The swamp is filling rapidly with Trump Plutocrats. Trump and his compadres are poised to launch a Putin-style corporate takeover of the USA. Remember Romney’s famous line: “Corporations are persons, my friends.” Trump is about to make this a reality.

Many are astonished by his cabinet and advisor picks. Didn’t Donald Trump promise to drain the swamp? Well, surprise! That Master of Reality TV has broken through your 52-inch screen and captured the presidency and, yes, our lives. Remember  the rules of reality game shows: no one is ever what he or she seems. That’s how you win the game and Donald Trump knows how to play that game.

So, what does Trump want?  Certainly power and money – the usual. But what truly motivates him is garnering the status among the entrenched elites he’s so long been denied.  We have had a president like this before. Abraham Lincoln’s southern Vice-President Andrew Johnson who assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination,  also betrayed  his populist promises that had catapulted him to prominence in his native Tennessee. Once ensconced in the White House Johnson immediately invited into his inner circle those same Southern aristocrats who had formerly scorned him for his humble roots. As president he basked in their glow and ultimately betrayed the national goal of reconstructing the South.

You get the picture, right? The same things motivate Trump as Johnson. Greed, yes, but of more importance to Trump is to be accepted by and kowtowed to by those same One-Percenters that formerly saw him a little more than a buffoon. You only have to rewind the video and watch the pretty dance Mitt Romney performed for the Donald before he publicly humiliated Romney by selecting Exxon Mobile’s Rex Tillerson as his choice for Secretary of State. Rex is not simply a Putocrat par excellence but, like too many of Trump’s growing inner circle, closely tied to Putin.

The result: he’s filling the swamp with denizens from Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile and other Plutocrats  with close ties to Putin. The swamp is not simply full but overflowing. America, as Trump has promised, will be great again, but for whom?

Read: The Transformation: GTE 45, for my chilling look at what our future holds. amazon.com/author/faren-siminoff