'Long Walk Home'

Trump wasted no time throwing Taiwan under the bus upon his return from China. That should come as a surprise to absolutely no one - and further reinforces the United States of America’s slide on the world stage from a super power protecting democracies around the world to a weakened nation run by a drug-addicted mob boss.

POTUS is now promising to withhold a congressionally approved arms sale to the island nation off the coast of mainland China to benefit President Xi, the communist dictator of perhaps our greatest economic and geopolitical adversary.

It is not just American spinelessness on the world stage, it is a complete abdication of the values and moral strength of a once mighty nation in service of oligarchy and incompetence.

Six months into the global pandemic, which would go on to claim over a million American lives in large part to due to Trump’s incompetence, Trump called Covid-19 ‘Kung-Flu’ to wild applause, cheers and laughter from a MAGA youth crowd, ‘Students for Trump’, in Arizona.

At a time when large public gatherings were still a very bad idea and widely prohibited, Trump broke with protocol and started hosting MAGA rallies again in June 2020, which exponentially contributed to the lethal spread long before a vaccine was widely available. Those events killed some of his associates, including Herman Cain, and many hundreds of Secret Service agents tested positive for Covid-19; all for Donald’s own ego and to bolster a campaign for re-election he would go on to lose.

Trump made a global health pandemic infinitely worse to assuage his boredom and feed his narcissism. His xenophobic comments of that time also included ‘China Virus’ which was always a big crowd pleaser for his base.

That same POTUS is now back in power and was in China this past week begging President Xi to open up more of the communist nation’s trade to the wealthiest of American tech titans.

Including the execrable Elon Musk, who builds more than half of his Tesla vehicles in China. The rest of the accident prone, shoddily assembled vehicles are made in non-union factories, under often dangerous and exploitative conditions, here in the United States. Dude’s a real prince and happens to be the wealthiest man alive, dwarfing his nearest rival, his net worth now approaching a trillion dollars.

The ever-awkward ketamine enthusiast looked bored and stoned as he sat for selfies with his Chinese EV competitors at a banquet given for the American delegation in Tiananmen Square’s Great Hall. Visibly huffing and smirking in his half-robot, half-dork-who-thinks-he’s-actually-funny fashion.

I will still never forgive SNL for allowing Musk to host, but then I’ve held a grudge since Lorne Michaels platformed Steve Forbes during the 1996 presidential campaign (he subsequently banned Rage Against the Machine for life for protesting the Republican billionaire’s appearance, as they were that episode’s musical guests).

I’ve spent too much time in the in the industry and New York City to fool myself about where the allegiance of most of our media institutions lies at the end of the day. NBC begged Mark Burnett for the ‘Apprentice’ and we shot the first finale of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ on SNL’s stage in Studio 8H. The first place I witnessed Trump abuse Adderall and struggle to read three syllable words such as ‘arbitrage’.

At the end of the day TV is a business and money talks. Democracy walks.

Musk’s presence in Beijing was clearly meant to signify the co-leadership role he has with President Trump, to whom he delivered the last election; without Elon’s support no future MAGA candidate will even attempt to run. Any talk of a rift between the two men was hopeful at best. He will not easily vacate the position he has purchased at the seat of power. Nor will the other titans in attendance.

Trump and his corporate friends were not there to help the people he is charged with leading, but once again to serve his own interests and those who will make him richer.

Eric Trump traveled aboard Air Force One with his vitriolic wife, Lara, to help solidify a deal for Chinese-made equipment needed for the various military industrial companies he now co-owns with his brother Don Jr., including construction equipment for a U.S. Defense Department contract they have in Kazakhstan; mining tungsten for use in weaponry and computer chips for their various military grade drone companies. They sought another $400 million of U.S. tax payer dollars just this past week for their tungsten mine.

Trump’s second term is the largest windfall ever for Team Trump and makes their years laundering money for the Russian Mob and selling condos through anonymous LLCs to the unsavory characters of the world look like child’s play. Not to mention how successful they have been in recent weeks in getting Trump’s prodigious role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring out of the headlines of most major media outlets.

The only surprising thing is that Vanky didn’t join in on the merriment, but she presumably had her fill of self-dealing during Daddy’s first term when she received dozens of fast-tracked trademark requests from China for her various businesses.

Trump has always had deep financial ties to mainland China (in addition to his once secret bank account), and used to explore business pursuits in the region. At one point he paid the CCP $188,561 in taxes, much more than he ever paid to his own government; beginning in 2008 he rented most of the 20th floor of Trump Tower to Communist China’s largest bank (ICBC) netting him millions annually.

This is not a man who negotiates, he is a man who accepts bribes and doles out no bid contracts in exchange for kickbacks and is the very reason laws and regulations were established against such self-dealing and corruption in the first place.

DJT represents everything our government tried to regulate, and legislate against, for 250 years: he is our republic’s worst character defects made manifest.

If his clan could still employ child labor or indentured servants they would be all too happy to exploit the suffering of others for their own profit. He has spoken almost wistfully of ‘the good old days’ and criticized the Smithsonian for focusing on ‘how bad slavery was’.

Trump regularly used racial epitaphs and derogatory slurs on the set of ‘The Apprentice’; I personally heard him use the ‘N-word’ to describe a contestant at a taping of a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finale in New York City.

When he was shooting ‘B-roll’ in a helicopter ahead of the first season of his NBC reality show, Trump looked out the window at his native borough of Queens below him and went on a racist tirade regarding how the ethnic demographics of the various neighborhoods had shifted since his youth, unleashing a trifecta of slurs to emphasize his ignorance and intolerance.

