We are living in the Age of Fraud. Perhaps no decade in American history has been characterized by as much public fraud, especially political fraud, as the period between 2016 and 2026. We can thank the Prince of Fraud for that. I’d say king, but he fancies himself a real king, and I refuse to denominate him thus.
He rode down a gilded escalator in 2015 and surfed a lie-polluted wave of campaign fraud into the presidency a year later. Fraud and fraudulent statements have only increased in number and brazenness since then. No POTUS has ever been branded in that fashion since we were first told the first POTUS could not tell a lie. I fear we are now numb to it.
My Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) says fraud is intentional perversion of truth to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right. One who defrauds another is a person who is not what he or she pretends to be—an impostor, a cheat. We all have encountered it and its personification in our private and public lives. Perhaps we first met frauds at the carnival, later in revival tents of healing evangelists, then in radio and television ads, and ultimately in politics, where some of us least expected to find it.
Political fraud is particularly pernicious because it undermines our very form of government. Moreover, it deceives us wickedly since we like to think we are immune to being fooled by “regular human beings,” neighbors, fellow citizens, persons born and raised in the same towns, cities and states making up our country. But we are not.
POTUS 47 knows that. He’s practiced fraud all his life and calls any investigation of it a “hoax.” He built a New York City business reputation stiffing creditors and pretending that he built the business inherited from his father with little money (he lied; he got millions), personally taking it into gilded, oft-bankrupted prominence, as a popular TV program misdramatized. “You’re fired,” he became famous for saying, while I doubt he ever actually said such a decisive thing to anyone. In two terms as POTUS, it’s apparent he lets others do such leaderly things.
We Southerners know from fraud. Southern leaders have been engaging in it for most of two centuries, getting us into an unjustified, treasonous Civil War 165 years ago, in the face of Lincoln’s willingness to compromise on slavery, and then writing and talking us into one “wargasm” after another. It was said to be a “lost cause” instead of the stupid thing it was. Surely it was, because they stupidly talked our forebears into fighting it for their own interests, with inadequate resources and for contradictory reasons, not the true interests of the region or of Alabama. As a result of Reconstruction, violent resistance to it and the resulting reign of Jim Crow—which decades later eventually stimulated the modern civil rights movement—we are still paying for that ghastly fraud. So we should have been ready for the fraudulent missives of POTUS 45 and 47, who set the new standard for political fraud, some of which we’d heard before about race. Let’s see what the Prince of Fraud has been saying over the course of the past decade that is so unprecedented that we ought to present to him the Universal Fraud Trophy and retire it:
He got an early start in his fraud-based political career with his first political initiative—fraudulently claiming that President Barack Obama was not a native-born American citizen and that he had the evidence to prove it. Hoodwinking the media, he lied. He had nada … except media attention. Along the way, he offered a fraudulent (unevidenced) account of his being “with his crew” at ground zero on 9/11 right after the attack on the World Trade Center and at the funerals of “friends” killed in the fall of the twin towers.
Then, lying again, he claimed in his first campaign for POTUS that “only he” could solve America’s evident problems—economic, foreign policy, immigration, medical, military and the rest. You name it; he had the solution to it. Only he. He exacerbated most of them, denigrating people right and left in the process. It all came to a head with his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in more than 1 million needless deaths. Who do his true believers think was POTUS during the yearlong inception of the thing? RFK Jr.? It’s not enough to say “he did the best he could.” I believe any competent, caring national leader could have done better, mostly by not sitting on … the facts.
Soon to be leaving office then, he next alleged falsely that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, that he had the evidence to prove it, and inspired gullible followers in the nation’s capital to walk with him to the Capitol to “take back our country” (he didn’t go). Later, after admitting to staffers that he had lost, as more than five dozen courts were finding, he presided over a riot that resulted in deaths and injuries, then left town as the fraud he was, never admitting he was wrong, as a congressional committee also concluded he was, just as the Mueller investigation had concluded that the Russians had helped him get elected in the first place four years before—the original fraud at his first administration’s beginning.
At Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by pilfered secret documents (to be used for venal reasons) and sycophants, for the former of which he was indicted, he began to plot a return to office, with revenge and retaliation in his heart, all based on fraudulent claims about his predecessor, making his job harder, and inaccurate assertions about his first term. At the same time, he spent months fighting off true legal claims against his past and present acts and behavior, finally being convicted of sexual assault and slander, recently affirmed on appeal. Only four things enabled him to return to office: a seemingly sudden downturn in his opponent’s health, leaving too little time for the latter’s substitute to plan and run an effective campaign; leftover issues from his first term that left the pandemic and its effects still active factors in the race; an unsuccessful assassination attempt that made him a hero to millions; and a series of fraudulent claims so outrageous that one wonders how they could possibly have been believed.
Particularly remembered are these: he’ll stop inflation and bring down prices beginning the first day; he’ll end the Ukraine war the first day; he’ll stop the practice of silly and endless overseas wars (how’d that one work out?); he’ll protect our health from another pandemic and protect Medicare, eventually proposing a better program; and he’ll solve this problem and that other problem. The latter included such things as the perception that DEI programs were no longer needed, despite the continuation of rampant, documented racism in the country, the 10 costs of which I’ve documented myself in my recent book, “Awakenings to Racism in Alabama”; the coming shortfall in Social Security; “making the military proud again” (he’s done the opposite); and deporting only “the worst of the worse” unlawful immigrants (he’s done the opposite, in the process killing innocent Americans and scaring millions of U.S. citizens). All not promises kept.
Virtually every problem area he and his mostly henchmen have touched has been made worse, and he has created innumerable new ones—misusing executive orders, many unlawful; turning the Musk munchkins loose on the federal bureaucracy with devastatingly negative effects (think AID and hundreds of thousands dead), without saving much, if any, money; misusing the FBI and ICE and letting their directors run as amok as the secretary of defense; changing the names of things on whims (Lake America?) and gilding everything in sight at the White House; creating a worldwide economic war, including with our best friend, Canada, and trying to fight it with unlawful tariffs; destroying national monuments and spaces and constructing nearly a dozen arguably unlawful, extravagantly expensive vanity projects in Washington; waging an unnecessary, irresponsible, now unlawful war against Iran costing nearly $100 billion; attacking history with the vigor of a technocrat in Orwell’s “1984,” even trashing the Smithsonian institutions; kneecapping FEMA and the CDC; killing the widely popular PBS and NPR; trying to take over the IRS for personal ends and creating a 9/11 slush fund to pay back his rioting supporters for their unlawful acts; threatening the takeover of multiple countries, from Greenland to Panama; putting armed military forces unlawfully in U.S. cities without gubernatorial requests; and the little matter of ballooning the national debt to an unimaginable $40 trillion, thanks, in part, to spendthrift Republican tax breaks for decades in Congress (isn’t it now larger than the GDP?). He’s now the Prince of Debt, too.
Two years into POTUS 47’s final term, where are we? He is still at it, with no end in sight this side of impeachment. His current reobsession, in reality another vanity project, is voter fraud in the coming midterm elections. It’s 2020 all over again! Without any direct evidence. Only this time, it seems, what he’s really after, besides indirectly claiming, “see, I was right about 2020,” is chaos and confusion, anything to cast doubt on the coming Democratic victories that will return one or both houses of Congress to Democratic control. He’s obviously so concerned because that will mean subjecting his final two years to the normal checks and balances that used to exist in Washington, before the Republican Party wimped out, afraid of POTUS 47 and … their shadows. It might also mean a reversal of political fortunes in states like Alabama, returning former Senator Doug Jones to Washington, D.C., and denying our incumbent senator’s inexplicable bid to be governor of Alabama, where he’s barely lived, if at all, over the past seven years.
