The Inevitability of It All For Trump

It appears that the Saturday Night Massacre might actually happen on a Saturday night.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Once a President has DONE whatever his underlying crime is, think about it, the rest is fairly inevitable, once the world wakes up to it – A criminal who got to the Presidency is going to be one slimy, manipulator of the world around him. As opposed to non-criminals who become President.

Given the nature of such a criminal, and his criminality, and that he has gotten away with so much for so long – enabled and covered by his entourage – he WILL have grown to be at least somewhat like a mafia don.  Being told over and over for years how powerful and wise and ruthless he is, his satellite players feed his ideas of self-importance and his cleverness – and his teflon invincibility (to have gotten that far unscathed). . .

When Worlds Collide

What is his reaction going to BE, when the authorities lock their radar on him?  He will attempt to shut it down before its tentacles get too close, and to divert it.  And to make some deals, because everybody has a price.  And who to deal with?  The top dog over on that side.  No underlings. Mano a mano.  One on one.  No witnesses.  Jefe to jefe.

And if you’ve gotten to be the don, or mayor, or governor, or President, you hire and fire, and make sure the underlings know who the capo is.  And if you don’t deal with probable problem people early on, you are screwing up.  Get them out of your organization right away and replace them with controllable people.

Culture Clash

Trump got into an organization far larger than he can handle (control) with handshakes and evil eyes and loyalty pledges.  And parts of that organization are imbued with true honor and integrity.  Literally, there are over 30,000 people in the FBI, CIA, and NSA who would have said no to any loyalty pledge, and who would – like Comey – immediately have reported the inappropriateness of Trump’s effort.

And in so doing, that would have put a big target on Trump’s back – no matter who met one-on-one with Trump within the top 10 layers of any of those agencies.

There is pretty much no way that Trump was NOT going to be in this predicament right about now.  What qualities he acquired on his rise were exactly the kind to maneuver himself into this.  What qualities Comey and those other ~30,000 G-men acquired on THEIR career paths were going to some day stand them against a don, a crooked mayor, a slimy governor, or a poser who made deals with a Putin.

Thus, this head-on collision was inevitable.

There is no way that with those forces arrayed against him, Trump slides out of this – IF HE HAS SKELETONS IN HIS CLOSET.  If he does not, they will vindicate him.  Really.  If they’ve got nothing, they will back off and announce to the world that there was nothing to it.  And that is even with the Intelligence community (IC) having entered 2017 seriously thinking that they had him skewered, and they HATED him, to boot.

Given his history with the mafia and with Russians close to Putin, there is a vanishingly small chance that he did not get corrupted – willingly or naively – before 2016.  Whichever, we are seeing the oncoming Doom of Donald.

Stick a Fork in Him

Prima facie, though, right now he sure as hell looks fucked.  His circumstances scream too loudly that he has ill-gotten gains, from ill-gotten opportunities – from ill-gotten connections.  And his choices, over and over, scream, “I’ve got major things to hide!”

Criminal actors gravitate toward criminal capo wannabes, and vice versa.  Trump is at the nexus of too many of these webs of criminality and graft and racketeering.  Those webs have pulled at him and now center him right over the hole with no bottom. When all is said and done, he is hanging over the abyss.

We the public are seeing the barest of outlines of what the IC and the FBI have found out about Trump.  They have 75 aces up their sleeves, and they will play them to maximum advantage.   And they are playing them out, one by one.

Against them all, the only weapon he has is to fire people.  Ironic, ain’t it?  And firing people is the very weapon that will dig his abyss even deeper.  And 99% of them he doesn’t know who it is that has the next ace in the hole.  Firing the ones he (and we) see, that will rouse and repel, enrage and disappoint, and eventually alienate.  His base will never abandon him, but the one thing he cannot afford to do us to alienate those who are nominally on his side – including a large part of the GOP. They hold the thinnest of the webs supporting him over that abyss.  When they let go and say, “He isn’t one of us!” that will be the end of this egocentric wannabe king of the world.  The Emperor’s clothes are already disappearing.

And all the while the FBI, down 10 layers, is opening more and more cans of worms.  Which evidence WILL go to the US Attorney of the EDVA today?  When it does, it will then be shared with grand juries.  And the indictments will flow.  The questions then will be twofold:  How many indictments, and will they try to indict a sitting President, which some say we can’t do.  I don’t agree.

NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.  Let’s see if that is functionally true.

I love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning.