The Who's Next Club
When you call an 800 number and the person on the other end of the line says, “Reservation desk,” the assumption is you are talking to the reservation desk of the hotel you presumably called.
We wanted to get away from everything for a few days, so I booked two rooms (Ben and Jazzy were joining us) at the Sleep Inn Motel near the University of Buffalo. I needed to talk to a human to verify there would not be extra requirements for Jazzy.
Jazzy, Ben’s guardian angel and pal.
The woman on the phone said, her accent heavy (red flag?): “There are no rooms anywhere because of a Microsoft Conference. But, you’re lucky,” she added, “because we still do have a few open.”
Lucky, I thought. An ominous word. Possible red flag number two.
When I asked for the following week (because the rooms seemed extraordinarily expensive), she said the conference was in town for a month.
A month! Not only that, but the conference started the exact day for which I requested a reservation. More red flags. The price she quoted — $365.90 – was double what I paid last October when we went to Buffalo for my Uncle Jerry’s service. Yet I am aware that during Cornell graduation weekend hotel prices can skyrocket.
But over 100 dollars in taxes?
“That’s how it is,” she said, and rattled of the various entities collecting these taxes.
I made the reservations and shook my head.
Mike said, “Everything is going up.”
“But how could the prices go up that much?”
“That’s the way it is.”
A few days later, we got to the Sleep Inn and no one could find a reservation for us. The woman behind the desk gave me a sympathetic you-got-taken look. Luckily (and this time, genuinely luckily) there was no Microsoft Conference – and despite UB’s graduation, the Sleep Inn had two empty rooms. I called my bank, cancelled my credit card, and called the number I’d used to make the reservation.
“Reservation Desk,” the woman answered. Oh, so this is how it is: Reservation Desk, not Sleep Inn. I complained that Reservation Desk took my money and grossly overcharged me and that if I didn’t get my money back, I’d contact the attorney general, Leticia James, the same Leticia James who had given Trump his 34 felony convictions. Meanwhile Mike googled Reservation Desk on his computer. “Uh huh, look at this,” he said:
Reservation Desk is scamming customers by misrepresenting pricing, overcharging, and then refusing to correct their mistakes. Their deceptive business model is causing financial harm to customers and they need to be held accountable.
Those on Reddit agreed; however, there were websites testifying to their legitimacy. From the ReservationDesk.com website, https://www.reservationdesk.com:
“Make Tomorrow More Memorable.”
I’ll say. Their website indicated 4 out of 5 stars based on 1,566 reviews.
Yeah, right!
I did get all my money back.
Bigger and More Troublesome Scams
It’s not easy to keep current on all the Federal Government’s scams. Where to start? How about Alligator Alcatraz?
Alligator Alcatraz is costing either Florida taxpayers, or the Federal government taxpayers – meaning all of us – one million dollars a day. Depending on how many people are caged – “essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage” – costs range from $245/day to $850/day per detainee. A full two-thirds (and likely more) of those in cages have no criminal record. Alligator Alcatraz has no ac, insufficient food (some served with maggots), and is characterized by “unsanitary and inhumane conditions.” Apparently, the facility is shutting down. Is it because of money? From the New York Times, May 13, 2026:
D.H.S. officials have concluded that the Everglades center is ineffective and too expensive to run. The DeSantis administration has been spending more than $1 million a day to run the center, which is in an isolated area between Miami and Naples. Florida has yet to receive the $608 million federal reimbursement it requested . . . Some private vendors the state hired to help operate the center have been struggling to front costs. One vendor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from the state, said in an interview last week that the state had not paid some invoices in more than 200 days.
Alligator Alcatraz is not closing down because of the “unsanitary and inhuman conditions,” but because it’s costing a lot of money. In fact, DeSantis said, “I think it would be a big problem politically to walk away from the deportation mission.”
The deportation mission. My Mom lived in assisted living for the last 15 months of her life in Florida. Most of the people working at her facility were immigrants. When I broke my wrist 18 months ago, most of the nurses in the emergency room were immigrants.
