I’ve had enough — more than enough — of this Trump debacle, of waiting for some sign that the end is nigh, that justice will be done, that this interminable waiting will be rewarded with the crushing of corruption and a blessed return to a humane government for all the people.
For sanity’s sake I need to envision an ending, to see a clear pathway to a final reckoning for these monstrous criminals. The mental calisthenics of sorting and shifting pieces of the Trump End Times puzzle into a fitting and just fate is therapeutic, an antidote to the waiting, frustration, and roller coaster ride of emotional highs and lows.
That’s how this diagram developed; it’s a structural frame for organizing seemingly disparate information, identifying patterns and processing ideas — and through it I begin to see the shape of a solution, a resolution, in these circles.
That solution does not include impeachment or a 25th Amendment remedy. The likelihood of both lessens with each passing day. Besides, the stark reality is that both are only partial remedies anyway because of their focus on Trump alone, a single person. That isn’t enough. That isn’t nearly enough. We need to rid the Executive of Pence as well as Trump plus all the co-conspirators. In short, a far more sweeping solution is needed to clean up the entrenched corruption of these Augean Stables.
So how to get rid of Trump? He’ll need to be levered into a situation where he’ll agree to resign. That may sound glib and yes, it is easier said than done. It always is, but it’s not impossible. What we know about Trump that is relevant at this point is:
- according to an extraordinary number of mental health specialists who have weighed in on the issue — including 27 who have compiled a book on the subject: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President — the consensus is that he has malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Medical experts in the specific fields of gerontology and brain degenerative diseases also hypothesize that this is now complicated by a more recent affliction on the dementia spectrum;
- Trump prioritizes wealth and prizes the power and status that comes with wealth;
- Trump is inconsistent in his views; in fact it’s often been said about him that he goes along with the last person who talked to him. Though it’s a generalisation, there’s multiple examples to support the view.
There’s also this amusing tweet, purporting to be from a White House staffer (could be but confirmation not possible for obvious reasons):
There’s a contest among staff to see what we can get him to believe.
Newsflash: anything.
His entire worldview is warped by his narcissism and filtered through the unevenly-patterned tea-strainers of right-wing media and his “advisers” (which include such dubious persons as Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Sean Hannity etc) such that his hold on reality swings wildly from arrogant ignorance to the outright delusional.
But the significance of this is that he needs help to get through the day. He needs to be told where he has to be and what he needs to do to fulfill the minimum, publicly-visible requirements of the job. So key to what will push him over the edge and into resigning is this: isolate him. Take away all his human props, all those in his circle of enablers. And just to make sure there’s no-one to step in and take their place, remove all those from the outer circles first before sweeping up his inner circle. Leave him clueless and helpless.
This is where Mueller comes in. He is Hercules in this Greek re-enactment. But, unlike the Greek hero, he is not alone in undertaking the tasks before him. He has gathered a crack team of attorneys and in addition he has the cooperation of state Attorneys General, the foremost being New York AG Eric Schneiderman.
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In the outer circle of the diagram is the Mafia and Russian mob plus agents of the Putin government. While removing them is a massive undertaking, the fact is this is already happening.
Mafia and the Russian Mob
Since well before Mueller’s appointment as Special Counsel, back when James Comey and Preet Bharara were still in office, efforts to round up, indict and convict mobsters were most evident in New York with a number of operations resulting in multiple arrests since 2016.
In August of that year, 46 were charged in a racketeering conspiracy that involved four of New York’s five Mafia families. In March 2017 another 10 were arrested in a “mafia crime wave”. At the end of May there were 19 arrests of mobsters connected to the Lucchese family. As for the Russian mob? A week later the FBI reported the arrest of 33 members and associates of a Russian crime syndicate for racketeering, extortion, robbery, murder-for-hire conspiracy, fraud, narcotics, and firearms offenses.
While these have been the result of many months of work that did not directly involve Trump (as far as we know), it’s pertinent to note the well-documented connections between Trump and the New York mafia families, particularly in the construction and casino businesses.
For example: Trump casinos have come under FinCEN scrutiny. The Taj Mahal casino broke money-laundering rules 106 times in its first 18 months of operation and paid nearly half a million dollars in fines in just one settlement agreement in 1998. In 2015, it was fined again for money laundering violations dating back to 2003. This time the fine topped ten million dollars, the highest ever levied by FinCEN.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is chasing down the connections:
...you simply can’t read over these deals and not see that Trump and his crew just play way out on the outer fringe of legality at best. At best. People who have done or subsequently did time in the US or other countries repeatedly appear in the picture. So do people from organized crime. A lot.
