The greatest danger facing America’s democracy today is the 2024 election campaign of the man whose hard work and persistence have earned him the right to five titles: Con Man Don, Criminal Don, Coup-Master Don, Lying Don, and Moscow Don.
Con Man Don told you who he is when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Where did the Donald get the principles of his below-the-belt politics? We all think that Trump does not read books. That’s not true. According to his first wife, Ivana, he keeps two books at his bedside and reads them every night before he goes to sleep. One is Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The other is Hitler’s My New Order, a collection of Hitler’s speeches.
It shows. Like Hitler, Donald Trump has destroyed something vital to democracy—the truth. Trump told 31,000 lies during his four years in the White House. That’s over 21 lies a day Trump demonized those who opposed him by using two techniques he learned from Hitler. Hitler delegitimized the mainstream media of Germany by calling it the Lügenpresse, the lying press. He attacked and suppressed newspapers and radio stations that criticized him, and replaced them with his own propaganda channels.
Donald Trump has changed Hitler’s phrase “lying press” to “fake news.” Then he’s used it like a baseball bat to bludgeon any press outlet that opposes him.
Another of Hitler’s tricks is the big lie. Tell a lie that’s outrageous. So outrageous that it overwhelms your listeners’ critical faculties. Then repeat that lie over and over again. Repeat it in the simplest terms possible.
One of Donald Trump’s biggest lies is that the election was stolen. Another is that Trump brought us the greatest economic growth in American history. Donald Trump did not bring us the biggest growth ever. But Joe Biden has. The gross domestic product of the United States is now the highest in history, higher than Donald Trump’s. The stock market is at record levels. It was breaking 25,000 under Trump. Now it’s gone past 36,000. Biden’s job growth in his first eight months is 5.6 million, the fastest in modern presidential history. Exports, the lifeline of America’s competitiveness, are at record levels. Supply chain problems under Trump were so bad that at the beginning of the covid crisis people waited in line to buy toilet paper and found grocery shelves empty. Today prices have gone up 6.2%, but the shelves are full.
According to Reuters, Trump is “the only modern president to leave office with fewer U.S. jobs than when his term began.” And Trump hit the lowest level of approval of any president in modern history, sinking to 37%.
Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants to be president for life like China’s Xi Jinping and to have a dynasty like North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. If Trump gets back into the White House in 2024, it could be the end of America’s constitution and the end of democracy.
That’s the overview. Here are the details.
Why should we call Donald Trump coup-master don? Trump instigated the Jan 6 insurrection that trashed the capital and threatened the lives of people like Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. Mitt Romney called January 6th an “insurrection incited by the president of the United States.” And Romney was right.
Among armed right-wing militia groups, planning started months before the January 6th Stop the Steal Rally. Militia leaders urged their members to come and provided them with lists of things to bring—things like bear spray? and zip-tie handcuffs for prisoners. Why prisoners? Because QAnon predicted an apocalyptic day when Trump would reveal his true powers. On that day, QAnon said, Trump would have all the democrats in Congress and the Senate and all of the so-called people of the swamp rounded up and executed.
Meanwhile, General Thomas McInerny and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn encouraged Trump to declare martial law, annul the election, have the military seize all the voting machines, and rerun the election under military auspices. In other words, these Trump-loving retired generals called for what we call a military coup. They argued for what Hitler called a putsch.
One sign that Trump was angling to make this coup possible was that Trump replaced top figures at the Department of Defense with unqualified trump yes men, people whose only high level military credential was their willingness to do anything Trump said.
Donald Trump went public with his coup efforts on December 20th, when he tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Wild is trump code for violent.
In the days before the insurrection, Trump had a war room, a command center, at the Willard Hotel three blocks from the White House. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, Steve Bannon, and John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the game plan for legally stealing the election, were all there. The hotel bills were paid by the Trump campaign.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast to predict that there would be surprises in the protest. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen,” he said, “You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready. …we’re on the point of attack.” Bannon was leaking the tiniest tip of Trump’s masterplan.
