What is your best reason for thinking that Trump will get his comeuppance soon and how do you think it will go down?
Conn Conagher, Ranch Cowboy
For years, indeed decades, Trump has flown under the radar of the criminal justice system. He has practiced housing discrimination by failing to rent to minorities (civil and criminal violations), has committed fraud numerous times (but has managed to avoid criminal prosecution by means of connections or offering minimal restitution) and is suspected of tax evasion (this remains to be seen). He has bragged about his Mob connections (New York and Philadelphia Mob, Russian Mob), yet nothing has been done to him. Why?
Trump was small potatoes. He brags about how wealthy he is (he claims eleven billion dollars…Forbes, Bloomberg and other sources place it as much, MUCH less, at most three billion and some as low as a few million. This may be why he so assiduously guards his tax returns: They would show that he isn’t as wealthy as he has claimed), but isn’t really all that rich. He was a loudmouth reality TV bozo whose delusions of grandeur could easily be written off as mere braggadocio. He was sleazy and a con-artist, but as long as no one got seriously injured or harmed by his offenses, the feds and New York state law enforcement had bigger issues to handle. Trump was just simply not worth the time nor the effort to prosecute. He was taken to civil court numerous (thousands) of times, but always settled out of court. He was both slippery and not worth the trouble.
Then he ran for president, and all that changed.
Trump’s foreign and Mob dealings made him blackmailable. His ties to adversarial states like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia (make no mistake. The Saudis are NOT friends nor allies of the US. They merely have interests which occasionally coincide with ours, but are otherwise deeply hostile to the US) render him a potential liability to national security as president. His sybaritic and profligate habits have been documented (the “pee tape” may or may not be a thing, but he has bragged—on the record—about sexual harassment, sexual battery and affairs which would be viewed as foul and repulsive by any human with a shred of decency) and are well known. With this kind of background, Trump would be deemed a security risk and be denied a clearance…as would have been Bill Clinton (sexual peccadilloes), George W. Bush (his past drug and alcohol use after his Air Guard service. He cleaned up his life and made that usage public, but investigators would still have had issues with it), and Obama (admitted drug use, aspects of his personal life and background which were contradictory and excessively secret…and that’s not just a normal desire for privacy, but it’s also a matter for another topic). In fact, Trump may be the biggest security risk ever to be elected president (JFK’s affairs…FDR’s affairs) in the post-WWII era. His financial difficulties alone make him a threat to national security since Russian “banks” have very direct ways of collecting on loans, and defaulting from those obligations—as Trump has done to American financial institutions—isn’t exactly an option. This would explain his blatant violations of the Emoluments Cause and his failure to divest from his “business” after his election. Trump has finally made his past and present a national issue, and much of it is criminal.
Trump has, stupidly, placed himself right in the gunsights of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York Attorney General’s office, Manhattan District Attorney’s office and this time, there’s no dodging. He WILL face severe consequences for his actions, possibly including prison time (although no president has ever been jailed for criminal actions committed either before or during his term, Trump prides himself, among other things, on being outside the norm, and there IS a first time for everything). It’s almost a certainty that his sons, his daughter and his son-in-law will face criminal prosecution for their actions. I almost expect Donald, jr. to do hard federal time, and Ivanka may well end up in Club Fed for a stretch. This would be the result of so much blatant lawlessness for so many years finally catching up to them all.
Consider this: Trump’s grandfather was a Yukon gold rush swindler, pimp, con-man and profiteer to rival “Soapy” Smith. Trump’s father was a slumlord, Klansman, bigot and swindler for decades. Neither of them faced a reckoning for their offenses. Trump has been doing the same for forty years or more and has gotten away with it. He had no reason to ever think he’d be held accountable. Why should he? His cult of personality followers would stand by him through all circumstances, and they were good at threatening and shouting down all opposition to him. Why, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any of their votes, he bragged! Then came November of 2018 and the Cult wasn’t able to protect him…in fact, the Cult was shown to be a very small percentage of the electorate and to be just a toothless tiger. Trump might be able to make a loud noise, and the Cult of 45 might scream their support, but now all it is, is hot air. Trump is an illusion…a fraud…a phony…a nightmare we still have yet to awaken from, but it’s almost dawn, and it’s almost over.
Robert Mueller may not find direct evidence of criminal conspiracy between Trump, his associates and the Russian government, but there will be other laws broken revealed, other crimes committed brought to light, and all will be tied to Trump. His history of avoiding retribution for his actions has run right into a man as disciplined as Trump is undisciplined, as reputable as Trump is disreputable, as dedicated to serving his nation as Trump is to serving himself. Mueller is the man who brought down John Gotti…he can bring down the Trump crime syndicate just as easily.
Be patient. Trump’s time is coming. He’ll pay for his decades of crimes and offenses. And it will be cathartic and refreshing to watch.
(Incidentally, I’m not a liberal nor a leftist. I’m a very firm Constitutional Conservative who refused to sell out his principles in service to a sleazy con-man who has no principles and who would sell out this country for a Big Mac. Not all Conservatives fell for Trump…just the fake ones, like Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Ingraham, Prager, Carlson…the ones who make money off of duping people, or are too thick, too bigoted or too clueless to grasp what REAL Conservatism is: The defense of ordered liberty, equal opportunity for all, equal protection under the law, and that the Constitution means what it says and applies to us all. Trump is the antithesis of that belief, and there is no way I could ever support him.) |
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