September 1, 2020: Let’s not delude ourselves. Donald J. Trump is the worst “LAW & ORDER” president we’ve ever had.
Today, he traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he talked about, basically, how much he loved cops.
This week he also warned that there were “planeloads of thugs,” dressed in black, flying about the country, landing in “Democratic-run cities,” stirring up rioting, and causing mayhem and bloodshed.
That sounded nuts.
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The worst “LAW &
ORDER” president we’ve ever had.
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Not only is Trump the worst “law and order” president we’ve ever had, he puts Richard M. Nixon and Warren G. Harding to shame. And why should we be surprised? This is the guy who bragged about grabbing women’s pussies—because he could. That’s sexual assault, of course.
“LAW & ORDER,” Trump style.
Trump isn’t interested in law or order, or even common decency. He’s the man who has two pending suits against him, filed by women, one by Summer Zervos, for defamation and sexual assault. The other was filed by E. Jean Carroll, alleging rape. This is the guy who was accused of rape by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, a 13-year-old virgin at the time of the alleged attack, and listed as “Jane Doe” in court documents. Her claim was supported by “Tiffany Doe,” who said she witnessed four incidents of assault by our now president, with Tiffany also admitting she helped recruit underage girls for Epstein’s sex-abuse ring. That case was dropped in April 2017, when Jane’s lawyer said her client “was fearful for her life.”
So, for Donald, innocent until proven guilty, at least.
Still, you get some sense of why the president went out of his way recently to say that he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well. She is, of course, Epstein’s alleged accomplice and main procurer of teen girls.
Trump can talk “LAW & ORDER” all he wants. But to use his favorite word, it’s a “scam.” This is the gentleman who defrauded students at his university and had to pay $25 million in restitution. This is the man who stiffed undocumented immigrant workers in the 1980s, fought to avoid paying for decades, and lost a $1.4 million judgment to them, too.
Trump and his talented “Team of Felons.”
President Lincoln is famous for assembling what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls a talented “Team of Rivals” to serve in his cabinet. Trump will be remembered assembling a talented “Team of Felons.” As Citizen Trump, he had already revealed his preferences by hiring Felix Sater, a convicted felon when Trump put him on the payroll. It was Sater who later suggested, if they hoped to close the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016, that they gift Vladimir Putin a suite in the proposed building, a perk which would be worth $50 million. There’s your “law and order.” Putin is a man guilty of a wide array of crimes, including bilking the Russian people out of tens of billions of dollars. And if anyone dares complain, he has them arrested, if they’re lucky, poisoned if they persist.
On an international front, since taking office, and even before, he has cozied up to some of the bloodiest killers on the planet, people for whom “law and order” don’t exist. At a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., in July 2016, Donald revealed his true colors. He admitted that Saddam Hussein was a “bad guy.”
“But you know what he did well?” Trump asked the crowd. “He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over.”
It was.
It was over. It was over for more than 5,000 Kurds, mostly women and children, when the Iraqi dictator ordered his air force to gas their town. It was over for all the brave Iraqis who protested against every kind of human rights abuse. They were beaten, raped, and tortured, and finally murdered in their cells.
“LAW & ORDER,” Saddam style.
A bizarre affinity for monsters.
Since rising to the highest office in the land, Trump has continued to cozy up to the world’s worst dictators. When Bill O’Reilly warned a newly-elected president that Putin was a “killer,” Trump showed disdain for basic justice and the rule of law. “What?” he replied. “You think we’re so innocent?”
Sure, Putin poisons critics; but Trump likes him anyway.
And it was telling, too, that President Donald J. Trump had agreed to sit down for an interview with a journalist he knew as an ally, working for a network run by Roger Ailes, Trump’s friend.
Both men would eventually be ousted, after women who worked at Fox came forward and made it clear O’Reilly and Ailes had long abused their power and been guilty of all manner of sexual harassment.
Trump is the guy who said later that O’Reilly, who had already paid several multi-million dollar settlements, shouldn’t have settled.
And, of course, while still a candidate, Trump said that he had always found Ailes to be “a very, very good person.”
Whereas, many of the women who worked at Fox News soon made it clear: Ailes was a predator.
Since taking office, Trump has shown a bizarre affinity for monsters. He has called the murderous Kim Jong-un a “friend,” and talked about the “very beautiful letters” Kim has sent him. Meanwhile, the North Korean dictator has continued to slaughter his critics and starve his people. Trump commended Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, for the “unbelievable job” he was doing on the “drug problem” in his country. Duterte’s secret, according to multiple human rights watchdogs? He had his police summarily execute alleged dealers, their clients, innocent bystanders, and political opponents who complained. Later, Trump defended Mohammed bin Salman, after the Saudi leader ordered a journalist assassinated and sliced into pieces. President Trump called him a friend, too; and he called Xi Jinping, China’s president, as corrupt a communist kleptocrat as ever walked the planet, both a “friend” and “an incredible guy.” Xi recently brought “LAW & ORDER” to Hong Kong.