Donald Trump disabled the national guard before jan 6th using one of his appointees at the department of defense Kenneth Rapuana. Then, addressing the crowd on January 6th, Trump encouraged violence. “We fight like hell,” he told the crowd, “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,”
Five people died in Trump’ January 6th insurrection. Ali Alexander, an organizer of the so-called Stop the Steal Rally, had tweeted way back in December that if Democrats stood in the way of reversing the election, “everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building,” And do it to the capital building they did.
But Ali saw a future uprising far bigger than a mere trashing of a building sacred to democracy. “1776 is *always* an option,” he said. 1776 has become code on the extreme right for an all-out violent revolution like the one in 1776. But this time not against a foreign tyrant. Against any occupant of the white house who is not Donald trump.
As Trump’s insurrection raged around her, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt tried to smash the windows of the door to the chamber of the House of Representatives. She and the crowd around her were attempting to storm the room and arrest Democratic Congress people. What was the crowd’s intention? Ashli Babbit’s last tweet said “the storm is here” Meaning it was time for mass executions.
That’s coup master don. Then there’s dictator don At a private gathering of donors at Maralago, Donald Trump enthused that China’s leader, Xi Jinping , had just taken a major step toward making himself China’s dictator for life. Trump exuberated about what a great achievement this was. He told the crowd, wouldn’t it be great if we had something like that here.
Then there’s Trump’s admiration for the Kim dynasty in North Korea. The dynasty was founded in 1948 by Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s current dictator, is Kim’s grandson. Trump has made it clear that he’d like the same sort of permanent hold on the top position in the nation for his children and grandchildren.
And there’s Trump’s fawning over Russia’s Vladimir Putin at Helsinki in 2018. Trump had been trying to get Putin’s attention for years. He was a Putin fan. Why? According to his former fixer and right hand man Michael Cohen, because Trump wanted to achieve in America what Putin had achieved in Russia—a dictatorship for life. And the personal ownership of a sixth of his nation’s wealth. No wonder Judge Tanya Chutkan on November 9th tried to remind Trump that “Presidents are not kings.”
But that’s not all. There’s traitor don, the man who surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban in talks in Doha. The man who gave up the entire middle east to Vladimir Putin by pulling out of Syria. The man who handed Asia to China by pulling out of an economic alliance of twelve Pacific nations like Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and Peru, an alliance we had pieced together with nations on both sides of the Pacific, an alliance we intended to lead, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump’s withdrawal opened a power vacuum in the Pacific. A power vacuum China is trying to fill.
China has applied for entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it gets that entry, it will take the throne that we built for ourselves.
Then there was Trump’s alienation of our relationship with our allies in NATO, an alliance we put together in 1949, an alliance that was the most powerful in the world until Donald Trump. With Trump’s alienation of our allies, we gave up our role as leader of the free world.
Finally, there’s Trump’s attempt to steal the election, his attempt to pull the biggest election fraud in American history. Some of these things are just policy. Others are treason.
Next is criminal don, the man who committed the negligent homicide of half a million Americans when he crippled the American government’s pandemic prediction and response operations early in his presidency, then when he told the American public 40 times that the covid virus was about to disappear. And when he explained that covid was a democratic party hoax.
On the illegal immigrant front, in 1978 Trump hired illegal Polish workers who spent six months demolishing Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller building to make way for Trump Tower. Yes, Donald Trump hired illegal immigrants.
But that’s not all. Early in her career, Melania Trump worked illegally as a model in usa. Her first ten US modeling jobs were illegal.
On the more traditional criminal front, Trump is reported to have worked with Fat Tony Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, to construct Trump Tower.
That’s not the end of Trump’s criminal record. The Mueller Report shows that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice and witness tampering in the court cases of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone.
Finally Trump violated the Hatch Act by having thirteen government employees work on his campaign while they were paid with taxpayer money. Many of those taxpayers are Democrats.
