WP: Why won’t Trump supporters admit they’ve been conned?

General
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When I speak with President Trump’s supporters, I hear the same things over and over again. He wants to help Americans — he really does — but he has been stopped. He’s trying to drain the swamp, as he promised during the 2016 campaign, it’s that “they” — Democrats, Republicans, his own staff and, now, for an increasing number of conspiracy-minded Americans, the “deep state” — won’t let him do it. They block him, getting in the way at every turn.

This is transparent garbage, and not simply because I know of no workplace outside of television where the top dog is constantly stymied by underlings and dark plots. It’s because both Trump and his Republican enablers are quite competent and capable of action when it comes to serving their own needs, and those of the most monied Americans.

Trump, for all his protestations to the contrary, remains uninterested in the plight of the less-than-well-off. Sure, he says he wants a “big” deal on the stimulus and that it’s his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who “hasn’t come home with the bacon” and made it happen. Please. If Trump were serious, the person he would call out isn’t Mnuchin or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has refused to commit to putting a White House + House Democrats deal, should one be reached, up for a vote on the floor of the Senate.

What Trump and the White House remain engaged in is helping themselves, and their wealthy friends and supporters. The New York Times came up with the receipts this week. First, there was yet another installment in its series on Trump and his taxes, this one centered more on his activities in the White House — or, as the Times put it, “the swamp that Trump built.” It quickly became known among lobbyists and those seeking favor from the administration that joining Mar-a-Lago, (where the initiation fee doubled shortly after Trump was elected president, and is now $250,000) buying drinks at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., and hosting meetings and conventions at family-owned properties was a way to make a favorable impression.

Many people, including The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, have made these point again and again, so much so that Norm Eisen, co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told me in 2018, “The president is essentially holding out a tin cup and shaking it.” But the Times put the pieces together in a devastating way. Somehow the deep state so desperate to stop Trump couldn’t put an end to that epic money-making spree.

And then there is the fact that even as Trump and his advisers played down the threat of the coronavirus to the public this past winter, they made sure connected insiders got word that things were not looking good. According to the Times, administration officials in February told a gathering of board members from the conservative Hoover Institution that they could not predict the virus’s impact on the economy — a message that many in attendance rightly took as a warning. A hedge-fund consultant attending the gathering wrote up a dire summary of what was said, one that quickly made the rounds of connected Wall Street insiders.

This was hardly the only way word got out. Take the case of Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), now under investigation for his February stock sales. Even as he assured the public all was A-OK, he told private groups of donors a different story, warning them, for example, the virus might cause them to “alter your travel.”

Trump and Republicans have played a neat trick these past four years, claiming to act on behalf of the economically and politically disenfranchised, and then getting them to turn a blind eye to the fact that their own actions in office are designed to line the pockets of elite supporters. But as the coronavirus pandemic continues to claim victims and disrupt lives, the evidence of Trump’s perfidy is harder than ever to ignore. Little wonder some turn to outlandish conspiracies such as QAnon to justify their continued belief in Trump. As crazy as it is, it’s less embarrassing than admitting you are just another patsy in Trump’s lifelong con.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/16/why-wont-trump-supporters-admit-theyve-been-conned/

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Yep. 100%.

And there is a cast of thousands who knowingly help perpetuate the con. And before that, the GOP and right wing media laid the foundation for Trump using similar techniques.

When Trump came along and called GOP politicians "dummies", what he meant was they were not conning their supporters anywhere near the amount they could have been.

Trump is the natural consequence of being a modern Republican.

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Note to Wisconsin residents. When you deal with parties named Don the Con and Foxconn, you should probably expect to be conned.

In many ways, the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is the physical manifestation of the alternate reality that has defined the Trump administration. Trump promised to bring back manufacturing, found a billionaire eager to play along, and now for three years the people of Wisconsin have been told to expect an LCD factory that plainly is not there. Into the gap between appearance and reality fell people’s jobs, homes, and livelihoods.

The buildings Foxconn has erected are largely empty. The sphere has no clear purpose. The innovation centers are still vacant. The heart of the project, the million-square-foot “Fab,” is just a shell. In what an employee says was a final cost-cutting measure, only the portion that was to host the Trump visit was ever finished. Recent documents show the “Fab,” once intended for use as manufacturing, has been reclassified as a massive storage facility.

WEDC, as part of its audit of the company’s 2019 subsidy application, had Foxconn survey its employees about what they were working on. Not a single respondent mentioned LCDs because no one is working on LCDs, and they never were.

The project has fallen orders of magnitude short of its hiring and investment targets. WEDC found Foxconn had only 281 eligible employees at the end of 2019, 13 percent of what it had originally aimed for. (Many of the employees Foxconn tried to claim were paid too little or hired too late in the year to get a paycheck in 2019.) After this year’s layoffs, it is nowhere near meeting its 2020 target of 5,200 employees. Foxconn itself acknowledged, in its subsidy submission, that it has so far invested 2.8 percent of the $10 billion it promised. It has built less than 2 percent of the 20 million square feet of manufacturing space it originally planned.

