The Stormy Daniels Case May Give Trump the White House
Trump Used Hitlerian Means to Destroy Democracy, but We are Feted to a Trial for Hanky Panky
by
David Gottfried
Mr. Donald Trump is a decidedly vile man. He tried to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, thereby spitting on our most cardinal democratic concept, the notion that the American people choose their leaders and their choice must be honored. He arguably is an agent of Russia as exemplified by numerous misdeeds including, most recently, his attempts to help Russia strangle Ukraine. He stole state secrets regarding our national defense and refused to return them to the White House. He has made his point of view quite clear: He has but one goal in life: The optimization of his power, his esteem, his ability to ride roughshod over the United States, a nation whose soldiers he derides as Losers and Suckers.
If the legal beagles arrayed against Trump had any brains, they would remember that a good advocate starts with his strongest argument and shouts it out from the rafters. A good lawyer should distill his strongest arguments into one momentous line spoken like a battering ram. For example, in a case in which former Nazis tried to become United States citizens, attorneys for the Justice Dept. went before the Supreme Court and opened with this line:
“The question in this case is whether a good Nazi can be a good American.”
The question in this case should be something like this:
“Can we dare ignore the actions of a man who used lies, threats of physical danger, threats to hang his Vice President, and fatal attacks on police officers to bury and revoke the most fundamental tenet of American Democracy: The people vote for the President, not the criminal conspirators of Fox News and people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
And is the important case going to trial ? Of course not. Because of the dimwitted prosecutors of New York, and because of the horrible (crooked ?) judges who are obstructing the other cases, the media is blabbing all day long about stupid stuff: Trump’s efforts to squelch and quash stories, about his sex life, in the 2016 election.
There is nothing the least bit illegal in paying someone to shut-up about a sexual affair. At first, the prosecutors were able to create a semblance of illegality about the hush money transactions because the tender of money, to Stormy Daniels, was in the nature of a campaign expense. However, it was not recorded as a campaign expense. Ergo, he violated campaign finance laws.
But now the prosecutors are stressing something else: Donald Trump dared to try to shape the news about him, tried to suppress bad press, and committed the most unpardonable sin: He tried to manage media coverage to make himself look better than he really was.
Mon Dieu ! What a scoundrel ! What a Devil ! He dared to sculpt the media to banish warts and blemishes from his beatific orange countenance.
Give me a fucking break. The most important personages in American politics air brushed their images to deny the American public information which showed that they may not have been fit for higher office.
However, there is one item in the National Enquirer-Trump affair that most of us did not know about until now, namely the Enquirer’s far-reaching effort to use its shoddy, histrionic journalism to elect Trump President by defaming Trump’s competitors. This could give rise to several intriguing causes of action. First, if Trump and CEO Pecker agreed to libel everybody else running for President, this is perhaps conspiracy to commit libel. Of course, libel is only a civil charge.
However, CEO Pecker’s dissemination of lies can be viewed as a criminal wrong. When Trump and Pecker spread lies about other politicians, they made it impossible for voters to vote for the candidate they really wanted. Perhaps an aggressive and imaginative litigator can argue that to spread lies about a candidate is to spread ignorance and when the people are ignorant their ballots are not their own. Perhaps then Trump and Pecker conspired to deprive people of the right to vote by making their franchise worthless by filling them with lies. However, if one were to adopt this legal standard, then the majority of politicians today would be guilty of depriving people of the franchise by disseminating lies. This is perhaps what Trump, like any good Marxist, wanted to do all along: Expose and underscore the bullshit that pervades our rigged and rotten politics.
How JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan Concealed the Truth to the Detriment of the American People
My last two paragraphs may be a bit too far afield for most readers to entertain. So I’ll return to the main point: One cannot charge Trump with the “transgression” of trying to mold or shape his image by burying incriminating facts. Consider how these “saints” of American politics deceived the America people by burying facts they did not like:
a) John F Kennedy lied about his affliction with Addison’s disease and his consumption of corticosteroids, speed and testosterone to combat his myriad symptoms. Addison’s disease robbed him of strength. Corticosteroids, speed and testosterone can induce unrealistic feelings of power and potency. Perhaps his inflated image of himself, induced by these compounds, made him fall flat on his face in the first year of his presidency when we suffered four enormous geopolitical failures: A) the Bay of Pigs, B) the erection of the Berlin Wall, C) the neutralization of Laos and D) Kennedy's disastrous meeting with Kruschev in Vienna in June 1961. (JFK did a very commendable job in 1962 and 1963, but most historians agree that his first year was a nightmare)
It's clear that JFK’s dishonesty about his health almost crippled our foreign policy. It is not at all clear why our national security depends on getting blow by blow accounts of Donald Trump’s bedroom escapades.
b) Lyndon Johnson is widely reputed to have stolen the senate election in Texas in 1948 through a) his relationship with a Sherriff in a County (I think it may have been Blanco County; See Robert Caro’s riveting biography on Johnson, there’s so much dirt in Lyndon’s history that the book reads like a porno pot boiler) whose official returns gave Johnson more than 99 percent of the vote, b) bussing in Mexicans from south of the border, and giving them five dollars and a shot of Tequilla so they would vote for Johnson, and c) delaying the release of the vote totals from Blanco County until the rest of Texas released its returns so he’d know how many fraudulent votes he’d have to manufacture in Blanco County to win the State.
