Donald Trump the current President of the United States of America faces the fight of his life. The accusation is that he and or his campaign colluded with the Russians in their intervention on his behalf in the 2018 Presidential election. Arising out of that circumstance and as a result of his behavior he is now, in addition, under investigation for allegedly obstructing the judicial enquiry into that Russian collusion. His central argument against all these allegations is that they are politically motivated and they are nothing but a witch hunt.
Trump is a remarkably powerful, inventive and canny opponent and together with the power that the Office of the Presidency gives him, he has used every stratagem available to counter the threat that hangs over him. There is reason to believe that he will resort to any possible means to survive - a feat he has achieved for the seventy - one years of his eventful, turbulent and, to put it kindly, controversial life.
WHO AND WHAT IS TRUMP?
Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate entrepreneur, franchiser and entertainer, to date has lead a charmed existence surviving four bankruptcies and over three thousand legal disputes including the most recent one where he settled a class action against him for fraud in relation to his now defunct Trump University by paying twenty - five million dollars. All this he has achieved exhibiting a modus vivendi akin to a capo di tutti capo or godfather.
He rules by instilling fear, issuing threats, and by dint of sheer strength of personality which results in a cult like following . He is an acknowledged no holds barred street fighter who, by his own admission, could shoot someone in Fifth Avenue New York and not lose a jot of support. His role model as to how be a winner is Roy Cohn who gained notoriety as, the eventually disgraced, Senator Joe McCarthy’s confidant and lawyer. The latter created an atmosphere of terror by claiming that the American system was infiltrated by Communists. McCarthy followed this up by labelling a whole host of individuals as Communists, none of whom were the perpetrators of the threat he was alluding to. Cohn’s central message to Trump was to concede nothing but rather to double down by hitting back against allegations thereby turning the accuser into the accused. The Don has proved a worthy disciple using the McCarthy/Cohn playbook claiming that the intelligence appartus of the USA has been infiltrated by traitors who want to effect a coup d'etat.
This resume hardly provides the credentials to become President of the most powerful country in the world and the world’s oldest democracy but Trump, intuitively reading the mind of the disillusioned American electorate of the time and by using the salesmanship skills that had brought to him where he is today, succeeded. His sales pitch had three simple narratives, “You never had it so bad”. He then persuasively longed for a past that never was and promised a future he could never deliver. The charismatic, demagogic and narcissistic Don rallied the masses with a populist, nativistic, isolationist, racist, protectionist and alarmist message and became President, albeit with a minority of votes.
THE CURRENT FIX TRUMP FINDS HIMSELF IN
The investigation into The Don and his Presidential campaign as to whether they colluded with the Russian Government’s intervention into the 2018 Presidential election has preoccupied the POTUS from the get go. The consensus of the American Intelligence Agencies is that the extensive sophisticated cyber campaign conducted by the Russians was to support Trump in his electoral bid. On top of that there is a strong prima facie argument that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians. Without going into the endless statements and events that affirm Trump’s bromance with Putin there is one glaring quid pro quo that Trump appeared intent on delivering to the Russians and that related to sanctions.
One of the main objectives of the Russians has been to get the American Adminstration to soften sanctions against their regime. These were instituted by Obama as retribution for Russian interference in the 2018 election. Again without rehashing all that has become our daily digest the sanctions issue is an overriding issue that makes a prima facie case that there was collusion. There is a long sequence of events that The Don and or his campaign has initiated in relation to the eradication of sanctions against the Russians. In the beginning, the Trump campaign softened the Republican platform’s sanctions against the Russian for their intervention in Ukraine. In the middle, once Trump had been elected, his Chief Security Advisor to be, Mike Flynn, who has plead guilty to lying to the FBI and is going to act as a prosecution witness, discussed the removal of sanctions with the Russian Ambassador. Finally, in spite of the fact that, in a rare display of near unanimity, Congress passed a Sanctions Motion against Russia as a punishment for their sabotaging the 2018 Presidential elections, Trump has refused to enact what is in fact law. In the current bohaai this unimagined act of defiance has gone unnoticed - unnoticed at least by everyone other than, Jay H. Ell guesses, the Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Then there is the overwhelming prima facie case against Trump for Obstruction of Justice. This includes the Comey axing with all Comey’s contemporaneous documenting of The Don’s clumsy efforts at “persuading” the former FBI Chief to drop the investigation. The Don’s public confession that he terminated the chief investigative officer because of the Russian Investigation followed. There was a meeting his son convened with Russians operatives where the latter promised “Dirt on Hillary” which again has been gawkly covered up with a host of contrary explanations with Trump implicated in the cover up. Interspersed and following this debacle there has been so much more including the fact that it has been accepted that The Don is trying to either stop or neutralize the Mueller probe one way or another. Even his sycophantic supporters accept this except they argue they the dirty deed should be done because Trump is correct that there is a conspiracy against him.
The story really becomes bizarre when the conspiracy is laid out.
