June 1, 2020: Seeds of Dictatorship Seen in Lafayette Square

 

June 1, 2020: This may go down in history as the day Donald Trump destroyed his presidency.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (1/10/21): It didn’t. But the most authoritarian president in history finished himself off on January 6, 2021.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE #2 (7/16/21): Okay, I was too optimistic in January 2021, too. Trump supporters shrugged off the Capitol Hill riot. And leaders of the Republican Party generally continued to kiss his posterior.

 

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Trump’s “Selma March,” in reverse.

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Black Lives Protests already convulse the nation. Hundreds of thousands are marching in the streets. There is looting, too, an unfortunate corollary of legitimate grievance throughout history. On Friday, May 29, protesters rattle barriers around the White House. A breach seems imminent. Secret Service agents move Trump, the First Lady, and son Barron, to a secure room beneath the Presidential Mansion. Some idiot tries to set fire to St. John’s Episcopal Church, within view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Protesters in Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House, throw bricks and rocks at police. Chants of, “Fuck Trump,” fill the air. 

Donald Trump is rattled. 

The story leaks in the press about the First Family retreating to the bunker. The president fumes. It makes him sound weak. After stewing all weekend, on this Monday in June, he decides to act. 

Irresponsibly, of course.

 

* 

There has to be “retribution.” 

MONDAY AFTERNOON he takes a call with governors and mayors around the country. The New York Times acquires audio. At a time when a calming voice is needed, President Trump is agitated. What he wants to do is target and silence protesters. “You can’t do the deal where they get one week in jail,” he tells the others. “These are terrorists. These are terrorists…it shouldn’t be hard to take care of, and we’re going to take care of it.” His words are either promise or threat. 

“Terrorists.” 

Make note of what he calls American protesters.

 

Trump tells everyone on the other end of the line that Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is listening on the White House end. Milley is “a fighter, a warrior, had a lot of victories, and no losses. And he hates to see the way it’s being handled, and the various things, and I just put him in charge.” This comes as a surprise to everyone, including Gen. Milley. 

In times of unrest, governors have power to call out the National Guard. If they need help they ask for federal assistance. 

None of the governors have. 

“We’re strongly looking for arrests, we do have to get much tougher,” Trump insists. “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you, and you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. You have to arrest people and try people, and they have to go to jail for long periods of time [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]” If the President of the United States has ever heard of “due process,” it doesn’t show.

 

Trump seems to be watching TV during the call. He expresses shock at what happened in Dallas. He says protesters kicked a man to death. He admits he’s not sure the man is dead. His contempt is clear. “It’s coming from the radical left. You know it. Everybody knows it,” he barks. He sees film of a young black looter who carries a new TV out of a ruined store and puts it in the back of a car. “The harder you are, the tougher you are, the less likely it is you’re going to be hit,” the president explains. 

He blames the trouble on Antifa. He says it’s “like a movement. If you don’t put it down, it will get worse and worse. This is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster, until one day somebody said, ‘That’s enough,’ and they just went in and wiped them out.” Trump’s anger has taken hold. He wants Americans wiped out. He says the Occupy folks weren’t worried about the law. They were camped out, “ordering pizzas.” Finally, police cleared out the protesters. It was “bedlam for an hour. And after that it was beautiful,” he says. “But these are the same people. They’re anarchists.”  

He ignores the fact protests have spread to hundreds of cities, towns, and neighborhoods across the nation.

 

He tells the mayors and governors, “I’m for everybody, I’m representing everybody. I’m not representing radical right, radical left, I’m representing everybody.” You can’t be weak, he says again, “but most of you are weak.” 

Mr. Trump makes clear his admiration for tactics being deployed by the National Guard, offering a play-by-play commentary. He’s excited to see protesters on TV, being knocked down “like bowling pins.” He sees a rioter throw a brick, winding up like a baseball player. Apparently, he watches a slow motion replay. These people have to get “five years, ten years” in jail, he growls. There has to be “retribution.” He promises, in D.C. “we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before.” 

He’s hatching a plan.

 

* 

NOT LONG AFTER, the President marches out to the Rose Garden and addresses the nation. At this point, protesters in Lafayette Square are peaceful. The crowd is not friendly to the president, but these are citizens exercising First Amendment rights. Trump? Trump wants to sound tough. He promises to be the “law and order” president. More ominously, he threatens to use active duty troops to clear the nation’s streets, if governors and mayors “refuse” to do their jobs. 

He says he will do it quickly, and might invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump is later rumored to have asked about bringing in 10,000 U.S. soldiers to drive away the protesters from in front of the White House. 

