Follow the Money

 

“Democracies survive when all major players respect the ground rules. They crumble when significant players start to flout those rules -- and get away with it.” Sasha Abramsky, The Nation

Trump’s up, Biden’s down, Trump’s down, Biden’s up. The election will be a nail biter. It will be a blowout, a landslide for Biden because the overwhelming majority of the American people reject Donald J. Trump and the Trumpism Project. Trump is desperate for a close contest so he can challenge the results and possibly kick the final decision on the outcome to the Supreme Court. This partly explains why Trump is hellbent on ramming another product of The Federalist Society through the Senate confirmation process and onto the court, pronto.  Even though conservatives enjoy a clear majority on the Court, Trump’s not willing to gamble. Maybe that majority isn’t as solidly pro-Trump as we are led to believe. How many times has the most despicable bottom feeder turned and snapped at the hand that once elevated and supported it? 

Have you ever wondered what Putin and Trump spoke about when they met behind closed doors with only their translators present? I assume both sides have recordings. In Helsinki they met for a couple of hours, before emerging so Trump could tell the world that when it came to Russian interference in the 2016 election, he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies. That should have spelled the end of Trump, right then and there. It would have ended the run of every other president since 1960. It was one of the first significant shocks of the Trump reign, an admission totally against the grain, but I don’t remember many ex-generals and Secretaries of State or Defense, former FBI and NSA and CIA Directors, losing their shit when Trump sucked up to Putin before the entire world. The spectacle was written off as Trump refusing to follow the norms of his office and the advice of people who know fifty times more than he does. 

Does Putin call the president, Donald? Do they have a secret handshake shared by grifters the world over? Is Trump in love with Putin? Is a desperate longing for the embrace of another man what lies at the center of Trump’s sociopathy?

Trump doesn’t let pesky details get in his way; he’s a “big picture” guy. 

As far as I know, Putin doesn’t play golf and Donald J. Trump doesn’t ride horses. (Frankly, the visual of Donald J. Trump attempting to climb, or be lifted by crane, onto a horse’s back is priceless.) So, what did these two men talk about in Helsinki, why has nothing been reported about it, and what have Putin and Trump talked about since? Does Putin call the president, Donald? Do they have a secret handshake shared by grifters the world over? Is Trump in love with Putin? Is a desperate longing for the embrace of another man what lies at the center of Trump’s sociopathy? Is he a self-loathing homosexual? Does that explain why an obese, weak, ignorant and cowardly old man goes overboard on displays of masculinity and menace? Or why he’s always threatening women who don’t stand for his bullshit? Pundits frequently tell us that Trump is projecting who he is on the rest of us. Why does Trump always pose before mammoth trucks, hold rallies using Air Force One as a backdrop, salute the military even though every active duty military member knows what Trump thinks about them? (Suckers. Losers.) Is Trump’s need for big toys, glittering women, and endless adulation all because he had a shattering, unrequited homosexual love affair at the New York Military Academy? Is reliving that experience -- those fleeting moments in the communal showers after lights’ out, when for the only time in his entire existence did Trump feel the stirrings of love and connection with another person -- the reason he’s up at all hours whining and bitching and spreading lies on Twitter? Because he lost his one chance at happiness? Because the one time his penis and his brain gave him diametrically opposed messages both happened to be true? That neither penis or brain were untruthful, was, and is, the torment. Trump’s brain screamed, “These feelings can’t be real!” while his erect penis answered back, “No, Donald, they are very real.” Donald buried the experience deep, under glitz and glitter and self-aggrandizing behavior, and it rarely surfaced until now, when the entire Donald J. Trump Show looks like being cancelled due to ridiculous storylines, bad writing, cardboard characters, incompetent directing and low approval ratings. Trump never bought the idea that truth, about anything, but in particular about himself, would free him. No, Trump believes a real man buries his deepest fears, regrets, lost opportunities, missed chances, failures, missteps, and feelings in the footings of a skyscraper. 

Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money. The key to who Trump is and what he does resides in his income tax returns, and that’s why he has battled for years to keep them away from public scrutiny. Recent reporting by the New York Times points to what a number of smart people, including the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who for years opined that Donald Trump is a tax evader, a tax fraud, and a business failure who isn’t anywhere near as wealthy as he claims. According to reporting by the Times, Trump is hundreds of million of dollars in debt.  He’s not a business wizard. He’s just a common white collar criminal. 