That is: If you are a really big fan of stifling the free press, and sending in the military to crush dissent.
“Birds of a feather.”
This president doesn’t care about law and order, except when he thinks he can scare his base, and guarantee he wins reelection. He’s the guy who has one son fighting a subpoena, demanding he appear in court and testify in a fraud investigation. Three of his children (Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, again) were banned from doing charitable work, after a pattern of questionable spending was revealed at the Trump Foundation. My favorite example would be the decision to spend $10,000 in charitable donations on a massive painting of…Donald J. Trump.
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Having
made crookery a staple of his business career, Trump brought crookery to his
campaign, and introduced it like a virus to the White House.
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Having made crookery a staple of his business career, Trump brought crookery to his campaign, and introduced it like a virus to the White House. This particular germ tended to kill honest public servants. Felons, including those who were already felons when they were hired, those convicted since, and alleged felons, include Roger Stone, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael T. Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and George Nader. Nader was already a felon when he went to work for the campaign, having been convicted of child sex trafficking in 1991. He has since been indicted on additional child-pornography-related offenses. He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Steve Bannon, a mastermind of the 2016 campaign, was indicted in August, as part of an alleged fraud scheme. To add insult to legal injury, that scheme is said to have involved stealing money from the poor MAGA-hatted crowd who elected Trump, and thought Mexico would pay for the wall.
Innocent until proven guilty, again, in Bannon’s case, but good Lord, do we see a pattern yet?
Felons stick together, like the proverbial birds, and do what felons do. Trump and Nader helped win a massive contract for Eliott Broidy, to perform security work for the United Arab Emirates. That contract was reportedly worth as much as $200 million. And who wouldn’t be tempted to break a few laws for that kind of money? Breaking the law was kind of a habit for Broidy. He had already committed a few felonies, a decade earlier. To be fair, Broidy copped to one, that felony involving bribing four New York State officials, at a cost of $1 million. In return they granted him investment control over a huge slice of the state employees’ pension funds.
The crimes Trump’s campaign crew committed were many and varied and there is no record anyone ever talked seriously about “law and order” behind the scenes. Manafort earned most of his felonies for work he had previously done for shady Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, this work done before he joined Team Trump. Fittingly, Deripaska, a Russian businessman, had been banned from travel to the United States over his role in an international money-laundering scheme. Manfort would then earn a “bonus” felony, one of ten he piled up in court, for witness tampering during the Russia investigation. In fact, he was so inclined to continue waltzing down a rewarding criminal path that the judge in his case refused to grant bail. Roger Stone also piled up the felonies, seven in all, including for lying to Congress during the Russian investigation. Then he added a cherry felony to his six scoop sundae, by trying to intimidate a witness.
Manafort has a day (one of many) in court.
Trump’s personal lawyer for more than a decade, Michael Cohen, racked up eight felonies. Most of those were earned in service to Donald, himself. Those counts included tax evasion and campaign finance violations, including payoffs to a porn queen, one Playboy bunny, a Trump Tower doorman—and, good god—a second Playboy bunny. The first three were meant to protect Trump’s reputation, such as it was, during the run-up to the 2016 election. The last payoff, a $1.6 million whopper, went to silence a Playmate who alleged she had been impregnated by Eliott Broidy, and keep her from talking about their affair and a subsequent abortion.
And lest we forget: the indictment filed in Cohen’s case mentioned a co-conspirator, labeled “Individual 1.”
Trump.
Before moving on, we should mention two more indicted individuals: Konstantin Kilimnik and Natalia Veselnitskaya. Kilimnik worked closely with Manafort during the time the latter ran Trump’s 2016 campaign. In a recently-released, bi-partisan report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik is referred to as a Russian secret agent, and Manafort as “a grave counterintelligence threat.”
Veselnitskaya famously met with Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June that year. The meeting was arranged after she claimed she could offer dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Sadly, both Kilimnik and Veselnitskaya are currently beyond the reach of U.S. law, having absconded to Russia.
I’m sorry this post can’t be read in Braille.
