A friend of mine gave me copies of a letter and a $500 check President Trump sent to him. The money, the president said, was a one-time rebate because the administration of President Joe Biden—Trump claimed—had grossly overcharged people who rely on healthcare.gov.
The accompanying letter was vintage Trump—borderline illiterate prose, capital letters scattered willy nilly across the page like trash falling out on the ground from a hole in a garbage bag and flush with grandiose claims that bear no resemblance to reality.
At the heart of its shamelessness is this paragraph:
“With this Historic Action, my Administration is taking the surplus funds that accumulated from the Obamacare ‘Premium Tax’ and issuing a one-time $500 REFUND to Americans who use the HealthCare.gov platform to purchase their health insurance, but who do not receive Taxpayer Subsidies to help pay for their Coverage. You have paid into this flawed System, and now you are finally getting something back.”
At least a couple of things need to be pointed out here.
The first is that one reason folks such as my friend weren’t getting taxpayer subsidies—don’t the words look less like they were being screamed at you when they’re lower case?—is that Trump himself gutted the taxpayer subsidies early in his first term.
That decision all by itself increased healthcare costs a great deal for millions of Americans.
But—and this is point number two—he compounded that injury by stripping 8 million Americans of their healthcare when he made it back to the White House two years ago. In doing so, he forced many, many good, hardworking, taxpaying citizens of this country to seek out health insurance from providers who have become increasingly predatory or do without coverage and hope neither they nor anyone they love gets really sick or injured.
Many of those Americans voted for Trump—and he betrayed them.
If they want to know who to blame for their out-of-control health insurance costs, they need to look no further than the mad typist in the Oval Office who loves to write with the CAPS LOCK key on.
But that’s not what makes this so exceptionally shameless.
That Donald Trump lacks both empathy and integrity isn’t exactly a news flash. He is, after all, the guy who buried the mother of his older children on a golf course he owned just so he could claim a tax deduction.
No, what elevates this to new levels of shamelessness is that, coming in the last weeks before an election he’s terrified he’s going to lose, the letter and the check strongly suggest that the president of the United States is trying to bribe people to vote for him.
Actually, that’s not true.
The letter doesn’t suggest that Trump is trying to bribe voters.
It SCREAMS—see, Mr. President, others know how to use the CAPS LOCK, too—that he is trying to bribe them.
Normally, evidence that an elected official was trying to pay people to vote for him would be a big news story. Paying people to vote is supposed to be a relic of the bad old days of machine politics when corruption ruled the day and a politician who was considered upright was one who stayed bought once he had been bought.
Even then, candidates who paid people for their votes violated the law, which, sadly, often was honored in absentia.
But this too is not evidence of exceptional shamelessness.
That Donald Trump is about as ethical and upstanding as Bugsy Siegel also isn’t exactly a revelation. He’d rob an orphan’s piggy bank if it were left in his care.
What makes this truly, truly shameless isn’t that he’s trying to bribe people days before an election.
What makes it historically shameless is that he’s trying to bribe voters with THEIR OWN MONEY.
(Really, Mr. President, the CAPS LOCK thing really isn’t that hard to master.)
If Donald Trump had wanted to do something truly remarkable during the waning days of this campaign season, he would have figured out ways to restore health coverage for those 8 million Americans and bring down healthcare costs for everyone.
To do that, though, this president would have had to do something he has avoided his entire life.
Honest work.
