As a man who grew up in a city once run by a powerful political machine — that of Kansas City, Missouri's Pendergast operation, Harry Truman's semi-benevolent benefactor and that of the city's downtown — I retain a certain admiration and even respect for the older Tammany Hall types such as George Washington Plunkitt (seated). He too was somewhat of an idiosyncrasy in that genre in that he prided himself on "honest graft," or as he also framed it, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." Each of 'em legal.
Nearly all the city machines are gone now, be that a good thing or bad. But the mostly illicit graft of yore has become the commonplace grift of modernity — and virtually all of it bubbling up in the corruption of Trumpism. In this vilest of all American political movements, not a soul within it harbors so much as even one lonesome principle. Yet every one of them, from the most sinister at top to the grungiest at bottom, is wholly, devoutly dedicated to self-interest and self-enrichment only — in brief, grifting. Aside from the obvious one himself, two of Trumpism's grifters have performed the most brilliantly.
Brad Parscale was Trump's campaign manager, 2018 to 2020, and his first fleecing struck instantly. In brazen opposition to campaign law, he founded a "digital-services" firm by the name of Red State Data, which the America First super PAC then took on as its only client. (No doubt Brad was the best, though, right?) So there was a campaign manager working directly with the campaigning candidate's super PAC. And in classic Trumpian form, they all said to hell with the law. Parscale? He personally took in nearly $1 million from Trump's America First.
The next year, 2019, another pro-Trump super PAC shelled out thousands of dollars to a company owned by Parscale's wife. Then, after her husband got canned as campaign manager in 2020, staffers first realized that the campaign had paid him more than $800,000 just to promote his own social media pages. But that was a mere pittance, they soon learned. The crew next discovered they had paid two of Parscale's businesses the staggering sum of $39 million.
Which brings us to Trump's co-campaign manager this year, Chris LaCivita. The former Swift Boater is a true piece of grift-work. Two years earlier he somehow managed to pilfer $19 million by acting as a "strategic consultant" to two of Trump's super PACs. (If you're curious, that's more tha $50,000 a day.) LaCivita was also raking in $75,000 a month in retainers. He then signed on to the Trump campaign.
So single-mindedly obsessed with Trump's presidential success, among LaCivita's first acts was to arrange three contracts between the campaign and his home-based LLC that brought him $3 million — that being his take from Trump’s TV, digital and direct mail spending. LaCivita is now set to haul in another $5 million by Election Day. I'm not quite sure why he bothered with these peanuts, but if Trump wins, he also gets a $150,000 bonus. But, greed is greed, I suppose, whatever the amount to be grifted.
George Plunkitt's graft was indeed of the legal sort, yet most of yesteryear's graft of machine politics was ultimately intolerable less because the grafters were stuffing their pockets than they were depleting the pockets of citizens. Today, though, political grifting is personal; it pilfers from fellow grifters like Trump and robs only the country's voluntary imbeciles.
The whole political scheme of incestuous Trumpian grift rather reminds me of the mobster Bugsy Siegel's defense of his own profession's scheming corruption: "We only kill each other."