If there has ever been a more criminally-inclined, anti-law and order bunch to lead this great country, I am not aware. And I taught American history for three decades. Trump is the first president, to my knowledge to step in repeatedly, and overturn punishments ordered by U.S. military courts. I’m fairly certain he’s the only president ever to call the military justice system a “disgrace.” Trump has repeatedly put a thumb on the scales and tried to tip it one way or the other, something normal presidents try not to do. He suggested two different U.S. soldiers, Chelsea Manning, and Bowe Bergdahl, were guilty of treason, the punishment being execution. He has called for swift and harsh punishment for criminals facing trial in civilian courts, too, and called a jury verdict he considered too lenient a “travesty of justice.”
Even before he ran for office, his “law and order” instincts were warped out of shape. He liked to refer to people accused of crimes as “animals,” even though the “animals” often prove innocent. He once demanded death for the Central Park Five. Those young African American men were, indeed, convicted for their part in a brutal rape and the near-fatal beating of a white female jogger.
It took years to clear their names; but cleared they were. If Trump had had his way, five innocent men would already have been dead.
Donald J. Trump is to “law and order” as Al Capone is to “paying your taxes.” Trump has been battling doggedly to keep his own tax records hidden from prying eyes. He and his legal team battled all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight a request for documents. That request is part of—yes—another fraud investigation, filed by the State of New York. The Supreme Court swatted away his arguments in one case and gave only temporary relief in the other.
Who is this guy? Trump is the guy who pardoned one felon (Stone), because that felon never ratted him out. Trump is the guy who tried to stop another felon who served him (Cohen) from writing a book about his experiences. When that felon was released from prison, as part of an effort to clear inmates out of cells in the face of spreading COVID-19 infection, the Trump administration ordered him back to prison, unless he agreed to take a deal.
That deal? Stop talking about the book and stop working on it, and you can remain free. Cohen refused, filed suit, and a federal judge ruled in his favor, saying his First Amendment rights had been violated.
Look. If you still don’t see the trend, I’m sorry my post can’t be read in Braille. Trump showed his stripes again, when two congressman, Duncan Hunter (and his wife) and Chris Collins, early supporters of Trump’s run for office, were indicted in separate cases. Hunter and his wife were nailed for stealing campaign funds. Collins got arrested and charged with insider trading.
This prompted the president to fire off an angry tweet:
Two long running, Obama era,
investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a
well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions
Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough
time. Good job Jeff......
Rep. Duncan Hunter, in better days.
In other words, Trump wasn’t interested in law and order so much as protecting his pals, and Sessions, his own pick for Attorney General, was weak for ignoring that fact. Duncan Hunter has since been sentenced to eleven months in prison, while his wife got off with eight months of home confinement—largely because she flipped on her sticky-fingered spouse. Collins pled guilty, as did his co-defendants, Cameron Collins, his son, and Steven Zarsky, father of Cameron Collins’ fiancée.
And if you’re keeping track, that would be five wins for true law and order, and zero for Trump.
The list of examples to prove the central point could be continued for as long as a diligent reader could stand—that central point being that this president cares no more about “law and order,” or even the rule of law, than guys like Kim Jong-un and Putin and the bone-sawing types. We just happen to be fortunate that we live in a country where the rule of law still applies, and where a president’s worst instincts, so far, have been checked. And those instincts are starkly manifest.
Trump has called the U.S. system of justice itself “a disgrace.” When the lower courts go against him, he attacks judges. He called one judge who ruled against him “a hater.” He said the judge was biased because he was “Mexican.” That judge was born in Indiana and went to law school in Indiana, too.
The president has insisted that an array of political foes and even critics should be jailed, despite the fact none have ever been:
1. Charged with actual crimes.
2. Been granted a trial, with a real judge, a jury, lawyers
for and against, witnesses—you know, the works.
3. Convicted by a jury or pled guilty.
These individuals would include, but not be limited to, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, a Clinton aide, financier George Soros, former F.B.I. Director James Comey, Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok (an F.B.I. agent guilty of “treason,” according to Trump), Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, flag burners, Steve Rattner, a critic, and the rapper Snoop Dogg.
Trump has even suggested that The New York Times could be guilty of treason for printing articles he doesn’t like.
“LAW & ORDER,” Hitler style.
In fact, a perfect measure of Trump’s lawless instincts would be the fact that he wanted flag burners thrown into prison. This, despite the fact the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case, that flag burning, just like flag waving (which President Trump loves almost as much as he loves banging porn stars) is just one different form of First Amendment free speech.
A closeted authoritarian, ready to come out.