Trump will attack the New York Times, call for whoever leaked his tax information to be executed, and demand William Barr make the whole mess disappear down the memory hole. He’ll whine about being treated unfairly. We’ve seen this show many times, and it gets no better with repetition. 

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 6 (4th of July edition)

“All I need's a volunteer

I'll cut you in half

While you're smilin' ear to ear

And the freedom that you sought

Driftin' like a ghost amongst the trees

This is what will be”

Bruce Springsteen, Magic

Who will be the last to die from a mistake? It’s a line from the Bruce Springsteen song, “Last to Die.” It’s a relevant question in this time of Covid-19 chaos, with Donald Trump and Mike Pence lying their way to what I hope will be eternal infamy, almost 129,000 dead, millions unemployed, rents and mortgages delinquent, and still, still, six exhausting, anxious months into this thing, no coordinated federal government response on testing, tracing, PPE, income protection for workers and families, or even the merest empathy for the dead and the grieving and the sick and the worried. 

Trump and Pence and all the Fox News blabbers have fed us a steady diet of bullshit, pie-in-the-sky false hope, and a triple helping of magical thinking. 

Trump got bored, Pence went back to praying for the end of the world. Job done. Americans should be outraged by the endless string of failures, scandals, fuck-ups, calamaties, and incompetence engineered by Donald J. Trump and his battalion of Enablers. When Trump and the rest of these jackasses take their final bow and limp or crawl off the stage, I hope we don’t spend even a minute trying to rehabilitate their images like we did with  many Confederates after the Civil War. Let them stand forever as symbols of failure, destruction, and death. 

4th of July, fuck me. The beaches are closed, fireworks cancelled, bars shuttered, movie houses dark. Except for a jog over to the high school, I haven’t left the confines of our apartment building all day. I am now acquainted with every inch of our small yard, from fence to fence. I’ve taken to placing my hands on the trunk of one of our gum trees, for reassurance, the feel of a living thing that will survive this strange time. 

Incompetence kills. Write it down, pass it on, post it on your favorite social media platform. Incompetence kills. It’s a long way to January 2021. Don’t underestimate the damage Trump, Pence, McConnell and Barr can do in the months ahead. 

Let me see if I can wrap part of my brain around recent news reports -- some of them breathless -- that Trump’s buddy, Vladimir Putin, King of Russia, offered cash to elements of the Taliban for killing American soldiers. The American media is astonished, almost apoplectic, first that Russia would bankroll the killing of our brave men & women, and second, that Donald Trump either didn’t read the carefully prepared intelligence that he was provided this past February, or that he refused to believe what he read (or more likely was told), and decided it wasn’t worth even a phone call to his friend in Moscow.  

It’s no secret that Trump admires the way Putin holds and wields and constantly expands his powers. On the other hand, I have never bought the notion that Trump is a Russian asset. Trump is far too scattered, impulsive, stupid, and undisciplined to be run as an agent. I think it’s far more probable that Donald Trump laundered money for Russian oligarchs when they looted the former Soviet Union. I think this explains why Trump is fighting the release of his tax returns in the Supreme Court, as well as why he treats Putin with such deference. The returns may show income sources, investment portfolios, but may also reveal what people like the journalist David Cay Johnston have suspected for years: that Trump never had as much wealth as he claimed.  

I’m not for war. I’ve been against the undeclared and illegal war in Afghanistan since it began. I support slashing the Pentagon budget in half. I’m just an average citizen, but I knew Afghanistan was a mistake and would end in failure. What I never suspected was that successive administrations would keep the war going for nearly 20 years, using the same litany of lies we heard during the Vietnam War: we’ve turned a corner, we must build up the Aghan troops, we’re winning hearts and minds, we just need a troop surge to finish the job, we’re making progress, the Taliban are contained, we’re meeting our strategic objectives, etc, etc. 