Donald Trump is fine with breaking the law. As long as one breaking the law is him. In fact, Trump seems to feel that he IS the law. Anything he does is right. Anything a Trump critic does is wrong. In other words, the law and order Trump talks about is his divine right to jail you and me and to inspire his followers to pepper us with death threats.
Finally, there’s Moscow Don My right-wing opponent in a debate on 545 radio stations November 10th claimed that the Mueller report absolved Donald Trump of collusion with the Russians. That’s a common Trump-world cliché. But it’s a lie. A lie concocted by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr.
Trump’s first trip to Moscow was an all-expense paid visit in 1987. Who footed the bills? The Russian government. Were the Russians grooming Donald Trump to be a Russian asset, a useful idiot? You bet.
Trump’s fascination with Russia never stopped. He married two women from the Russian sphere of influence, Ivana from Chechia and Melania from Slovenia. He threw his annual Miss Universe pageant in 2013 in Moscow. He tried with all his might to get a meeting with his hero, Vladimir Putin. He failed.
In 2016 and 2017 Trump told his audience at presidential campaign rallies that he had absolutely no business in Russia. In fact, he repeated that claim eight times. As usual, this was a lie. On “in October 2015,” three months into his first campaign for the presidency, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent to move forward with a Moscow Trump Tower project.” He offered a free penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Putin. But Trump still could not get Putin’s personal attention.
In 2016, a shadowy cyber figure who called himself Guccifer 2.0 passed Clinton emails to Trump via Julian Assange. Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian officer of Putin’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU.
In 2016, when Donald Trump Jr was given the opportunity to meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya about potential Hillary dirt from Russia, he said “I love it” Trump’s sons Eric bragged about the money his family had raked in from Russians and claimed to have access to $100 million in Russian money.
Meanwhile, Trump Tower has been the American capital of the Russian mob. Several books detail how Russian mafia money laundering operations have been run out of Trump properties. Yes, Russian money laundering operations. Run out of Trump Tower and other Russian-Mafia-friendly Trump properties.
Then there’s Christopher Steele’s dossier, reporting on how the Russians cultivated Trump as an asset for 30 years. Right wing columnist John M. Curtis, my opponent in my radio debate on Coast to Coast AM, says Steele is a con man who made up the whole dossier on Trump’s Russian connections. That is a popular line among members of the Trump cult. That the Steele dossier has been discredited. But it is false.
Christopher Steele was the lead Russianist at MI6, MI6 is one of the most respected spy agencies in the world. It’s England’s CIA. Steele ran MI6’s Russia desk.
On top of Steele’s report, says ABC-TV in Chicago, “The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton. Investigators determined there had been “numerous links — i.e. contacts — between Trump campaign officials and individuals having ties to the Russian government.”
October 18th, after years of silence, Christopher Steele did an interview on ABC-TV with George Stephanopoulos. “It was credible reporting,” Steele told Stephanopoulos about his dossier. “We knew some of it was right, and we suspected some of it may never be provable.” “It meant that, for the first time, there was a potentially serious situation of ‘kompromat’ against a presidential candidate. And therefore, it became much more of serious issue than we had expected.” Steele said emphatically that “I was surprised and shocked.”
Donald Trump’s allies are trying to paint Joe Biden as a tyrant who must be overthrown. But that’s not true. The new tyrant wannabe, the new king George in waiting, is Donald Trump.
Again, Donald Trump has been running for two things ever since he lost the election of 2020. One is to overturn the election and move back into the White House now, today. The other is to win reelection in 2024.
But Donald Trump is the opposite of everything America stands for. And worse. He could spell democracy’s finish.
References:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/07/this-is-why-the-national-guard-didnt-respond-to-the-attack-on-the-capitol/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-tower-explainer/why-an-unbuilt-moscow-trump-tower-caught-muellers-attention-idUSKCN1QZ159
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists
https://time.com/4465744/donald-trump-undocumented-workers/
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-in-moscow-what-happened-at-miss-universe-in-2013
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are-full-of-dirty-russian-money-the-scandal-is-thats-legal/2019/03/29/11b812da-5171-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html