Meanwhile a plan is being perfected – if you can say Team Trump ever perfects a plan. Someone (reportedly Ivanka) convinces the president to take a stroll. The president, or someone in his administration, orders law enforcement officers from an alphabet soup of federal agencies, bolstered by active duty military police, to drive the protesters from Lafayette Park. Shortly after 6:30 p.m., authorities begin firing tear gas, and using flash-bang devices and bludgeons to clear the area.

 

Once the air clears, Trump and an entourage of top aides emerge from the White House. Ivanka is there, sporting a protective black COVID-19 mask, and carrying a $1,500 designer handbag. Inside is a Bible. White House aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner is by her side. The usual assortment of bootlickers, including Press Secretary McEnany, flank the president. Unfortunately, Gen. Milley accompanies the “marchers.” So does Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Both appear to give a military stamp of approval to the attack on peaceful protesters. 

Trump bravely walks a thousand feet – out the front door of the White House – across Pennsylvania Avenue – cutting through Lafayette Park – and crossing another boulevard – to stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. There, he takes the Bible handed to him by First Daughter Ivanka. He hoists it over his head, glowers, and intones, “Greatest country in the world. And we’re going to keep it safe.” 

Trump poses in front of St.  Johns.

Having offered a dozen words of “inspiration,” he pivots on his heels (ignoring the pain he feels from his old bone spurs) and hoofs it back, another thousand feet, to his West Wing bunker. Then the president gets back to the business of dividing the country. Soon after completing his pathetic “Selma March” in reverse, he tweets out fresh insult. He calls the African American mayor of Washington D.C. “incompetent.” She is not fit, he says, to lead a great city.

 

* 

LIKE MOST AMERICANS, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is aghast. The fact that Esper and Milley accompanied Trump, strikes her and many others as having watched the seeds of dictatorship being planted. “I imposed a curfew at 7 pm.,” Bowser explains. “A full 25 minutes before the curfew & w/o provocation, federal police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House.” 

This, she warns, will only antagonize demonstrators. It will make the job of D.C. police “more difficult.” “Shameful!” she calls the decision. “DC residents – Go home. Be safe,” she suggests. 

MAGA fans, of course, applaud the president’s stunt. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Press Secretary McEnany announces that Trump’s appearance before St. Johns was a great moment for the American people. She compares Trump to Winston Churchill bucking up the spirits of Britons during the London Blitz in 1940. 

As Maureen Dowd writes, this is too much for most Americans to swallow. “We shall fight them on the golf courses,” she writes, quoting a friend. “We shall fight them on Twitter. We shall fight them at Mar-a-Lago.” 

In days to follow, more than two dozen former U.S. military leaders pillory the man in the White House. They make their concern clear. They label Trump a threat to the U.S. Constitution. 

(Due to their importance, their comments are collected under a separate post.)

Special Post: Last Words of Rep. John Lewis

 

Rep. John Lewis, who spent his life fighting for justice, passed away on July 17. He had been beaten badly, more than once, for standing up for human dignity. He had seen the worst of Jim Crow justice and helped destroy it at the foundation. He had been elected to high office, after growing up in an era when most African Americans in the Deep South were denied the right to vote. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, he penned the following tribute to those millions who had stood up to protest.  

Lewis was beaten and arrested repeatedly

in the fight against Jim Crow injustice.

It was released on the morning of July 30, a few hours before his funeral service began: 

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

 

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“Good trouble, necessary trouble.”

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While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

 

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

 

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison [emphasis added], and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

 

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

 

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

 

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

 

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

 

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

 

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

August 25, 2020: Right-Wingers Play "Racist Bingo"

 

8/25/20: It didn’t take a genius to see this coming, and it won’t take a genius to tell you President Trump won’t take the blame. Tuesday night, a 17-year-old from Illinois, armed with an AR-15, shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and wounded a third.

Kyle Rittenhouse, 17.

 

According to sources, Kyle Rittenhouse, the alleged shooter, was “obsessed” with the Blue Lives Matter movement. What better way to show support for “law and order” than to join like-minded vigilantes, travel to another state, and gun down protesters? According to one report, Rittenhouse was one of a group of heavily-armed men who described themselves as “armed citizens [come] to protect our lives and property.”  

Look, we of the liberal persuasion get it. People burning down stores are a species of idiot; but unleashing people like Rittenhouse, is not the solution. 

(There’s also no evidence the people he shot were burning down anything.) 

The young man has been charged with fleeing across state lines as well as murder. Look for President Trump to take one of two courses. First, he ignores the story. More likely, he offers “calming words” and attacks “Democratic mayors” for letting criminals run amok in city streets.