The latest quixotic campaign of POTUS 47 is based on evidence so flimsy it would be laughable if it were not being put to such harmful purposes. My friend Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney in northern Alabama and a member of the University of Alabama School of Law faculty, brilliantly punctures his most hot-air-filled political fraud in her widely read daily commentary, “Civil Discourse,” on September 3. Noting that POTUS 47 “has mastered the art of using … fake narratives” to try “to justify restrictive measures” that make voting more difficult for all who might not vote Republican, she asks, “How could there be fraud that affected only [him] …, at the top of the ticket, but not” down-ballot candidates on the same ballot? Moreover, if large numbers of unlawful immigrants voted in past elections, how did he and other congressional Republicans win? “It doesn’t make sense. And that’s because it isn’t true.” Sure, a small number of noncitizens manage to register, but only “a minuscule” number have voted in Alabama, according to our Republican secretary of state. For example, in a January 2026 report, he found only 186 registered noncitizens, only 25 of whom “voted in a past election,” or 0.00075675676 percent of the 3.7 million voters registered in Alabama. Other states have found similarly low numbers—none of which justifies the sort of anti-democratic SAVE Act measures POTUS has proposed in Washington. It’s all fraudulent, cynically designed to suppress the votes of people POTUS 47 thinks might vote against him and his supporters by discouraging their voting and/or creating such confusion at the polls that he can claim “Fraud!” again, as he tries to overturn an election again. That’s apparently behind his ridiculous mail-ballot claims, even as he votes that way again himself. Millions do business and financial transactions by mail or email without problems, so what makes voting by the U.S. Postal Service so problematic? Only one thing—POTUS 47’s self-interested, fraudulent electoral phantoms.
Anyone wanting a real example of voter fraud and voter suppression need only examine the history of post-Reconstruction electoral practices in Alabama, including their role in adopting the racist, vote-denying state Constitution of 1901, which in short order disenfranchised poor whites and most Blacks in the state. Read the literature about the use of armed forces to keep Blacks away from the polls in Eufaula and other Alabama cities in the 1870s. We’ve been where POTUS wants to take us with ICE and other armed federal personnel before. Only before, they wore sheeted hoods.
Finally, perhaps the greatest fraud POTUS 47 is perpetuating on us all is the faux image and fraudulent persona of a POTUS who has the mental and physical wherewithal to be a POTUS able to preside over the affairs of the country from the Oval Office. If Republicans don’t soon wake up and join Democrats in removing him from that office, he may start the nuclear world war he dreams about and dramatizes online, AI-created pictures and all.
The above is the short list, a selection from a long list of more than 100 examples a friend has developed, of what lying POTUS 47, now with a 33 percent approval rating, has been doing to defraud the American people. It doesn’t include his hawking for data centers without restrictions, his inconsistent support of Ukraine, his unproven reasons for murder on the high seas of the Caribbean and appropriating oil from Venezuela, his risking war with China by arbitrarily restricting Middle East oil on which it is dependent, his string of lies and inconsistencies about why he attacked Iran, his support of RFK Jr., the secretary of health whose lack of expertise and inconsistent claims about vaccines are likely to cause more epidemics like the measles one now evolving in the country. And on and on it goes. In my eight decades, I’ve never feared a POTUS, even ones I didn’t vote for … I’ve never feared so many agencies of the federal government … but I do now under its present fraud-founded leadership that is leaving us vulnerable to wars here and abroad, to ungoverned ICE agents, and to unsafe air travel, food and viruses, to mention three examples of coming scourges.
It is a measure of the inadequacies of his defenders that such essays as this and others I’ve written rarely receive rebuttals. There are rejoinders to be made, but I would hate to have to craft them. Even a former Auburn debater and debate instructor would be hard-pressed to explain away so much fraud. But I’m still at [email protected], and I’d welcome replies.
Fraus et jus nunquam cohabitant. “Fraud and justice never dwell together.”
