply with the current legal obligations to disclose his own profiteering at public expense.

End of quote

Acceptance of such abuse is typical of cults and arguably the Trump base is turning into the largest non religious cult base in US history, dwarfing its runner up, namely the Mormon Church as initially founded by Joseph Smith in the 19th century. The Mormon Church has largely cleaned up its act, but there is no evidence that the Trump base cares if they are being bilked and swindled by the orange hair criminal whom is residing in POTUS duties. I.e. Utah as far as its admittance to the Union as a state structurally reformed a lot of abuses in the Mormon Church, but it is arguable that in the case of the largest cult in US history, that of the MAGA crowd, that such reform is impossible because its members WELCOME being swindled by Donald Trump

I.e. Money illegally contributed from campaign coffers to Trump's businesses, the swindling of the US Secret service, and the beat goes on.

When will the public get it that what Trump is doing is arguably one of the most dangerous mass cults in American history and that we have an emergency situation due to this giant cult which is unable to coherently appreciate the massive swindles it endures daily due to Donald Trump?

Andrew Beckwith, PhD