Perhaps, if we had known that Lyndon was an unpardonable liar, he would not have been elected President and we would not have suffered the lies he used to get us into Vietnam.
c) Watergate was chicken shit compared to Nixon’s biggest misdeed. I suppose that the men who manufacture our history concentrate on Watergate so we won’t realize the
depth and gravity of corruption in our national life.
This is the most damning dirt: In October of 1968, the Paris Peace Talks, convened to end the war in Vietnam, were going well. If peace were obtained, the Democratic candidate, Humbert Humphrey, would have probably defeated Richard Nixon in that year’s presidential race as much of Nixon’s popularity was premised on hostility toward the current Democratic President’s (Lyndon Johnson) loathsome stewardship of the country with respect to Vietnam.
Nixon, therefore, decided to bust up the Paris peace talks. His agents told our South Vietnamese ally that they would get a better deal from the more staunchly anti-communist republicans. At the behest of Richard Nixon, the South Vietnamese bolted from the Paris Peace talks, and banner headlines, on the Saturday and Sunday before election day, shouted the demise of the Paris Peace talks. Nixon was elected by seven tenths of one percent of the vote, and four years later, during which an additional 30,000 American men were killed, Richard Nixon arrived at essentially the same peace deal that Johnson got in October 1968.
Richard Nixon, needless to say, did what Trump did: He kept his dirty secret from the public. Now, pray tell, whose misdeed was worse. Richard Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris Peace talks resulting in the treasonous prolongation of the Vietnam War or Donald Trump’s efforts to conceal harmless sexual liaisons.
d) Ronald Reagan: In 1980, he deplored the supposedly enormous federal deficit. He vowed never to give us a deficit. When he took power, we got the biggest deficits in history until Trump came long. Because our deficits were gigantic, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates as deficits can fuel inflation.
However, our high interest rates made the dollar strong and that made us import more and export less. The demolition of our export trade drove a dagger into manufacturing. Under Ronald Reagan, the deindustrialization of America began. If it were not for his lie, he would not have been elected president and our manufacturing output would be much greater today.
I live in New York. Many New Yorkers are utterly delighted about the hush money trial. (These same New Yorkers were not happy when the Media, in a fit of gossipy irresponsibility, spent a year on Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and cum stains on a red dress) I have no doubt that Joe Biden will Win New York with an overwhelming margin.
However every single news report to the effect that Donald Trump is the big bad ogre because he wanted to cover-up his sexual pleasures is eroding Biden’s support West of the Hudson River, and from the Cornfields of Pennsylvania to the hot and dry windswept west of deeply lined faces forged in long hours and low wages, hard men and women, whose lives consist of something more substantial that Bloomindales, Beyonce and petty bourgeois affectations, are convinced the litigation against Trump is a witch hunt.
Liberal lawyers have hurt liberalism before. For example, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, they brought many lawsuits demanding that, to further integration, white students should be bussed into black neighborhoods and black students should be bussed to white neighborhoods.
Never mind that a majority of black parents, as well as a majority of white parents, did not want their children bussed, more than one hour away from home, to achieve racial balance. But, after all, highly educated government bureaucrats can do a better job of raising other people’s children.
School bussing galvanized the right. I remember that right wing George Wallace characterized government bureaucrats as “pointy headed pseudo intellectuals who can’t even park a bicycle straight and probably have nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches inside their briefcases” (Wallace’s oratory probably influenced the way I write. I loved his alliteration. Recall his talk about the common folk, “The mechanic in Mobile and the beautician in Beaumont,,.”
Liberal support for school bussing was the biggest impetus toward the destruction of the New Deal Coalition and augured the rise of the Republic retrenchment initiated by Nixon and immeasurably expanded by Reagan.
And now, misguided liberal lawyers don’t seem to realize that they are about to put Trump back into the oval office, on a throne, with all the apparatus of the security state to jail his opponents, revoke our civil liberties, pauperize our working class and make common cause with an anti-communist, Tzarist Russia in a headlong rush to send us careening back in time to the “auto da fe” and the “lettre de cachet” of the “ancien regime.”