This is who and what Trump is. He’s a closeted authoritarian, ready if reelected to come out at last, in all his flaming glory. This is a president who dispatched Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to drum up any dirt he could find related to Hunter and Joe Biden. Rudy is the toady who quickly lined up two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to help. Last October, both were charged with violating straw and foreign donor bans in U.S. political campaigns. And again, we should see patterns. We know Sam Patten, a well-connected Republican fund raiser, pled guilty to arranging for a Ukrainian oligarch and another foreigner to buy $50,000 worth of tickets to one of the Trump inaugural events. To do it they used an American straw purchaser. We know Imaad Zuberi, who donated $900,000 to the inauguration fund, was later indicted and admitted to his own series of felonies. Among other questionable actions, which led to a charge of obstruction of justice, Mr. Zuberi covered up the fact that at least $50,000 “he” donated came from a foreign individual.
According to CNN, Zuberi also deleted emails related to a number of illegal transactions. Those included “a $5.8 million transfer from a foreign national that came in around the time of his [$900,000] political donation.”
So it goes, in the fun-house mirrors world of Donald J. Trump. You have a president who praises a member of Congress for body-slamming a British reporter. That lawmaker, Greg Gianforte, first claimed he didn’t slam anyone. Then witnesses said he did. Gianforte pled guilty eventually, got slapped with a misdemeanor, and had to pay several thousand dollars in restitution. This was reminiscent of Candidate Trump offering to pay the legal fees for a supporter who sucker-punched a demonstrator at one of his rallies. That man was also charged with assault—which is perilously close to the exact opposite of being for “law and order.”
Look, this isn’t “Fake News,” just because, if you like Trump, you don’t like what you read. I simply keep track.
So, here’s a little more of what I know, and the average voter should know. After Matthew Heimbach, an avowed white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at yet another Trump rally, his lawyer claimed Heimbach should not be held responsible. His client had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump,” who had working hard to stoke the hate. When Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. sent bombs to Joe Biden, Barack Obama and CNN, his lawyer asked the judge for leniency, because his client saw President Trump as a “father figure.” And when three Kansas men were convicted of plotting to blow up the homes of Somali immigrants, who happened to be Muslim, and attack a mosque, their lawyers also blamed the President of the United States. As one defendant’s attorney explained,
As long as the Executive Branch
condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies,
then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people
generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies
identified by their own Commander-in-Chief.
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In the end, the most
dangerous thug in the United States today is the President of the United States.
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Trump, his wife, Epstein and Maxwell, in happier times.
I don’t make this up. I keep track. Who was the federal prosecutor, for example, who let Jeffrey Epstein off on a single count of soliciting prostitution in 2008? That sweetheart plea deal, when dozens of young women had already come forward to complain, allowed Epstein to abuse girls for a decade more. That prosecutor would be Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump to serve as his first Secretary of Labor.
This is no “law and order” crew. Can you remember which Trump cabinet official had to resign after racking up more than $1 million in unauthorized travel expenses and sticking taxpayers for the tab? What other cabinet member resigned in the face of at least a dozen investigations into abuse of power, including for financial gain? Which cabinet official still has hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in banks on the island of Cyprus, where money-laundering is a sport? Finally, what former cabinet member called Donald J. Trump a threat to the U.S. Constitution, and accused him of ignoring the fundamental concept of “Equal Justice Under the Law?”
Those cabinet members would be, in order: Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross and Gen. James Mattis, the only one honest enough to quit in disgust.
This is exactly who Donald J. Trump is. He’s not about “LAW & ORDER,” and he never will be. He might scare his base into believing that he’s the only person who can stop the rioting in places like Portland and Kenosha—and crush legal protesting too. He won’t even admit the difference, and doesn’t care that there is. Just this week the president defended the actions of a young 17-year-old man, Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged with murder. Rittenhouse is alleged to have killed two Black Lives Matter protesters, and wounded a third. None, as far as we know, were armed themselves. But Trump has already made up his mind, which means he pressed his thumb down hard on the scales of justice again. Trump said on TV that Rittenhouse was “violently attacked,” basing his opinion solely on a bit of tape he had watched. Had the young man not fired, Trump suggested, “he probably would have been killed.” So, now we know. If a teen with an AR-15, a weapon he’s not legally allowed to own, opens fire on people without weapons, then, sure. Call it self-defense.
And watch out for imaginary thugs on imaginary planes.
In the end, the most dangerous thug in the United States today is the President of the United States.
He’s not for “LAW & ORDER” in even the most basic sense of the words. In fact, he’s the first—and only—president ever to claim that if he faces legal jeopardy, he can just pardon himself.
We need to face up to facts. If we care about the rule of law, about justice in the broadest sense, we must vote Trump out.
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