An analyst wrote on Monday that he was stunned to discover that his grandmother had been scammed by people impersonating the Trump campaign while visiting family for Christmas.
Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for The Bulwark, wrote in a new column on Monday that the visit with his family, whom he described as “quite conservative and full of Trump voters,” left him struck by “just how many ways all the current unpleasantness is actively changing their lives for the worse.”
He described seeing volumes of scammy text messages from alleged Trump-aligned causes asking her for donations and to confirm personal information.
One such message told Egger’s grandmother to pay $10 to receive a $2,000 tariff rebate check. By the end of the call, the scammers debited $10 per month from her account.
“The whole thing was infuriating, and there was nothing to be done about it,” Egger wrote. “Her phone number is out there, circulating among various GOP fundraising lists. No matter how many times she tries to unsubscribe, there’s always another text, another ‘check,’ another disappointed message from ‘Trump.’”
He added that the event illustrates how damaging the Trump presidency has been to the American political landscape.
“That’s an underappreciated feature of our political age: It’s not just that things are bad, it’s that they’re relentlessly so,” Egger continued. “You can’t turn it off. You can’t escape it. You can’t distinguish between real and fake, good and bad, normal and abnormal. The stuff keeps piling up.”
“Maybe none of this should have surprised me,” he added. “I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about the damage done by Donald Trump, his politics, and his strange cultural movement not only to the country in general but to the people who support him in particular. It’s clearer than ever to me that that damage is extensive and pervasive and will outlast him by years.”
“But I can’t abide by the schadenfreude-laden viewpoint that anyone who ever pulled a lever for Trump deserves whatever’s coming to them as a result,” Egger wrote. “The fact is that this political moment is immiserating good people. I don’t blame them for that. I blame him.”
Read the entire column by clicking here.
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