I think it’s important to understand that many of these detention centers have detainees working. Some work $1 to $1.50 per hour. Others work for free. The private prison companies that run these centers, like Geo Group or Core Civic, have seen their profits rise up to 700 percent. People who disagree with the mission of these prisons have removed their money from the lending bank, which is Citizens Bank. That seems to be one of the best ways to protest.
Corruption
According to The Contrarian substack: “Never in American history have we seen corruption remotely like what is going on with Donald Trump and his cronies in and outside of government.” Its writers compiled list of Trump’s top schemes which include the following:
· The Epstein Files, three million (plus-or-minus) pages not released
· Selling American residency to the super rich, which is Trump’s ‘Gold Card’ available for one million dollars
· World Liberty Finance, Trump’s crypto business
· The Meme Coin grift
· Tom Homan’s paper bag filled $50,000
· Melania’s movie
· The USD1 Biance UAE Deal
· Trump’s Qatari Boeing
· Trump’s foreign real estate boom
· Trump’s DC renovation racket (White house, Lincoln Memorial Reflecting pool, etc).
There’s Trump’s Dell stocks that recently exploded in value. And his personal lawsuit (against the IRS and the Treasury Department, his own administration) “to brazenly pick $10 billion out of American’s pockets. Most outrageous of all is the amount originally sought: $10 billion. That is more than the entire annual appropriation for the IRS, an agency of 75,000 employees.”
Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts Senator) has said, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this is the most corrupt Administration in all of American history.”
Trump’s war of choice with Iran is costing an estimated $500 million to almost two billion per day benefiting, apparently, only oil companies. Estimates are 90 billion spent as of June 15th.
Pardon me? No, Pardon Me!
If that’s not enough, shortly after getting into office, Trump pardoned the 1,500 or so rioters who participated in the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot. Here’s the curriculum vitae of one participant, Edward Kelley.
Edward Kelley is an American convicted felon known for his participation in the January 6 United States Capitol attack, as well as subsequently conspiring to murder dozens of law enforcement personnel involved in investigating his role in the Capitol riot.
On November 8, 2024, Kelley was convicted of eleven counts – three felonies and eight misdemeanors – in connection with the Capitol attack, including civil disorder, destruction of government property, and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers. On November 20 of the same year, Kelley was convicted of conspiracy to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and influencing a federal official by threat.
Trump’s pardon, however, did not extend to a conspiracy charge, and thus this particular felon is spending the rest of his life in prison.
Other Capitol attack luminaries pardoned by Trump (paraphrased from Christopher Armitage’s substack), include:
. . . at least seven men arrested or sentenced for child sex offenses . . . Daniel Rodriguez, who drove a stun gun into Officer Michael Fanone’s neck and caused a heart attack . . . Christopher Quaglin, who choked Officer Fanone and attacked other officers with shields and pepper spray . . . Patrick McCaughey, who crushed Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorframe . . . Peter Schwartz, who had thirty-eight prior convictions before he beat cops at the Capitol. . . a nursing-home executive who stole $10.9 million from his employees’ paychecks to fund a $2 million yacht . . . a man who stole $38 million from his employees in a payroll-tax fraud. . . a man who defrauded Nikola shareholders out of roughly $660 million.
. . . the sheriff of Culpeper County Virginia who took $75,000 in bribes for selling police badges to two undercover FBI agents . . . a former Tennessee state senator, fifteen days into his sentence. . . the Nevada Republican who stole $70,000 raised for a slain police officer’s memorial and spent it on her daughter’s wedding and cosmetic surgery. . . a former Tennessee House Speaker . . . a former Connecticut governor with two prior corruption convictions . . . a sitting Democratic congressman, weeks before his bribery trial.
Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving forty-five years for cocaine trafficking. This official was pardoned even as the U.S. struck boats (and continues to) in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming those killed were narco-terrorists. No evidence was provided. According to the AP:
Families of two Trinidadian nationals killed in a Trump administration boat strike last October sued the federal government recently, calling the attack a war crime and part of an “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful U.S. military campaign.” . . .many legal experts say they amount to a brazen violation of the laws of armed conflict.
From a family of one of the men (Rishi) killed:
If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him. They must be held accountable.
How Do You Address Corruption?
The U.S. has not always played fair, and has caused havoc in around the world, but it’s still hard to believe we have become a country that imprisons children, and puts neighbors, friends and co-workers who are not American citizens – most of them without criminal offences – in cages while the real criminals are gutting the treasury and erecting gold monuments to themselves. Republicans could have stopped all of this months ago, instead, most of them have turned their backs on the American people, on the federal workers fired, on the farmers who have no fertilizer or immigrant labor, on the poor and middle class who cannot afford health insurance.
A recent poll (CNN) noted that 30 percent of U.S. citizens still support this con man. A recent New York Times article (May 18, 2026) quoted a republican who voted for Trump, second time:
He’s not doing what he said he was going to do.
Would you expect someone who was a convicted felon in New York State — 34 counts of falsifications of business records – to tell the truth? Or how about having been convicted twice for sexual abuse and defamation? Trump still owes 88.3 million dollars to E. Jean Carroll. He has appealed twice and now has his judicial department investigating her. Would you trust a man who appeared 38,000 times in the Epstein files (only the publicly released records) who denies ever having been part of the Epstein entourage?
What is it going to take for that 30 percent to finally see that Trump is madder than Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter? That he has brought a level of corruption to the White House that most people never anticipated?
A Crack in the Cabal
But there’s finally a crack in the Republican cabal. Thank you, Donald Trump. I guess paying $1,776 billion to Trump’s rioters and looters – who were armed with firearms, tasers and knives – who attacked the Capitol and threatened to hang Vice President Pence, did not sit well with some Republicans. It probably did not help Trump’s cause that two Capitol policeman, Harry Dunn and Dan Hodges, who were beaten, pepper-sprayed, and crushed against metal doors, are suing Trump’s to stop rearming his insurrectionists.
Trump has deepened the crack by withdrawing support from two top Republican senators: John Coryn (Texas) who is not MAGA enough, and Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) who voted to impeach Trump years ago. Joining them are Tom Massie (Kentucky) who voted to release the Epstein Files, and Thom Tillis (North Carolina) who vowed to do whatever he could to halt Trump’s SAVE Act.
Mike calls it the “Who’s Next Club.”
Right. Who’s next?
A Scam for Everyone
I recently purchased The Future of Fraud by Becky Holmes. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list. On the back cover, she wrote: “There is a scam out there for every single one of us.”
I don’t feel so bad about falling for Reservation Desk, after all, they did not tell me explicitly, they were charging me double what Sleep Inn charged. Just like Donald Trump did not say: “Hey chumps! I’m taking away your democracy and gutting the treasury while I’m at it.” It’s easy to fall for a scam, not so easy to admit you fell for it.
Notes
Norman Eisen, The Contrarian Substack,” Trump to Redistricting Robbers: Hold My Beer The Corruption Scandals Widen,” May 16, 2026
Norman Eisen, Gabriel Lezra, The Contrarian Substack, “Trump & Cronies’ Top 10 Corruption Scandals,” February 7, 2026
Christopher Armitage, The Existential Republic Substack, “Untangling the Trump Crime Family’s Multi-Billion Dollar Pardon Market,” May 15, 2026.
Edward Kelley (Capitol rioter) - Wikipedia
The Big Picture Substack, Our Wins of The Week, May 17, 2026
Families of boat strike victims sue Trump administration | AP News
Citizens Bank customers pull money over lender’s ICE ties | Banking Dive
Another great one! Thanks Pat!
Yes, you are right. Accents are relative. I have a "Buffalo" accent. My kids grew up in the Midwest and when we came back East, their classmates commented on their accent.