Let us prey: Cheeto Jeezus wants to save the soul of 'Murica

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud

~ Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" (from The Future, 1992)

Mark your calendar for May 17, Year of Our Lard 2026. For that is the day that #neverwasmypresident Donald John Trump, aka Cheeto Jeezus, aka Mango Messiah, aka Cantaloupe Caligula, has declared that he shall lead a "National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving" on the National Mall to "rededicate America as one nation under God."

Trump first announced this momentous event back on February 5, 2026 at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he boasted about his regime's efforts to forcefully shove religion back into the public arena, whether the public arena wants it or not. (When you're a star Messiah, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the 1A.)

The upcoming National Jubilee is intended to be part of the greater celebration of America's 250th birthday. And the MAGAts who consider themselves People Of Faith are beside themselves with bliss; they've been all over social media with words of praise for the Orange Overlord. They practically wet themselves with reverent joy over the fact that their idol sat at his desk and droned out a few passages from the Old Testament during a marathon Bible reading on April 21. And this May event has had them super psyched for months.

I have written a lot on this Whirled over the years about the cynicism and hypocrisy of Christofascist leaders who suck up to Trump, and about the gullibility or naivete or willful blindness or (in some cases) the stupidity of his followers who have apparently swallowed his religious shtick. And many millions of other words have been written by others about Trump's utter lack of biblical virtues. So I don't need to go over those points in detail; they speak for themselves. (If you want to review some of those points anyway on your own time, here, from a Bible believer and self-described Christ-follower, are just 21 of them.)

I do, however, feel a need to reiterate another oft-repeated point: the idea of Trump as any type of savior or religious leader is screamingly hilarious on one level, but dangerous on another -- at least it's dangerous if you actually believe in the First Amendment and are worried about the crass and unprecedented politicization of religion that we're seeing from the Turd Reich. That politicization began during Trump's first reign and has accelerated alarmingly since he slithered into office again.

In an April 27, 2026 editorial on The Hill, opinion contributor Svante Myrick wrote that April has been a strange month for American Christians whose religious identity is not bound up with the adoration of Trump. For instance:

We watched a president who postures as a defender of the faith pollute the holiest days of the Christian calendar by invoking God while making profane threats to commit war crimes and annihilate an entire civilization.

The same president offended Christians of all stripes by sharing an AI-generated image of himself appearing as a Christ-like figure, surrounded by prayerful and adoring supporters and carrying out a miraculous healing. Oh, yeah, and he responded to the pope’s calls for peace by rudely insulting the spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics.

We also had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed “secretary of war” and bloodthirsty crusader wannabe, treating the U.S. attack on the Iranian regime as a holy war to be waged without mercy and with “overwhelming violence.” Meanwhile, he urged Americans to pray for American victory “in the name of Christ” — or was it in the name of Quentin Tarantino? 

Religious MAGAts will brush all of that off, saying that what's important is that Trump is returning America to the "Christian" roots in which it was founded. Oh, good lord, how many times have we heard that lame rationalization? Here's Svante Mryick again:

It has indeed been a rough year for Americans who support the religious freedom and pluralism that thrive here thanks to the constitutional separation of church and state.

Trump’s devotees claim that he was anointed by God to carry out a divine mission to save America from people they see as their enemies — secularists, feminists, gay and transgender people, non-white immigrants — and to ensure that America remains, or returns to being, their version of a “Christian nation.” 

But that’s more fantasy than history. If our country’s founders, who were unhappily familiar with Europe’s state churches, wanted to create a “Christian nation,” they could have written Christian dogma into the Constitution. Instead, they included a ban on any official national religion and an explicit ban on any religious test for public office.  

So no matter what George Washington or some other Founding Father did or didn't say about faith and God and all of that stuff, the brand of Christian nationalism that Trump is enabling is running roughshod over all of our freedoms, and not just our religious freedoms.

And Trump himself as a leader of a national prayer event? Gimme a break. The man who has spent a lifetime worshiping at the altar of his own ego is now calling on the rest of us to bow our heads in reverence. It’s a level of hypocrisy so dense it could bend light.

Those of us -- and there are many millions of us -- who don't have orange-stained noses from spending so much time rooting around in Trump's secondary mouth can see what this event actually is. It’s not a spiritual awakening; it’s a campaign rally with a gospel soundtrack. It is the ultimate branding exercise. By wrapping himself in the flag and holding a cross, he is trying to sell himself as the divinely appointed savior of the nation.