THE "CONSPIRACY" AGAINST TRUMP
Now for one moment forget everything that has happened and what you have seen or read this past year and a half and register what Trump is alleging:
The Don maintains that the intelligence agencies of the United States of America are in a conspiracy with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats to remove him as President. In case that didn’t register allow Jay H. Ell to repeat - it is argued that the law and security institutions of the country have formed a “Dark State” to effect a coup d’etat so that they, the organizations that presently have and traditionally have had Republican leadership, can conspire with the Democrats to remove Trump.
Now to cut a another long story relatively short the narrative maintains that incontrovertible proof of a “Dark State” is provided by the Republican House Intelligence memorandum that was unprecedently derived from classified FBI material. The document was authored by an individual who could be a character out of a Charlie Chaplin farce, Devin Nunes. He hit the National scene when it was shown that he had in the stealth of the night collected “incriminating” documents from the WhiteHouse and the next day went to the selfsame destination to deliver these as if he had independently discovered them. As a result of this deception he was forced to recuse himself from the Trump hearings. He then inexplicably returned to initiate the "conclusive" memorandum.
The burden of Nune’s message was based on the fact that there was alleged bias by the FBI in a request to a Judge to continue surveillance on a member of Trump’s transition team, Carter Page. It was argued in a three and a half page brief that the Judge had been mislead because the nub of the FBI’s case was allegedly derived from unverified evidence from an investigator that had been paid by Hillary Clinton and didn’t want Trump to be President.
Even accepting every word of this argument, everyone is asked to believe that the whole intelligence and security establishment was in a conspiracy on the basis of the fourth renewal of surveillance warrant on a person who had been followed since 2013 for his involvement with the Russians. The fact that he was an advisor to the Trump campaign was rather a problem for Trump to respond to in addition to the fact that so many of his team had links with the Putin regime.
It thus appears that the question to be answered was why Trump had so many Russian sympathizers in his camp and not the fact that some of them were under surveillance because they were allegedly collaborating with an adversary of the USA who were simultaneously illegally subverting American democracy.
The FBI and the Democrats attacked Nune’s memorandum on the basis that their “proof” had been culled from a fifty to sixty page submission to have Page’s surveillance renewed. The FBI Head and Acting Attorney General Rosenstein pleaded with The Don not to allow the release of Nune’s expose as it had glaring omissions and could compromise methods and sources. The Don refused as it exposed the "disgrace" of the FBI and its leadership and cleared him, once and for all, of any wrongdoing.
The Don made it quite clear that the memorandum proved what he said it proved.
TRUMP AND ALLIES ELECT TO FIGHT POLITICALLY
Trump let it be known that Nune’s had provided the wherewithal to axe Rosenstein who was in charge of the Mueller Investigation. (It has been already been reported and not denied that Trump was stopped in his tracks from firing Mueller when the WhiteHouse Counsel threatened to resign if he proceeded). The Don was backed in his obtuse interpretation by Fox News and a cadre of Republican legislators. More significant is the fact that the vast majority of Republicans, that off the record attack Trump, allowed this travesty to proceed. Speaker Ryan with Senator Leader McConnell standing next to him supported Nune’s Memorandum but argued that this in no way impacted on the integrity of Mueller and Rosenstein. Attorney General Sessons earlier in the day had praised Rosenstein to the sky. However when push comes to shove they have all, in the past, caved under The Don’s pressure.
So in the next few days the Nune’s justification will be eviscerated but the issue is not rational it is political. This particularly so now that it has been reported by Time that Carter Page bragged in 2013 that he was an informal advisor to the Kremlin. Trump believes that if he does axe Rosenstein and or Mueller the Republicans will do what they have done up till now - grin and bare it. Trump’s problem is that Ryan and McConnell have already committed themselves that the memo does not implicate the FBI dramatis personae. McCain has nailed his objections to the door so this time round there may be opposition. Remember it was McCain that kiboshed the axing of Obamacare. Most significantly four of the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that voted for the release of the memorandum have publicly stated that it was not an attack on the FBI and the Justice Department.
There is one certainty The Don is not going to stand by and leave it all to due process. As the Mueller investigation grinds on only he knows what they can find and if his behavior is anything to gauge his near hysterical reaction indicates that he is a very worried man. He knows that by this stage the Special Counsel has elicited all connections related to his property deals and his comings and goings with the Russian oligarchs. What happened in the campaign and thereafter has been painstakingly reconstructed with the help of Flynn, Papadopoulus and countless others. He obviously senses or knows that Mueller has already got the goods. He also reckons that if Mueller can provide incontrovertible proof he will be abandoned by the bulk of the Party as swiftly as he would throw them under the bus…. In some ways the bullet is already out of the gun and any further action by him will just serve to worsen his predicament.
But The Don is a street fighter, a counter puncher, a winner and a survivor so he will never give up.
He has one ace up his sleeve and he has hinted at it. He can argue the need to preemptively strike North Korea. He has ominously said that the only real way a country can be unified is by a catastrophe. Peter Beinart, in a piece in The Atlantic, dissected The Don’s State of the Union Speech and argued that that Trump was laying the grounds for such an attack. So for the ‘nth time Jay H. Ell is pleading with Congress to take away the right of a President to unilaterally start a nuclear war. We already have one in the country itself.
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