High up among the questions I’d like answered about this era is how and why so many people seized on Donald Trump as The Man with the Answer? As the guy who could get “it” done? Was it really because in their minds he already got it done? As the wildly successful and glamorous businessman, like the one he played on TV?

Was it really that simple (minded)?

In a culture that regards fame as an unalloyed virtue and keeps score based on the number of gold-plated toilets seen in your publicity photos, TV-created Trump and his repeated claims that, “I’m really, really rich” seem to have played like fentanyl-laced salted caramel candy to a certain type of brain configuration.

I believe there’s testing to prove that.

But if that’s true, what do those same people think now as they watch him flounder and squeal and rant trying to cover the half billion dollar tab on his New York fraud conviction?

Yes, yes, it’s all “the Deep State picking on him” for no reason at all other than they hate freedom. But it’s just a bond. He gets the money back if he wins his latest of hundreds of time-sucking appeals. Are any of his adoring mob asking themselves, “Why doesn’t he just write a check?”

I’m absolutely certain even Trump TV hosts and pundits on Fox and NewsMax have reported his inability to convince any bank or insurance company to give him a loan. So the “money problem” is “out there”, as the kids like to say.

As of this morning Team Trump is asking the judge (uh, excuse me, “liberal, biased New York judge”) to allow him — the “really, really rich guy” with the gold-plated toilets — to pay just 20% of his tab, much like a court would allow you or me to cough up $20 to cover a $100 parking ticket.

Maybe some of the folks who confused the opening credit sequence of “The Apprentice” with reality are wondering, “Why didn’t he set aside some dough just in case he lost — at the hands of that biased, uppity, colored babe?” Or maybe take out a revolving line of credit on one of those big New York ofice buildings he says are worth billions?

Most likely the gullible fans of famous and “really, really rich” aren’t wondering much at all. This is all just another liberal attack on the “one true real American.” A tycoon who is again turning to them and pleading for their money to save his ass. Not cash for bogus college courses, knock off vodka, tough steaks or gold-plated sneakers, but to cover his legal bills, “Right now … before Monday! Before thewy get their filthy hands on Trump Tower and those toilets.”

Why anyone making south of $100k a year (and much less) would send a “really, really rich” billionaire money for anything boggles my mind. But Trump’s celebrity-struck masses have and still are, although less and less as time (and repeated appeals for more) have gone on. I mean, they gave him over $200 million to fight the “rigged election” almost all of which he pocketed in (another) naked fraud that he is not being prosecuted for by the Deep State. But they Belivers gave it and few if any complained about getting ripped off.

That PAC, his Save America gimmick, is still up and running, and he now has full control of the Republican National Committee’s fund-raising as well as his own Trump 2024 campaign income. All of money sucked in by all three could … could … go to his legal bills and not to getting him or any other Republican elected. Does the Trump herd understand that? Or care?

If I were a betting man, based on Trump’s fifty-plus years of marketing himself as vastly richer than he really is and evading America’s sclerotic legal system all along the way, I’d say he’ll skate on this one, too. Either the system will give him some pennies-on-the-dollar relief, or he’ll suddenly come in to a windfall from an undisclosed benefactor.

He may not like the look of (yet another) bankruptcy, but there’s no way he says “No” if a Russian oligarch or Saudi prince bails him out … on the down low, of course. No names on anything. Just a gift out of left field to a “friend”. A gift to a friend … with an “understanding.”

(The fine point being, as many others have pointed out, a guy desperate for money is the classic mark to be converted to an intelligence asset. Or, put simply, money from Russia makes Trump Russia’s man, even more than he already has been. And that all the while he is legally entitled to regular top security briefings as the presumptive Republican candidate. Jesus christ … ).

The mentality of the average fame-struck Trump idolator would have a much harder time with bankruptcy than a half billion dollar “gift” from an undisclosed, mysterious source. Bankruptcy looks so, mm, “shabby”. So much like drunken cousin Ted after buying that $80,000 pickup. But hundreds of millions from some unnamed source would be to them just further proof that “he’s a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy” … even if the guy in question is currently slaughtering Ukrainians by the hundreds and/or chopping up up newspaper columnists.

But “The Apprentice’s” producers never showed them any of that.