 

* 

AT LEAST Donald J. Trump’s businesses are doing better. Federal Election Commission filings show $2.3 million in donations to the president’s reelection campaign have been transferred to companies he owns, to pay for rent, food, and lodging. Since taking office, for example, Orange Leader has accepted $1.5 million in rent from his own campaign on just one property in New York City, his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. The Republican National Committee has paid $225,000. The Trump campaign has also paid the Trump Organization $281,000.

 * 

IN OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention has had a few snags. For example, there are only so many Trump family members available to speak. And we know his older sister is out (see: 8/23/20). So, the lineup of guests can seem thin. You can’t get former GOP nominees for president, successful or otherwise, to talk, because with one exception (Bob Dole) those still living (Bush 43 and Romney), and at least two deceased (Bush 41 and John McCain), considered Trump a cancer. 

That meant you had Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend filling a speaker’s slot, shouting into an empty arena, as if she were talking to an audience of the deaf, and believed volume would cure their impairment. Kimberly Guilfoyle – who probably caused deafness in a few listeners with good ears in the process – whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, yelled about how her parents immigrated to this country, and how if Joe Biden won in November, America would no longer be the haven of freedom it has always been for people like her mother and father. 

Critics were quick to point out that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. That means Guilfoyle’s mom and dad were citizens the moment they were born, which somehow, she didn’t realize.

 

Another speaker was Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist. That’s fine. People of good conscience can disagree about that topic. 

More of a surprise are her views on voting. It turns out, back in May, she tweeted support for “head of household voting.” She explained that “in a Godly household, the husband would get the final say.” 

That would mean, if she and her husband disagreed, her husband would vote for the candidate he liked. Mrs. Johnson could stay home and make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich upon his return. 

This must be the Republican Party’s idea of making it up to women for running a Pussy Grabber for president. 

 

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The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law or otherwise.

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You can and should sympathize with anyone who loses a loved one, or who sees a loved one badly injured. For example, the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Or the families of two men allegedly killed by Kyle Rittenhouse. The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law, or otherwise. 

When the RNC invited Mary Ann Mendoza, an “Angel Mom,” to speak about her son’s death in 2014, you could understand she might have something important to say. Her son, a Mesa, Arizona police officer, was killed in a head-on collision in 2014, involving a drunk driver. That driver was in this country illegally.

 

No one story proves a point involving millions of human beings, but you can surely feel the mother’s overarching, unending pain. The same for the other 30 families, on average, who lose loved ones to drunk drivers every day, and the 10,500 stories that could be told in the United States every year. 

Then again if you are Team Trump, and you are trying to stir hatred and fear against illegal immigrants, yeah. Pick this one example. 

Mendoza would still get a pass in my liberal book because pain is pain. But her speaking slot was revoked when it was revealed she had posted a link on her Twitter feed, and suggested her 40,000 followers read a story rife with anti-Semitic tropes and horrible comments. Included in the story were selections from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic “classic” and a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Fans of QAnon jumped in on the thread, with comments like these, suggesting that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave non-Jews and promote world wars.” It was said the Titanic had been sunk to protect the Federal Reserve, and that every president between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump “was a ‘slave president’ in the thrall of a global cabal.” 

My sympathy for Mrs. Mendoza, in regards to her loss, remains. I would think, however, that a mother who knew great pain might not be trafficking in the same kind of hate that led to the death of 6,000,000 Jews.

 

Not that it matters much, but Mendoza also lost points in my book when I learned she was listed as a consultant on the “We Build the Wall” project. 

That is the project, we now know, which allegedly involved a significant degree of self-dealing and fraud. 

(Not by her.) 

A check of Wikipedia reveals her son, Brandon, was 32 at the time of his death. He was driving home from a shift in his own car, when the drunk driver, a man with a lengthy criminal history, and without a driver’s license, crossed the center line. Both men were killed. The drunk had a blood alcohol level of 0.24%, three times the legal limit. R.I.P. Officer Mendoza. 

Blue Lives Matter. 

And so do Jewish lives, Mrs. Mendoza. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: This blogger has a number of excellent Republican and conservative friends. None, as far as he knows, are racists or bigots. They would not be his friends if he knew they were. 

 

“All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

Nevertheless, racists and bigots are clearly fond of Mr. Trump. Case in point: Marjorie Taylor Greene, running for a seat in Congress in November, and a big fan of crazy conspiracy theories. 

