Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani told the less intelligent among our species back in 2016 that HRC was the criminal and they were the good guys - too many Americans just shrugged and said ‘That sounds about white….’
Now Trump and the GOP are trying the same play with President Biden - while facing a total of 91 felony charges across four indictments covering jurisdictions up and down the East Coast.
The same coast where Trump once created the myth of being a successful real estate developer and Rudy proclaimed himself the organized crime fighter and hero of 9/11.
Now both men are charged in a RICO case for their role in attempting to overturn the federal election results in the state of Georgia.
The irony could not be richer, nor could the glaring and quite observable fact that both men have qualified for these type of charges well before Trump first placed his Cuban heel in the political arena.
They were both men who benefited throughout their careers by an incessant self-mythologization and the mainstream media’s desire to play along with the ruse, while authorities looked the other way.
It was easier to write about Hillary Clinton’s emails than it was to examine to the torrid and unseemly accusations of sexual assault of women and underage girls that swirled around Donald Trump for decades.
Or examine Rudy Giuliani’s mistakes and shortcomings around 9/11 and his continued grift and self-enrichment from the cataclysmic tragedy - that from a branding perspective he seemed to take hold of, while going virtually unchallenged in the press.
Even Trump had lies about his role pulling bodies out of the rubble at Ground Zero - when the reality was he wasn’t anywhere near the place and made false claims about damage to his downtown Manhattan building to grift federal relief funds.
His children didn’t even hand out water bottles to first responders as many in NYC lined up to do in the aftermath of 9/11.
I worked on the memorial ceremonies for many years after that awful day handling the dignitaries in the V.I.P. tent.Giuliani was the only guy I ever saw show up to that somber occasion wearing a smile and he did it year after year.
It was a business opportunity for him - he used to work the room like he was at Russian Mob Night in The Grand Havana Room. (That’s the private cigar club atop Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue building where Rudy would often hold court and drunk-dial various accomplices and underworld associates).
Watching Hillary Clinton on Rachel Maddow the other night, as these latest charges were announced, reminded me quite bittersweetly what might have been, had she been elected in 2016.
I am sure I am not alone in that remorse; the way our country has changed for the worse as a result of the Trump administration and their abject failure of leadership, especially during the early days of the COVID crisis, is almost hard to fathom.
The problem with the cult that Trump and the GOP have created with MAGA is that they can still degrade American life, even when a Democrat is in the White House.
They will continue to tear at the fabric of our civic life long after Trump has been laid to rest out by the 9th hole and his pungent legacy has moved into martyrdom.
MAGA will move more ‘merch’ after he’s gone, much like Elvis.
There’s a generation of kids being raised in ignorant households were Trump is held up as some sort of deity.
Sure, some of those children will realize their parents are morons and escape the insanity.
Many will not and we will potentially have thousands of well-armed psychopaths running around calling themselves patriots.
This is not a recipe for a thriving republic but a ship of fools sailing into stormy seas they will not be mentally or psychologically equipped to navigate.
The existential changes brought about by global warming alone will provide insurmountable challenges in the minds of the mediocre minions.
They won’t be able to shoot at the tornadoes and hurricanes that will consume their villages.
They will not have the will to understand the sad and simple fact that fossil fuel consumption has played in their predicament.
Science itself is derided as ‘woke’ by the greasy politicians in Texas and Florida who preyed upon their supporters’ ignorance for their own gain.
They have been handed a Bible and a gun and a ‘savior’ in the form of a septuagenarian from New York City who spent his adult life living on Fifth Avenue, atop a golden toilet, getting manicures and riding around in limousines while their grandmas poured their Social Security checks into his slot machines.
Then he decided to steal their minds and their futures along with their modest paychecks and annuities.He made them pay for the pleasure of being grifted by the man who has picked on their regions for decades.
Trump was an early innovator of sending buses out to Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky - offering ‘free trips’ to his Atlantic City casinos; he would swallow their money into his casinos and send them home without so much as a free lunch.
A metaphor for things to come, Trump is picking on the same region today; his crowd-funding operations have only expanded.
As his indictments mount, so do his pleas for money, and now he will mostly leave bankrupt his cohorts and co-conspirators, like Rudy Giuliani and others who don’t have the charisma or deep pockets Trump’s grip on his base affords.
I shudder to label anyone beyond redemption but it’s gonna take a lot of work to get the stain of the Trump era out of the hearts and minds of far too many of our fellow citizens.
And we have absolutely no choice but to do this work as we trudge the long and hard road out of perdition and into redemption.
It is always tricky business when you are trying to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
But MAGA’s particular malignancy does not occur in isolation and it threatens to drag the rest of the free world and the health of this planet down with it.
We have to reach deep for the compassion and love they would perhaps not return in kind.
Ultimately non-violence will be the way to change the hearts and minds of these miscreants so full of contempt for anything that isn’t in service to their puerile orange godhead and the white mediocrity for which he stands.
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October 4 2016. FBI Director James B. Comey has named Charles McGonigal as the special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Field Office. Where is McGonigal now?
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/charles-mcgonigal-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-counterintelligence-division-for-the-new-york-field-office
Wow Noel is spot on again. I think Noel is an astute philosophical thinker, just what we need in these turbulent times...we need truth tellers on both sides of the pond. We in the UK have our fair share of powerful people who gaslight and mislead the public to further their own nefarious ends. Noel exposes Trump and his acolytes for the frauds that they are. Well done Noel!