Pluralistic: America is a scam (28 May 2025)


Today's links


Uncle Sam in a leg-hold trap. The trap is staked to a log, against which rests a sign bearing the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN wordmark. In the background is a halftoned image of a waving US flag amidst the clouds.

America is a scam (permalink)

Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist… but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html

The election of Donald Trump feeds many needs in the right wing coalition: the libidinal pleasure of seeing trans people, migrants, and anyone who isn't white getting terrorized by masked thugs and swivel-eyed loons; massive tax cuts for the oligarch class, especially those who (like Trump) inherit their wealth; the gutting of public education and the destruction of the barrier between church and state.

But the most important, best-served constituency in the Trump coalition is scammers. This has been his promise since his first campaign, when he boasted on national television that he cheated on his taxes because "that makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Trump – who has run multiple pyramid schemes – is gutting enforcement against Ponzi scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

Trump – who has repeatedly lied to investors and customers about his business plans – has elevated the 21st century's most notorious defrauder of investors and customers and put him in charge of restructuring the US government:

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-elon-musks-broken-promises/

Under the previous administration, agencies like the FTC and (eventually) the DOT revived their powers to block "unfair and deceptive" commercial practices, from fast food restaurants forcing cashiers to sign noncompete "agreements" to Southwest Airlines selling tickets for planes that didn't exist and cancelling the least-booked flights every morning, stranding passengers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

But this administration has reversed course, demonstrating time and again that there is no rugpull too petty or cruel to pass up. Take this one: RFK Jr blames processed food for health problems on indigenous reservations, so the USDA is…killing the food banks that provide local, fresh produce to indigenous reservations:

https://www.propublica.org/article/tribal-food-grant-cuts-trump-rfk-jr

Trump is the ripoff candidate, the King of the Scam. Take Trumpcoin: the President of the United States of America issued his own shitcoin through which people could openly offer him bribes. Then he announced that he would reward the top 220 bribes with a private dinner where he could be directly lobbied for presidential favors. The top bribes were proffered by a rogues' gallery of domestic and foreign scammers and crooks, including billionaire felons seeking pardons for stealing from millions of normal investors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

But the actual attendees didn't really bribe Trump. They scammed him by taking short positions on their Trumpcoin holdings:

https://www.theverge.com/cryptocurrency/674327/trump-coin-short-sell-hedge-contest-dinner-winner

And the instant the guestlist was announced, they liquidated their holdings, tanking Trumpcoin's price:

https://protos.com/trump-token-15-since-dinner-as-40-of-guests-dump-by-dessert/

But Trump scammed them, by turning the "private dinner with the president" into a whistle-stop in which he breezed into the hall, spoke for 15 minutes, and then left by helicopter without meeting with any of his "guests":

https://link.nymag.com/view/640f640416f22cc291043cebntiap.15g1/0da0f946

This is the kind of scammer inception that threatens to create a black hole of superdense Scammium-138 that sucks the whole country into the scam singularity. But scammers don't care – the Art of the Scam is to race across the river on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. These people aren't long-termists, they've always got one foot out the door.

The Trump II presidency is the most scam-friendly presidency in history, and everyone knows it. The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed – like Verizon, which wants to bring back the long-banned practice of locking your phone so that it only works on their network and refusing to unlock it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/verizon-tries-to-get-out-of-merger-condition-requiring-it-to-unlock-phones/

Verizon had to promise to unlock its customers' phones as a condition of being given exclusive control over billions' worth of the public spectrum, and in exchange for the right to buy its competitor Tracphone, in a nakedly anticompetitive merger. They stand every chance of getting out of these obligations, because Trump's scammer FCC chair Brendan Carr has launched an initiative called "Delete, Delete, Delete" in which he is inviting scammers to nominate regulations that protect the public so he can get rid of them:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/fcc-democrat-to-resign-cementing-republican-majority-for-chairman-carr/

Trump handed control over the Department of Education to the scammer Linda McMahon, wife of the scammer Vince McMahon, who bought up every wrestling league so that his performers had nowhere else to go, then falsely reclassified them as independent contractors, taking away their health insurance and leaving them to beg for Gofundme pennies so they could die with dignity in their mid-fifties from their work-related injuries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

Linda McMahon, a scammer, has thrown 5.3 million student borrowers into collections, calling them "irresponsible." Another 5.59 million will enter default in the next six months. She's opened the door for these ex-students to have money taken out of their Social Security and other government payments, leaving them only $750/month to live on (this figure hasn't been inflation-adjusted since 1996). Each time they get dinged, another $20 in fees (for having their money taken away) will be added to their debts.

As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, McMahon is also unleashing America's scammiest loan servicers on student borrowers:

https://prospect.org/education/2025-05-27-borrowers-besieged-student-debt/

Take Maximus (owners of the Default Resolution Group), which has been repeatedly sued for misleading debtors, illegally taking money out of their accounts, and failing to note which borrowers were legally protected from having their funds taken. DoE loan servicers have a long and dishonorable tradition of ripping off debtors, like the giant Navient, which was eventually barred from servicing student loans altogether:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-bans-navient-from-federal-student-loan-servicing-and-orders-the-company-to-pay-120-million-for-wide-ranging-student-lending-failures/

Servicers like Maximus routinely fail in their legal obligation to inform debtors of their rights, and when debtors know their rights – for example, the right to contest wage garnishment – Maximus just ignores their paperwork:

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6rc8r76c/qt6rc8r76c_noSplash_41d21b1b129a7224ae49ae65621f8dda.pdf

Dayen cites a long list of Maximus's documented sins – for example, systematically failing to inform debtors that if they enter loan rehabilitation and make nine payments over ten months, they can avoid default. Every time a borrower completes this process, they come off of Maximus's books, so it's not hard to see why Maximus would fail to tell them about it.