The FBI, NY US Attorneys (including former US Attorney Preet Bharara) and New York state AG Eric Schneiderman are also very aware of the Trump family’s business practices. The latter is assembling several cases against the Trump organisation including enterprise corruption, New York’s equivalent of RICO.
By 2018, mob busts for money laundering escalated internationally with a number of high profile arrests including Russian MP, Vladislav Reznick, and 17 members of a Russian mafia gang now on trial in Spain.
Russian Hackers
Although most Russian hacking news is focused on those involved directly in election interference, the DNC and RNC, since last year news of arrests and extraditions of hackers associated with Russia have not directly involved the US 2016 General Election.
From Philip Ewing, NPR’s National Security Editor:
Then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that Russia launched cyberattacks against a wave of targets in the United States as early as 2015. But the indictment on Friday traced the origins of the Russian interference operation even earlier — to May of 2014.
Notably the hacking of Ashley Madison, Google, eBay and others also happen to fall into this time period. But it isn’t the timing alone that has alerted interest, it’s also the nature of the data. All these companies would have provided a wealth of material for Russian kompromat.
While this is speculative at this stage, the two most recent revelations are evidential. The first was the bombshell news that Dutch Intelligence caught Russians hacking American systems:
The respected daily Volkskrant and the current affairs show Nieuwsuur reported that hackers working for the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service penetrated the computers used by the group, often nicknamed Cozy Bear, in mid-2014 and watched them for at least a year, even managing to catch the hackers on camera.
Side Note: The source for the above is Australian because US media either declined to pick up this story or dampened it, despite its obvious enormity and relevance to American citizens. Why they chose to do so may also figure in the puzzle.
Following on the heels of the Dutch revelation was the news that Mueller’s team had indicted 13 Russians and three Russian organizations for conspiracy to illegally influence the US presidential campaign. That immediately put the lie to Trump’s claim that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a “hoax.”
Russian Government
Russian Intelligence agents posing as diplomats were held accountable in no uncertain fashion when President Obama had 35 of them expelled before he left office. He also shut down two Russian facilities and slapped sanctions on the Russian government for good measure. That was a solid start — and not one that either Putin or Trump liked one little bit.
In moves that should surprise no-one, Trump and his handpicked madministration minions have been doing all they can to erode the Obama expulsions and sanctions. In the State Department, the section dealing with the enforcement of sanctions was gradually denuded of staff thanks to part-time Secretary of State (for Russia and occasionally parts of Europe when convenient to his personal schedule), Rex Tillerson, before he scrapped the Sanctions Office altogether in October last year.
In addition, Trump has ignored 2017 legislation requiring further sanctions. This should also come as no surprise because Trump’s signing of the sanctions Bill was accompanied by a statement saying:
despite his belief that parts of the measure were unconstitutional [ie the current and additional sanctions on Russia], he was signing it into law for the "sake of national unity."
Often overlooked in the verbal melee over Trump’s inaction is the fact that Republicans in both houses of Congress are not in the least concerned by Trump’s failure to enforce their legislation. Not only have they done nothing, they won’t speak of it either, leading this observer to conclude that the vote on the legislation, and indeed the legislation itself, was only for show and never intended to be enforced.
Rounding Up the Outer Circle
This diagram was originally created in April last year and the introduction to this story written in June. Many factors contributed to the delay in completing this article, not least of which was the uncertainty of the information available at the time. Now with more recent events and revelations, it is only too clear that there really is considerable movement in the outer ring. They are clearing the way.
That is not to say there is no activity in the inner rings. There certainly is. We see it in the indictments of Flynn, Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos and the various interviews Mueller’s team has conducted.
What it all ultimately shows is that Justice is on the move and Justice in the hands of Mueller, his team and Schneiderman is strategic, tactical and thorough. In the long run the diagram may not prove accurate but for now it’s holding up and, more usefully I hope, providing a simplified overview of a very complex web of corruption.
While we’re well past the beginning now, it’s hard to tell where the end may be. As Shower Cap put it in his inimical way:
...this ballgame ain't close to over. Fuck, only the Special Counsel and his team even know what inning we're in.
But we can see progress and its general direction now. We can also see the scoreboard: Justice is in the lead.