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA sprang into action, supplying weapons, money, training and logistical support to the Afghan mujahideen, whose first and only loyalty was to expelling the invaders without giving up any tribal advantage or territory. How many young Soviet soldiers returned to their homeland in body bags, courtesy of the American-supported mujahideen? Not a few, not hundreds, but thousands. Putin would recall the Soviet Union’s failure and humiliation in Afghanistan very well. It must be his Vietnam. The overwhelming force of a superpower defeated by a determined and unyielding guerrilla army that received plenty of help from the United States. I imagine Putin would enjoy settling that score, inflicting casualties on the US, who really have no business being in Afghanistan in 2020. We cannot win any more than our arrogant leaders can admit defeat. 

The message from the US is always the same: it’s fine when we do it, not fine when you return the favor. We’re the indispensable nation, the great beacon of liberty and freedom. Yes, our police forces routinely murder unarmed black Americans. Yes, many of our states contort themselves to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. Yes, millions of Americans cannot afford basic health care. Yes, our police spray rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Yes, we incarcerate more people than any other nation. Yes, we erected monuments to traitors and white supremacists. But how dare anyone question our commitment to liberty!

Trump Joins the Club

“Second, if the Democrats were really a Left opposition party, the majority-Democratic House would already have impeached the Malignant One for any number of fascistic, corrupt, and ecocidal crimes more harmful to humanity than UkraineGate…” Paul Street

Trump is impeached. The Orange Menace joins Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the ignominious Impeachment club and, forevermore, will be labeled the “impeached 45th President.” Serves the fool right. Despite the batshit noise and smoke and disinformation kicked up by Trump’s GOP enablers, impeachment was necessary. The only disappointment for me was that Nancy Pelosi left so many of Trump’s impeachable offenses on the cutting room floor. 

For a man who sees himself as a tough guy, Trump sure is a whiny pussy. That six page letter he dropped on Pelosi will go down in history -- not for the reasons Trump wanted -- but because it’s a perfect example of his blatant ignorance of the most basic aspects of the Constitution, and his complete disregard for the rule of law. Trump’s constant white is black, up is down, round is flat, 2 + 3 = 6 pronouncements are morally dispiriting and intellectually exhausting. Trump’s manifest venality wears his opponents down. How does one respond to a man who refuses to recognize reality? Who lies as he breathes? Who wears his intellectual sloth as a badge of honor? Who doesn’t, or possibly can’t, read? Who spends most of every day watching Fox & Friends and Tweeting utter nonsense? 

Wasn’t it comforting that Vladimir Putin came out in support of Trump? 

Every last Republican who voted against impeachment deserves a ringside seat in Hell. For siding with Trump, for standing against the Constitution, for contorting themselves into pretzels to defend Trump’s indefensible behavior, they have earned the wrath of history. These people are craven hypocrites, and they know it. If Barack Obama had extorted the President of Ukraine and withheld military aid, the GOP would have gone into a full-tilt existential meltdown, an absolute freak-out. It would have been the end of the American republic, treason, the worst crisis in American history. Mitch McConnell would have tied the noose and picked out the highest tree in DC himself. Sean Hannity would have soiled himself. Limbaugh would have suffered a coronary. 

But the news that most astonished me this week was the House vote to approve a whopping increase in the Pentagon budget, including funding for Trump’s racist border wall.  My local Congress-twit, Salud Carbajal, cast his vote for the increase, as did many other Democrats. Who cares about deficits? Who cares that the bloated American military is a first-class contributor to global warming, a massive, worldwide carbon-spewing machine? The GOP certainly doesn’t care, though when they are out of power all they do is moan about the federal deficit, demand the country tighten its belt and live within its means lest we bequeath our children an albatross. The Democrats tax and spend; Republicans cut taxes and spend. Even worse, this ridiculous increase came on the heels of reporting that the Pentagon (surprise, surprise) lied repeatedly about our nineteen-year-old war of choice in Afghanistan. Turns out that when the top brass said we were making great progress, we actually weren’t. Of course any simpleton had already grasped that the mighty US military lost the “war” in Afghanistan years ago. But let’s hand the Pentagon and the generals and Lockheed Martin more tax money to piss away. And because we do, what choice do we have but to consign thousands of low-income Americans to hunger and want by slashing food programs? 

When a country is as corrupt as ours keeping despair at bay is difficult. We’re ruled by bankers, hypocrites, liars, and assholes who will not be satisfied until they reduce all they behold to a smoking pile of rubble. The whole system is riddled with gangrene and cannot be reformed from within.  

Christmas nears. The abyss opens before us. The devil is laughing.