Of course he has a lot of support for that branding from the evangelical "leaders" who regularly infest what my favorite potty-mouthed pundit, Jeff Tiedrich, calls the Oval Bordello, where said "leaders" regularly gather 'round their orange savior and pray over him while he slumps at his desk with eyes closed and hands folded, looking properly humble and reverent. (Actually, his eyes are most likely shut because he's snoozing yet again. Tiedrich has often referred to him as a "narcoleptic old fart factory.") Also lending support to the con is the Christofascist wing of the GOP, which in recent years has become much more than a wing; it's practically the whole big fat stupid turkey. And naturally there are the gullible MAGAts who take everything that their Cheeto Jeezus says at face value.

And that prayer jubilee? It’s classic political theater, designed to keep Trump's base energized while the rest of us are left shaking our heads in disbelief or disgust. It's all just another way for the career grifters to prey on the gullible. I can already see the merch table now: "Make America Pray Again" hats, gold-plated Trump Bibles and gaudy, overpriced jewelry (he's an old hand at that), and maybe some commemorative holy water bottled straight from the tap at Mar-a-Lago or one of Trump's other vermin-infested golf motels (as Tiedrich calls them).

Rededicating America to God is a lovely sentiment for those who are religious, though not so much for those who aren't, or those who are of the "wrong" religion by Christofascist standards, or those who care about the separation-of-church-and-state angle of the First Amendment. And having a rededication-to-God ceremony led by a man whose entire public persona is built on pride, greed, and wrath feels less like a holy moment and more like a rejected movie script for a third-rate political satire.

So on May 17, as the crowd of the faithful gathers on the Mall to gawk at the consecrated carnival barkers who will be in the spotlight oozing their religion, I'll be here in the corner, longing for the day that America is delivered from Mango Messiah and his merry band of ersatz spiritual leaders who constantly urge us all to pray while they continue, endlessly, to prey.

True Spanish lies: A scam in any tongue is still a scam

For some time I've been aware of -- and have blogged and Facebooked about -- the fact that certain Scamworld sociopaths in the US love to hate on "the illegals," by which, traditionally, they most often mean Hispanic/Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America. More recently the hucksters have been hating on Syrian/Muslim immigrants as well, warning that the Muslims are taking over Europe, raping all the women in their path, and that the US is next -- but by no means have these vociferous xenophobes let "the Mexicans" off the hook. Some have been griping for years about the influx of undesirables from South of the border.

For instance, there's currently imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie, who, as reported in this June 2011 Whirled post, came down hard on the "Mexicans" a few years ago. In November 2012 my pal Salty Droid also paid tribute to Katie's apparent racism (or at least Katie's pandering to racists, which is just as bad).

And on the Fourth of July, 2014 (cue patriotic music), former Trudeau b.f.f. and alt-health/cancer quack/fake doctor/conspiracy theorist/racist Leonard Coldwell, linking to the aggressively nativist NumbersUSA site, wrote about how he is proud to be "AND [sic] AMERICAN." He wrote that "they" (the New World Order and Obama and all enemies of freedom) "want to destroy our national pride, our way of life, our language and our culture by flooding us with these illegal immigrants." By "our" language I assume he means English, which he is doing quite an effective job of destroying on his own, but I digress.

More recently, LoonyC shared this on Facebook, linking to yet another article that attempts to indict all "illegals" for the crime committed by one. Obama is blamed too, of course; it wouldn't be a proper Loony rant (or in this case, Loony-approved rant) without vilification of our president.

 
Then of course there is GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, and if you don't think he belongs in a discussion of Scamworld, read this. Apart from that whole "build a wall" shtick, Trump has made himself very not-loved by Latino voters by running off at the mouth about illegal "Mexican" immigrants being diseased criminals.

Here's a recent Facebook posting from the aforementioned Loony Coldwell, citing an article regarding yet another Trump tweet about "Mexicans."

Of course the scammers, including and perhaps especially Trump, mostly insist that they're not, not, NOT racist, and that they have nothing against "Mexicans." It's just those lazy, diseased, sexually predatory illegals they don't like. By way of proving that he's not racist and actually likes Mexicans, for instance, Kevin Trudeau said, back in 2011, that he admires Che Guevara and likes guacamole. Things haven't gotten any better since then. If anything they're worse, and If you call someone who's clearly racist out for being clearly racist, the least violent response you can expect is to be jeered at for being "politically correct" and a "libtard."

But for even the most racist scammer, one yuuuuge thing trumps (so to speak) white Western Euro-purity, and that one thing is, of course, money. And any scammer worth his or her salt has realized by now that the Spanish-speaking market is enormous and potentially very lucrative -- and damned if they're going to let a good cash op pass them by.

Accordingly, Kevin Trudeau's scampire has been peddling some of his info-frauducts in Spanish for years, both online and via infomercials. I'm sure the company currently handling those info-frauducts would gladly accept moneys from the undocumented, no questions asked. For that matter, I bet that Katie's legal defense fund would be similarly open-minded.

