By now it’s practically a matter of public record that Donald Trump is a lifelong huckster who will do anything to make a buck. Days after the 2016 election he agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University, a smoke-and-mirrors operation that made University of Phoenix look like Stanford, where instructors were given a “playbook” that included the name of a TrumpU employee to call “if an Attorney General arrives on the scene.” Before that, the ex-beauty pageant owner was slapping his name on everything from steaks to mattresses to cologne to deodorant in exchange for lucrative licensing fees. In June, the New York attorney general sued him alleging “persistently illegal conduct” related to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, charging that the charity served as “little more than a checkbook for payments to not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization,” a suit Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, called “politics at its very worst.”

In addition to a willingness to do anything to enrich himself—like, for instance, (allegedly) dodging taxes for decades—we’ve yet to see evidence that the president of the United States cares about anyone not related to him by blood or marriage, or possesses the sort of moral compass that would prevent normal people from engaging in activity that hurts others. (According to The New York Times, the Trump family created a company in 1992 that not only allowed the family to siphon millions to Trump, his siblings, and a cousin, but also let them pad invoices so they could raise the rent on low-income tenants who were supposed to be protected by rent regulations. In a statement, Charles Harder, a lawyer for Trump, told the Times: “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone” and that such affairs were “handled by other Trump family members.”) So, really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise in the slightest that the president and his three adult children have been accused of pushing investment scams on thousands of vulnerable Americans in exchange for “lavish” payments they conveniently failed to mention in their sales pitches.

Filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday . . . the 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.