These sort of racist statements have always been a trademark of Donald Trump and are a partial reason why he makes those around him sign NDAs (the other of course is his criminality and sexual predation). When Trump ran in 2016, Burnett let it be known in the TV production world that he would sue anyone who spoke out about his behavior on set.

I had colleagues who attempted to discourage me from speaking out and I never considered it for a moment. It bothers me that more didn’t understand the urgency of the moment or waited for their NDAs to expire.

To me that is as bad as the sort of ‘saving it for the book’ brand of journalism that has always swirled around Donald Trump. We must put aside self-interest when such a villainous opponent of freedom and equality is soaked in venality and avarice.

The man was involved in over four thousand lawsuits before he ran for POTUS; he has used his army of lawyers and the courts to his advantage but that only really works if you are afraid.

That isn’t to say he hasn’t done tremendous damage to innocent people’s lives through frivolous lawsuits-he indeed has, many times, but we must recognize his malicious use of the judiciary to advance his assault of our country’s norms, and to serve his own needs - or escape accountability for his lifetime of crimes.

Trump has broken our nation’s government in this incendiary moment; he and his ‘America First’ cohorts did so by weaponizing the bigotry and ignorance of millions of Americans who should have known better by now but still don’t.

Nothing belies Trump’s claims as a working class MAGA populist more than his corporate guest list for his trip to Beijing. It is a ‘who’s who’ of titans of industry and finance.

There isn’t a blue collar in sight.

POTUS’s allegiance was always with the Larry Fink’s (BlackRock CEO) of the world; the fact that he rose to prominence conning the ‘Larry the Cable Guys’ of red state U.S.A. will never not be a bitter and tragic irony.

Trump despises the sort of folks that worship at his swollen feet.

Their misjudgment of his true nature and motivations will leave their communities, their farms, factories and hospitals, so broken they may never fully recover. What was once America’s breadbasket and heartland will turn into data centers and desperation. Self-inflicted destruction.

Trump had trades in his personal stock portfolio on 7 of the 17 companies represented in his trip to Beijing. Most substantially, NVIDIA with whom he placed a multimillion dollar trade in February before their deal with META was announced.

Trump’s stock portfolio alone is not just a conflict of interest, it is a crime in plain sight - and our chance to do something about it is slipping away.

The war chest they are amassing, filled by both by the tech oligarchs and the corrupt Trump administration Cabinet members and allies, will be leveraged against freedom and democracy for decades.

Trump is currently negotiating with the DOJ he sued as POTUS for ten billion dollars. He is apparently on the verge of accepting a 1.7 billion dollar settlement, which will be distributed to January 6th defendants and other strategic consorts of his administration and neofascist movement.

This staggering amount will be used as a private fund to pay for his mercenaries and a shadow government. POTUS will preside over a small coterie of board members who can doll out the money to anonymous recipients. This is not only unprecedented, it is extremely dangerous given Trump’s history of malfeasance and violence. I believe he will use whatever methods he can to stay in power.

What this deal essentially represents is a victory for the collusive lawsuit he brought against the Justice Department and IRS for revealing through documents leaked to the New York Times (from IRS subcontractor Charles E. Littlejohn who is now serving five years in a federal penitentiary) that Donald Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and had paid $0 (zero!) dollars in taxes for ten of the fifteen years prior. Part of his scam has always been to claim massive business losses, while at the same time publicly, of course, claiming to be a billionaire.

This tax period covers the time he hosted a reality show on NBC which was predicated on his business acumen and opulent wealth. I paid more in taxes working on the show as a production assistant than its host.

Which is of course why he refused to release his tax returns during his first presidential campaign (along with his various foreign entanglements).

Had he done so, his con job of the American people may have been harder to accomplish; he of course instinctively knew that, and it’s why he kept stalling and promising to release his federal income tax returns when his ‘audit’ was through. A variance on the ‘it’s coming in two weeks’ BS that is a bedrock of his entire shell game in politics.

Tax evasion has been a lifelong pursuit for the Trump clan going back to Fred Trump Sr.; if this DOJ settlement is corroborated it is not only a massive blow to the rule of law, it is an unjust affirmation of his ridiculous claims of governmental weaponization against him by President Biden’s Justice Department.

The DOJ under the tortoise-like tutelage of Attorney General Merrick Garland, basically allowed Trump to run out the clock concerning his cases and get a free pass for his myriad crimes - including the stealing of top secret classified documents related to his Trump Organization business interests overseas, most especially in the Middle East.

Now they are placing him above the law, in concert with a SCOTUS which has enabled his every felonious instinct. It is no accident a giant banner featuring Trump’s scowling visage now hangs over the entrance to DOJ’s headquarters in DC.

POTUS has once again painted himself as the victim and been successful in his bogus claims against our government, which will only further embolden the true believers of his ‘I am your retribution’ schtick. The more he gets to say ‘see, I was right’ to the folks most susceptible to his brainwashing, the closer we come to contested elections and more attempted coups d’état on the horizon.

I worry about the precedent he is setting now that his successors may follow. Including his sons who no doubt have their beady eyes on the golden throne at this very moment.

This abysmal settlement is also apparently freeing him and his family from any IRS audits going forward, which, if the worst case scenario is realized, will have essentially allowed the biggest family of grifters in the our nation’s history to live tax free and above the law for the rest of their lives.

Not to mention rewarding Trump and his allies for the unprecedented violence he fomented and unleashed on our democracy when he lost the election in 2020 and then sent his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol, and attempted to hang his own Vice President to stop the Congressional process of certifying the electors’ votes and formally announcing the results.

An election that to this day he still claims to have won and acceptance of this absurd proposition has become a litmus test to prove loyalty within his ‘America First’ party.

Good luck stopping him next time. Our DOJ just made it much harder. And he knows it.

It’s gonna be long walk home.

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