June 18^th

I will forego the enormous temptation to make puns on Donald Trump’s name. On second thought, I won’t either.

Yes, he has trumped himself. You may remember his entrance to the Trump Tower when he made the announcement of his candidacy. He took pains to comment on the great crowds saying, “That is some group of people…thousands” unfortunately for Trump the cameras panned his audience and there were certainly not thousands. Maybe there were hundreds. But what politician does not exaggerate?

Now we discover that not even all of those “hundreds” were there for love of “The Donald.” An outfit that supplies extras for movie crowd scenes called Extra Mile Casting supplied some of the enthusiasts. The casting call went out offering fifty dollars for about three hours of wearing a Trump t-shirt and doing a little “Yeah Trump” yelling. A couple of extras were recognized but they insisted later that they weren’t paid to perform.

Now Trump is denying he paid anyone, the performers are denying they were paid and the booking agency has no comment. Can anyone imagine that if Trump was willing to pay fifty dollars to each actor, that he might then have been willing to pay even more for them to keep their mouths shut about the gig? There might have also been a nice bonus for the casting company if they denied that they were involved at all; ah, the power of having a few millions in cash to throw around.

Now comes Forbes to call Trump out for inflating his net worth. Donald has put it at about eight billion and that is about twice as much as Forbes has estimated it to be. What’s a guy to do when one of his prime references questions his “truthiness?” I guess you just soldier on; after all this is politics and Trump realizes that like any business endeavor truth is not relevant to the bottom line.

What we have here is a slippery slope and Trump has slid right off the edge of it. Other politicians have bussed people in to their rallies. These folks are supporters of the causes but they might not have the necessary transportation to attend the rally. The wealthy backers provide that for them, usually free of charge. All they have to do is show up and get on the bus. Lunch might also be provided, as well as the trip home; all of it free. In Trumps case he bought fake supporters; that’s an altogether different ball game.