The rules are incredibly complex. If you do enter loan rehabilitation, you can still have payments garnished from your paycheck until you've completed five separate payments. You can consolidate your loans – and possibly even get them canceled after 20-25 years – but that also erases any credit you've managed toward debt forgiveness, and starts piling interest on the new loan. If you get any of this wrong, you have to pay more every month, not less.

The CARES Act ordered Maximus to stop taking money away from debtors – but some workers had their paychecks docked for 17 months after the order went into effect, including borrowers who had already paid their debts in full:

https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/SBPC_AWG_Final.pdf

Buried in all the complexity around student debt are several obscure, difficult to navigate paths that can reduce or eliminate your payments. But these are almost impossible to find (the Office of Federal Student Aid's website devotes 39 words to them, several screens down the page). This has created an opportunity for a giant scam industry that takes desperate debtors' last dollars to fill in paperwork they could easily complete for themselves, or to pretend to fill in that paperwork and just walk away from them:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/actions/monster-loans-lend-tech-loans-and-associated-student-loan-debt-relief-companies/

These scam agencies charge thousands of dollars – up to 40% of your outstanding debt – for either doing nothing or doing something you can do yourself, but can't readily find out about. This can net them tens of millions of dollars, extracted from desperate debtors:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/panda_prosperity_complaint.pdf

There's about to be a hell of lot more of those desperate debtors kicking around. The DOE is cutting $330 billion out of the student loan pool in order to fund Trump's tax-break for the ultra-rich. This will make government loans much more expensive for borrowers – but it'll also vastly reduce the amount that students can borrow through the government. The lifetime cap on undergrad loans is now $50k, and $100k for grad students. Pell grants are being taken away from anyone who isn't a full-time student with a 30-hour courseload (so the poorest students, who have to work part-time while they go to school, will be shut out of them).

Where will students get the rest of the money? From predatory lenders. Private student loans currently pay for 7% of borrowers' education expenses – soon, it could be 90%. This is great news for scam colleges, like Trump University, which encouraged students to take out predatory loans to pay sky-high tuition for a useless "education":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University

The Big Beautiful Bill contains numerous attacks on the safeguards against scam colleges. That means that even more public money will go to propping up fraudulent institutions, and naive students who are just looking to get an education will be on the hook to pay it back – with interest.

Dayen calls this "The Golden Age of Scams":

https://prospect.org/power/2025-05-27-golden-age-of-scams/

He likens the current griftogenic environment to the situation in Elizabethan England, where counterfeit money was in wide circulation. This prompted Sir Thomas Gresham to coin "Gresham's Law": "Bad money drives out good." Gresham observed that anyone who was passed a bad coin would try to spend it as soon as possible, and if they managed to do so, the sucker who received the bad coin would then hasten to get rid of it. Eventually, everyone is preferentially spending counterfeit money and hoarding their legitimate coins.

In Trump's scam-friendly America, honest businesses operate at a disadvantage. The car dealer that cheats you on the inspection report for your car, cheats you again on your loan, and cheats you a third time on warranty service will have more money to advertise and market than the honest seller across the street. The supplement-pushing grifter has more money to spend on marketing than the company that makes real medicine.

Trump is out there pardoning shady crypto exchanges, gutting the white collar crime cops, and accepting tens of millions of dollars in payments from companies and executives who are under investigation for stealing from the American people. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau just shut down its kleptocracy unit (seriously!):

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/bondis-day-one-corporate-crime-memos-rattle-white-collar-bar

This is a far cry from how other governments operate. In Germany, two executives behind Volkswagen's Dieselgate sentence are personally going to prison, one of them for 4.5 years. 31 more executives are still being dragged through the courts:

https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissions-court-fraud-3878fcf6c06c9574bf5bff8d31029f90

Scams beget scams. Scammers will tell you that "you can't con an honest man," and try to make everyone complicit in their dishonesty. If you are convinced that being honest will get you taken advantage of, there's nothing for it but to turn scammer yourself. Trump and his scammer base will drive out every honest business and interaction in our economy – and when they steal from you, they'll flash their veneers and tell you "That makes me smart."

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Copyright prevented transmission of Beatles music to aliens https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/29/copyright-prevented-transmission-of-beatles-music-to-aliens/

#10yrsago Pornoscanner lobbyist’s new job: overseeing TSA spending https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/tsa-body-scanner-lobbyist-takes-congressional-job-overseeing-spending-tsa-security/

#5yrsago Canadian newsrooms restructure as co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#co-ops

#5yrsago GOP lawmaker hid his diagnosis from Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#flu-klux-klan

#5yrsago Walmart's crummy anti-theft AI https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#neverseen

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#mask-up

#5yrsago What to do about the police https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#qualified-immunity

#5yrsago Private equity goes mainstream https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#looters

#5yrsago How the IoT reinforces gentrification https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#automated-karens

#5yrsago Big Tech distorts our discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#tech-unexceptionalism

#1yrago The Pizzaburger Presidency https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

#15yrsago Canadian students speak out against the Canadian DMCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA1RDyN7JTg

#10yrsago How metadata compromises you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP_e56DsymA

#5yrsago Corporate Dems include military contractors in bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#beltway-bandits

#5yrsago World video premiere of the Little Brother stage play https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#custom-made

#5yrsago Wisconsin cases surge after voting day https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#grandparents-optional-party

#5yrsago Teardown of an "anti-5g" USB stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#conspiragrifters

#5yrsago California is setting itself up for a brutal second wave https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#second-wave

#5yrsago Why ammosexuals are REALLY pointing guns at their own dicks https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

#5yrsago "News" broadcasts air scripted Amazon commercial https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#quackspeak

#5yrsago Cuomo legalizes nursing-home murders https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#immunity-impunity

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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