From the outset, Ms. Greene has had detractors even within the Republican Party. The slogan adopted by Dr. John Cowan, the Republican who lost to her in a primary contest, was, “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

“She is not conservative,” he told Politico before the runoff. “She’s crazy.”

 

A check of web archives done by NBC News revealed that Greene, running in a safely Republican district, should win a seat, despite having promoted all manner of dangerous absurdities. She believed the “Pizzagate” tale, which led some other dope to shoot up a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. She posted about a “Clinton Kill List,” which theorized that Mrs. Clinton had ordered a string of assassinations, but the “Deep State” covered for her. In another post she questioned whether or not a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. 

When violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Ms. Greene did President Trump one better, when he said there were “good people on both sides.” Greene claimed that the white supremacists weren’t involved in the killing of Heather Heyer and the injury to 19 other anti-hate protesters. The attack was an “inside job,” carried out to “further the agenda of the elites.” 

James Fields, who drove the car that killed Heyer and injured the others, was involved in an “accident,” she maintained. 

Greene also suggested recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, noting that the punishment is execution. Previously, she had suggested that a good way to remove Pelosi from power would be – no, not voting her out – but “a bullet to the head.” 

So, one must wonder. Do Greene and poor deluded individuals like Rittenhouse and Fields all drink from the same toxic fountain of neo-fascist hate? 

This blogger would argue that they do. 

 

Greene fills her card for Racist Bingo.  

Candidate Greene came in for fresh criticism after Politico uncovered inflammatory videos she posted online. Not entirely a fan of religious freedom, she suggested in one rant that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the U.S. government, and that there was an “Islamic invasion” going on. She noted that a Muslim woman elected to Congress wanted to put her hand on the Quran to be sworn in. “No,” Greene said (clearly never having read the Constitution.) Her description of sexual practices in the Muslim world was textbook bigotry. I found myself surprised, as I listened, to a tape she made, that she hadn’t claimed Muslim men had sex with camels. Wait…I am typing and listening to her screed…She just mentioned “goats and sheep.” Greene has suggested in the past that George Soros, a Democratic megadonor, was a Nazi in his youth, even though Soros is a Jew. And if this was Racist Bingo, she filled her card by saying that blacks should be proud to walk past statues of Confederate generals, because those statues show how far we’ve come in overcoming racism. 

A story in The New York Times added depth to what should be Greene’s shame – save for the fact the Trump base clearly loves her. 

A clear indication that Greene was more than a dabbler in QAnon was her 2018 endorsement of “Frazzledrip,” one of the most grotesque tendrils of the movement’s mythology. You “have to go down a number of rabbit holes to get that far,” said Mike Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, comes out later this year.

 

The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.

 

When Greene posted a picture of Donald Trump with the mother of the slain N.Y.P.D. officer Miosotis Familia on Facebook, one of her commenters described Frazzledrip and wrote, “This was another Hillary hit.” Greene replied, “Yes Familia,” then continued, “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad to see your comment.”

 

Michelle Goldberg, whose last name alone should send QAnon believers into a tizzy, describes the whole “Q” movement as “a repurposed version of the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat.” 

Of course, Greene is not the first nutjob on the right to demonize Mrs. Clinton, but more in a “proud” line of nutjob thinkers. 

Goldberg notes: 

An attendee at the 1996 Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” Running for Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trump’s secretary of the interior, described her as “the Antichrist.” (He later said he was joking.) Trump himself called Clinton “the Devil.”

 

In any case, when this blogger tunes in again to listen to Greene’s old tape, he hears her say “the most mistreated group of people in these United States today, are white males…they are blamed for everything…they’re the scapegoats…” 

At that point he can’t take any more. 

Greene insists that her old posts no longer represent her views. You can watch her story here if you have the stomach.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Greene goes on to win a seat in Congress. By February 2021, she has become such an embarrassment, that the U.S. House of Representatives votes, 230-199, to strip her of all committee assignments. That includes one on the Education and Labor Committee. In her own defense, Greene claims she no longer believes in QAnon. She blames her earlier positions – that leading Democrats deserve to die for their role in a diabolic pedophile ring – on her inability to trust the mainstream media. 

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she says. 

Only 11 Republicans join in the vote against her, which would seem to be an indictment of the GOP, more generally.

Trump is the worst "Law & Order" president we've ever had

 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. 

____________________ 

The worst “LAW & ORDER” president we’ve ever had.

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Even Warren G. wasn't this bad.

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. 

Check used for a payoff, signed by Trump, who said he didn't know about any payoffs.

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. 

The virus in the White House kills honest men and women. 

General Mattis found that out.

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.