If his psychotic, off-the-rails speech in Texas the other day is any indication, maybe for the first time in his life Donald Trump appears to feel the cloak of invulnerability slipping off after a lifetime spent doing “little things” like cheating business partners, refusing to pay contractors for work done, to bigger things (tax fraud, obstructing an election, inciting an insurrection). But outside of his many business failures leading to bankruptcy which only seemed to hurt the business partners who believed his bluster, Trump never seemed to suffer any real personal accountability.
Of the word “fraud,” that begins with the person of Trump himself and his self-proclaimed business “acumen,” as shown by tax records showing he lost over a billion dollars from 1985 to 1994 (his tax records since then have not been released), and his efforts to market products from neck ties and beef to an airline and a casino have been disasters and prove that his “brand” doesn’t impress consumers. Trump (along with Rupert Murdoch) served as an inspiration for the airline/Global News Network magnate Kench Allenby in Anchorman 2, who inherited $300 million from his “late, great father,” and “toiled” his “entire bloody life to make it $305 million.” Analysis of Trump’s “empire” reveals that its current net worth would be same if he had done nothing on top of the real estate business he inherited from his father.
Trump never expected to be elected president in the first place, but once he became “comfortable” in the job and realized he had the power to do most anything he wanted to do, he revealed himself to be the sociopath he kept hidden from others. The biggest problem for Trump is that he simply did not have the intelligence or common sense to behave like a “normal” person, and spent his time gleefully alienating and angering people. The result is that as Trump sowed the wind, the whirlwind had to wait until he was no longer protected by “presidential immunity.”
Is Trump now scared stiff following the failure of his efforts to delay his day of reckoning? Sure he is. Only a cornered rat would behave as he did during the rally in Texas: "These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They're racists and they're very sick, they're mentally sick. In reality, they're not after me. They're after you." Of course everything is “relative,” and of course Trump is so lacking in self-reflection that it is impossible for him to recognize that he and his stupid mouth are his own worst enemy. When Trump claims that they are “after you,” he really means himself as the “leader” of a racist white nationalist rabble—and they need him as much as he needs them, because they are nothing without each other.
Further, as Peter Stone writes in The Guardian, Trump’s “incendiary call at the Texas rally for his backers to ready massive protests against ‘radical, vicious, racist prosecutors’ could constitute obstruction of justice or other crimes and backfire legally on Trump,” according to former federal prosecutors. Trump—rightly accused of inciting the January 6 insurrection—has now opened himself to being accused of inciting insurrection for his personal benefit again by calling for the “biggest protests ever” in New York and Georgia against efforts to criminally prosecute him on financial, tax and election interference charges.
The Guardian also notes that despite Trump’s bizarre claims of “racist” vigilantes targeting him, he in fact currently faces 19 civil and criminal lawsuits, most of which are being brought by people who look more like him. Besides the House’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, these include four separate lawsuits by Capitol police suing Trump for inciting the insurrection, a tax fraud case involving his Westchester golf course, a DC lawsuit charging Trump with misuse of 2017 inauguration funds, Mary Trump’s lawsuit claiming Trump defrauded her out of her inheritance, a class action lawsuit claiming Trump made misleading and bogus claims about business opportunities, the on-going defamation case by E. Jean Carroll, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman lawsuit in regard to retaliatory action against him for giving evidence in Trump’s first impeachment, protestors suing Trump over assault by his security detail at the Trump Tower, and former “fixer” Michael Cohen is suing Trump for ending his home confinement as “retaliation” for his “tell-all” book.
But none of those cases have the import of those he accuses of being “racist” against him. A court has granted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis the power to seat a special grand jury in May to look into criminal charges of election interference by Trump and his cronies. Both the state of New York and Manhattan are investigating the Trump Organization for financial and tax fraud. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Eric Trump both took the Fifth 500 times in a deposition in the investigation into charges of both inflating valuations to obtain loans, then deflating them to engage in tax fraud, a display of the criminal arrogance of Trump and those associated with him. Remember that when taking the Fifth, people are avoid saying anything that would incriminate them in a court of law—meaning they have something to hide.
Among the items Eric Trump took the Fifth on was his involvement in the valuation of the Seven Springs property, which when first purchased by the Trump Organization in 1995 was valued at $7.5 million; by 2014 it ballooned without any justification to $291 million, and this valuation was used by Ivanka Trump in her role as the Trump Organization representative in gaining loans from Deutsche Bank, when no U.S. lender would touch Trump after he lost so much of their money in his many bankruptcies.
It remains to be seen what if anything comes out of all of this, but after a series of failed efforts to use the U.S. Supreme Court to block the production of documents, such as from the National Archives—many of which were shredded and had to be taped together, and others were “found” in boxes at Trump’s home in Mara Lago—and financial and tax records demanded by New York prosecutors, it appears that Trump won’t be able to “run out the clock” in time for the 2024 election in the hopes of again receiving “presidential immunity” for his crimes,
Let us also observe that Trump deserves all of this. He has played the race card in earnest ever since he became “shocked” that a black man could be elected president of his country, and began that “birther” nonsense to delegitimize Barack Obama’s “qualifications” to be president. Trump kick-started his 2020 campaign mouthing ugly racist stereotypes about Hispanics, installed a known racist (Jeff Sessions) as Attorney General, and allowed Sessions’ mole—Stephen Miller—to conduct white nationalist policies to keep people from “shit hole countries” out. Rather than express any concern by white supremacist actions or lethal weapon abuses by police, Trump displayed not one once of national healing, but rather calling “some” neo-Nazi types “good people,” and continued to deliberately inflame race hate among his white base to support his racist policies.
And people like
Trump have the nerve of claiming to be the victim of “racism.” If that is true,
it is because his own racism has rebounded back in his own face. He couldn’t
deserve the blowback more, and it'll take more to "save" him than his fascist Supreme Court picks who claim that a lower court overturning a gerrymandered House district map that is in clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, as Alabama has done in ignoring the mandate that at least two majority black districts must be created if the state's population is at least one-quarter black, is more "hurtful" to black voters than to white power.
No comments:
Post a Comment