Leonard Coldwell, brave guardian of the English language and American culture, brags that his "mega bestselling" books are being translated into Spanish, but I'm guessing that he won't be demanding proof of citizenship status before taking money from those people who are helping to destroy said language and culture.

And despite his apparent racism, and the fact that he has shot himself in the foot business-wise with his racist remarks about Latinos, Donald Trump would gleefully welcome the Latino vote and has said he's confident he'll get it if he wins the nomination, because, he asserts, "Latinos love me".... though thousands of Latinos nationwide apparently disagree. (Illegal immigrants have no voting rights, despite what the wingnuts would have you believe.) Regarding "illegals," Trump has little room to speak, given his own business practices. And he knows as well as anyone else that if all illegal immigrants were suddenly deported, the US economy would implode.

Although there's no way of knowing for sure, I have little doubt that had Trump's more blatant Scamworldly enterprises such as Trump University and the Trump Network been longer-lived, those scams would have penetrated deeply into the Spanish-speaking market. As it is, Trump is currently dealing with a class action lawsuit over the alleged fraud that was Trump U, and he blamed the fact that the suit wasn't thrown out on the hostility of a "Spanish" judge.
 
[Update 29 May, 2016: Important development in the case of Drumpf and that "Spanish"/"Hispanic"/"Mexican judge.]

But as Salty Droid indicated in his posts about Trump U and Trump Network, linked to in the first sentence of the paragraph above the update (and you should read those posts, if you haven't already), Trump has proven himself to be a fan of network or multilevel marketing, or, as Salty put it, "the MLM fraud vortex of doom." Which is as good a way as any to segue into this point: If you think the MLM industry is sitting on its hands when there are potentially so many millions of Spanish-speaking victims to suck into that vortex, you simply haven't been paying attention.
 
Brown folks' money is just as green as white folks' money.
A long-running theme on Salty's blog is the destructive force that MLMs have been in the lives of so many people. I published a two-part guest post about the matter myself in December 2013. (Here's the link to Part 1.)

One of Salty's most frequent targets has been the mega-scam and pyramid scheme Herbalife, which he addresses yet again in his post of April 26.

I'm sure he'll have more to say about this subject soon, in light of his yet-to-be-completely-told tale of stowing away on a scammer sea cruise last fall, and of the recent release of a documentary about the Herbalife scam, Betting on Zero, which made its debut at the recent Tribeca Film festival. For the time being he has embedded a heartbreaking thirteen-minute bilingual video that poignantly demonstrates how a scam is still a scam, even in a loving tongue.



There is also a thriving Herbalife wannabe called 90 for Life, which is the unholy child, spawned in 2012, of Youngevity (founded by long-time frauduct peddler and former veterinarian Joel Wallach) and Livinity (founded by Barb and Dave Pitcock, who cut their huckster teeth with Kevin Trudeau back in the late 1990s). I've mentioned all of these folks on this Whirled previously, and here they are again. Loony Coldwell and his ex-bro Peter Wink were even involved in 90 for Life for a while, under the company name Coldwell Brothers LLC, until Loony blew his little balding top at Barb Pitcock some time in 2013, and that was that.

But more to the point here, 90 for Life, which peddles a large line of overpriced nutritional drinks and supplements and potions, launched its big Hispan-o-scam a couple of years ago, and front and center in that scheme was another longtime Katie bud (and frauduct/flopportunity peddler, Scamworld circle jerker mutual admiration society member, apparent xenophobe and Trump lover) Fred van Liew. who has also been mentioned here a few times.



"I am heavily invested in this project to open the door to the Huge Spanish speaking community throughout the world, as well as the US and Canada," said Fred in 2014. And here's a May 2015 upload of Spanish Financial Freedom with Dave & Barb Pitcock: "The most effective system for building wealth ever created."

I only recently found this upload and felt a need to join in the conversation, but so far it's just a monologue and not a conversation. I seem to run into that problem a lot. On the other hand, that particular video has only had 206 views at the time I'm writing this, so there's that.

But... if you've seen one scheme, you've seen 'em all. As Salty wrote in his April 26 post about Herbalife:

Everything they do :: everything they say :: everyone they hire … it’s all about perpetuating a lie that facilitates some of the world’s richest people str8 stealing from some of the world’s poorest people.

Every distributor I’ve investigated :: every lead generation method :: every retention method … everything … fucking all of it … lies

Yep, that about says it all. A good rule for financial, emotional and perhaps even physical survival is this: If some smirking, overfed huckster approaches you blathering about a new opportunity to realize the American dream... solo di no.