The state is at an impasse. It can deny further subsidies, as it did last week, but taxpayer money has already been spent. The Village of Mount Pleasant took on hundreds of millions in debt that was supposed to be repaid by property taxes on Foxconn’s fantastic campus. It will now have to hope Foxconn honors its contractual obligation to make up the shortfall. (In a joint statement following the state’s subsidy rejection, Mount Pleasant and Racine officials said they were “disappointed in the State’s decision to not support the creation of the Gen 6 facility,” that they observe “significant construction activity” in the Village, and that Foxconn “continues to fulfill its financial obligations under the local contract.”)

“The state has upheld our part of the contract,” said DOA’s Joel Brennan. “Unfortunately, Foxconn hasn’t been able to do that on their side.” Brennan and WEDC officials continue to say they’re open to revising the contract to reflect whatever it is that Foxconn is now doing. Employees say that the company is now making servers, and Foxconn has announced it is making ventilators, though no employees or state officials could say whether any have been produced. Yet, Foxconn has so far refused to amend the contract. The company continues to insist, against all evidence, that an LCD factory is on its way.

This steadfast rejection of reality is where the Foxconn debacle stands apart from other development projects that fall short of their hype. The company’s desperate quest to maintain appearances caused it to fail repeatedly and in ways more destructive than mere ordinary failure would have been: local businesses were strung along, civil servants spent years figuring out what the company is doing, residents were removed from land the company didn’t need, and again and again recruits were lured in by the vision of a grand manufacturing renaissance in Wisconsin.

That vision got Gou regular access to the White House during a trade war and gave Trump a groundbreaking and almost a ribbon-cutting, too. But maintaining the mirage required a culture of secrecy. Employees were warned not to talk to the press (including, specifically, me). Many were afraid to speak — afraid of getting fired, or of retribution even after they’d left. Publicly, the company issued announcement after announcement — innovation centers, career fairs, smart cities, AI 8K+5G, the AI Institute — each one erasing the memory of the last missed deadline. (One employee quipped that one of the few things Foxconn succeeded in making in Wisconsin was press releases.) [b]The illusion was defended by GOP officials at all levels of government, from Mount Pleasant to the State Assembly to the White House, who accused anyone pointing out that the project was off track of trying to scuttle it for partisan ends, as if the existence of the factory were open to debate and positive thinking might make it real.

But in actual reality, the project has succeeded in manufacturing mostly this: an endless supply of wonderful things for the President to promise his supporters. This past weekend, in an interview with a local Wisconsin TV station, Trump insisted Foxconn had built “one of the most incredible plants I’ve ever seen” in Mount Pleasant and would keep its promises and more if he was reelected. “They will do what I tell them to do,” he said. “If we win the election, Foxconn is going to come into our country with money like no other company has come into our country.”

No one wanted to believe promises like this more than the people who went to work for Foxconn in Wisconsin. They each came to regret different things: the wasted time, the jobs they’d left, the integrity lost making deals and offering jobs only to have the company change course. But one common theme was frustration that it hadn’t turned out to be real and that long after they’d learned the truth, they saw the facade still standing. “There are a lot of good people who fell for this,” said one employee, shortly before departing a job at Foxconn. “Who wanted to see it succeed.”

“We got screwed,” another former employee said. “The state got screwed.”[/b]

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I afraid they have been brain-washed so can't make rational decisions just like Mason or Jim Jones cult followers! History has shown it doesn't end well for the cult leaders or their followers! All end up in jail or early deaths! Just like Trump's wanna-be Taliban, far-right already in jail for plotting to kidnap Gov. Whittmore. Soon their cult leader Trump will join them too once the prosecutors are able to access his tax records despite him filing endless appeals and taking it to Supreme Court!

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Anyone who understands how business is done in China knows that the Chinese government / communist party works hand in glove with it's companies, of which Foxconn is one of the biggest.

So Foxconn going along with Trump was done with the blessing and involvement of the Chinese government.

The Chinese love Trump as President because it weakens the US more than they could have ever hoped. Anyone who listens to Trump insulting China and think that equates to him outmaneuvering the Chinese is a fool.

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I think the reason Foxconn agreed to doing the fake deal in Wisconsin is just like why entities starting frequenting Don the Con's properties. They were hoping for political favors down the road. It also helped that Wisconsin was willing to give Foxconn anything they wanted. Anyway, Don the Con did not even care that the public proposal was never feasible. Hell, they never even had a real business plan that was intended to be implemented and financed by Foxconn. All this time, it has been mostly hiring people at the end of the year to do nothing just so Foxconn could meet the qualifications for a tax credit.

No matter to Don the Con about Wisconsin's horrible investment as the state believed the fake promise made by Foxcomm of them building a state of the art LCD manufacturing plant and employing 13,000. Actually, all Don the Con cared about was getting his photo op during the groundbreaking and bragging about it on Twitter. Yet, there are still people who support him.

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Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA Redone