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Three Card Donnie [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-05

Ooh, boy, I’ve just been itching for a fight! However, I don’t have many left in me, so I’ve gotta choose my battles…

While I would LOVE to run for President, so I’d have a reason to publicly attack the leaking bag of shit on a daily basis AND receive some protection while doing so, it’s just too dangerous. I can’t afford to be sued, and anyone who goes after Orange Julius Caesar is gonna get sued, we know that. I have too much to lose, and not enough to fight with.

If I WAS running, though, in every daily Instagram post I would add this statement at the end: “To you who voted for Donald Trump, I feel no hatred and no enmity. You got conned and deserve my sympathy, but because his con is causing so much harm you won’t GET my sympathy until you wake up and realize your mistake.”

While the news media is much more blunt this time around in describing Trump’s statements as “untrue,” they and most of the rest of the “reasonable” political establishment continue to make the same mistake: Listening to him at all!

I’m younger than Trump, but lived in NYC when he was coming up and know the assumptions and expectations of a New Yorker of a certain age. He was a native and I was a transplant, and there were different rules for each group, including the fact that the transplants would go through a learning curve that the natives not only didn’t have to repeat, they might even profit from. One of the items on this learning list was, “Don’t play three card monte!”

I don’t know if they’re still there, but there used to be wiry teenagers lining West 14th St. with cardboard box “card tables,” a steady patter, a couple bodyguards and four (or more) cards with which to rip off the rubes. The game is simple — find the Queen of Hearts among the three cards. They’d have a plant make a bunch of dumb mistakes, making the rubes more and more excited and confident, and then when the rube laid down a twenty dollar bill, suddenly the Queen would be nowhere to be found. BECAUSE THEY CHEAT. If the rube objected, suddenly the two or three bodyguards would step forward, and if the cops were called the wiry teenager would run like the wind, the cardboard box would be left behind, and the rube would be left red-faced, angry and twenty dollars lighter in the wallet. But if the rube wasn’t too stupid to live in NYC he would learn his lesson: don’t listen to or look at the young men playing three card monte, and don’t even consider playing!

America is still a nation of over-confident rubes, most of whom detest NYC without knowing its ways, and so they remain ignorant of its lessons. They don’t know about three card monte, and keep stopping to listen, get excited and lay down their money. At some point they're going to lose their shirts in one way or another, but until that happens, they won’t attack the charming kid with the patter, and because it reflects poorly on themselves and their judgment, they will fight tooth and nail to say that they haven’t been conned. The news media, unfortunately, continues to act as Trump’s unwitting veil of deception by treating him seriously. I understand, they have their principles, but with Three Card Donnie the only reasonable thing you can do is walk away. If he’s catching your attention, it means he’s about to make some of your money his.

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