Let’s start by stating the obvious; John Bolton isn’t a hero.
If Bolton thought Trump was a real threat to the United States, he could have, I don’t know, testified during Trump’s impeachment. If there’s something damning Bolton knew that he refused to tell until some publisher paid him a handsome to say it in a book, Bolton is still a scum bag, a liar, and another in a long line of grifters that have passed through the White House who have been more than willing to let Trump be Trump right up until the point where it was obvious they wouldn’t get to suck on the federal government’s teat anymore. Fuck John Bolton, fuck his book, and fuck anyone else who knows that Trump is a criminal thug but keeps letting him get away with it as long as their bank accounts are full and Trump isn’t threatening to ruin them.
With that said, Trump’s lawsuit against Bolton is more or less a desperate fucking gasp for a man who files lawsuits like Karen’s mom buys toilet paper during a pandemic. Of course it has basically no chance of succeeding. Of course it doesn’t matter if it does work, because then a copy of the manuscript will “leak” from “anonymous sources” and it will all end up being for fucking naught anyway. (Hey, would you look at that; every media company already has a copy!)
This is Trump’s primary job nowadays; doing fuck all but trying to appear as though he’s doing something. Trump is literally every middle manager in a cubicle farm, constantly appearing to do something but having no real power and no real authority and no real desire to actually manage anything unless it looks like his ass will be on the line. I was going to say Trump is like Michael Scott, but Michael had, at the very least, a heart and a soul, even if he was woefully ignorant and kind of dumb. Trump is more Todd Packer than Michael Scott, a con-artist, a bully, a sheep in wolf’s clothing , every bit as dumb and insecure as Michael but lacking the self-awareness that even Michael has to know what a huge and unyielding piece of shit he is.
Take for instance Trump’s executive order on police reform. Trump spoke for an agonizingly long time (then again, anything longer than two minutes is agonizingly long to me at this point), never mentioning the word racism once, repeatedly mentioning his support for the police, and then doing his sunsetting grandpa routine by pivoting to talk about how good the economy is doing.
Trump’s executive order, like almost all of his executive orders, will do precisely jack and/or shit. They are a figurative gesture made more so that lazy people read “Trump writes executive order” and never question what the executive order does, if anything.
Trump’s never-ending barrage of screaming that everyone who says anything negative is FAKE NEWS while interpreting seemingly promising data in the most advantageous, disingenuous way possible has only begun to ramp as poll after poll after poll shows Trump lagging behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden, all with sizeable margins, all doing their best to not undercount Trump’s wayward base of uneducated white people.
I’m about as untrustworthy of polls as anyone is, and come November all this “JOE BIDEN HAS A GIGANTIC LEAD!” shit could evaporate into a second Trump term in a heartbeat. But there’s a reason why our notoriously unhinged President seems even more unhinged than ever, and it’s only partly because he’s an evil old fuck who can barely walk down a ramp without looking like a complete goon.
Trump’s entire Presidency is essentially a game of inches at this point. Trump’s re-election hopes more or less hinge on Joe Biden not being able to flip any of the states that Trump narrowly won in 2016.
I mean, for gets and shiggles, if Biden flips Michigan (where Trump’s down an astounding 16 points right now), Wisconsin (the latest Fox News poll — yes, that Fox News — has Trump down 9 points) and flips North Carolina (where Biden is up a more modest 4 points according to Public Policy Polling), and Trump wins literally everywhere else he won in 2016, he still loses. If Trump slips on a banana peel and somehow loses the humid hellscape of a miserable state like Florida and flips for Biden along with Michigan? Trump loses. In bizarro fantasy land where the 2016 map stays exactly the same but Biden flips Texas and only Texas (where the latest poll has Biden and Trump in a dead heat)? Trump loses.
This is the reality that Trump faces. Granted, Trump has defied conventional reality before and more or less shifted us into The Darkest Timeline where it’s the “Berenstein” Bears and not the Bernstein Bears. But if it seems like Sunny D Stalin definitely sees the torrent of bad info and is desperately trying to convince a world that still has people getting sick and dying every day and that hasn’t stopped protesting even in the face of armed white men showing up to kill cops and frame them that all the number and the data that points against him is faulty, but all the numbers and math that allegedly help him are right.
But this is still Donald Trump we’re talking about, and whereas smarter, more adept men would, ya know, pivot to something approximating a new strategy, Trump just keeps doubling down on his old bullshit, hoping that he can still kick up enough of a fuss and anger enough racists to stay perched atop his precarious position. Bolton’s book is full of claims about the desperation Trump has to be re-elected, which is weird, because the guy doesn’t want to do the fucking job.
How dumb do you have to be to ask foreign governments to interfere in an election so you can keep a job you don’t even fucking want?
I mean, the worst thing about Trump is that, if he was merely corrupt, he could have at least handsomely grifted millions of taxpayer dollars into his private businesses, and then would’ve been fine with losing the election, dying happy and rich as fuck. Instead, Trump seems hellbent on staying President, mostly because he seems to like the title “President”, even though he has no desire to actually be President, and even weirder, seems to have little interest in actually grifting as much money as possible from the system.
Like, if you’re going to be corrupt, at least being fucking good at it.
But that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s not good at anything, nor does he have a desire to be good at anything. He’s fine with sucking.
What he’s not fine with is everyone else realizing he sucks.
Trump’s Admin reminds me a lot of my “relationship” with a coke head narcissist (it is what I view Trump as) after she pushed her way into my house.
1st stage: Overwhelmed/miserable. It seemed like everything I did made her angry at me. She constantly shook me down for money.
2nd stage: Felt broken. She felt she owned me. Disconnected from everyone who gave a damn about me.
3rd stage: Realization that the hold she had on me was gone. Anger kicks in. I begin to fight back.
4th stage (where the world is now): The painful process of reclaiming what is mine.
Hopefully the US Amercia story ends like mine where she’s miserable in jail and I won’t take any of her calls.
That shit is dead on.
The five year statute of limitations for most federal crimes plus the standing DOJ policy of not indicting a serving president gives him a huge incentive to stay in office so anything from 2016-2020 would be off the table.
There are a couple of obvious flaws in this scheme. One is that state crimes aren’t covered, and the Trump Corporation (probably) won’t get protection from the DOJ policy or the courts, and obviously Trump cares more about his towers than his own kids.
More fundamentally, Trump is an unredeemable criminal. Statutes of limitations don’t help if you don’t take a five year break from criming. He will be committing crimes on his last day in office.
He could do himself a favor by checking in to Club Fed tonight and getting a clean slate, but that kind of rational behavior will never happen,
In addition to needing protection from crimes, Trump needs MONEY. Trump’s net worth has increased during his presidency, largely as the result of his graft and corruption. From Wikipedia:
Trump reported a yearly income of $362 million for 2014 and $611 million from January 2015 to May 2016. Trump and his family reported more than $500 million of income in mid-2018 financial disclosure forms.
Breakdown of the grifting: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/trump-businesses-empire-tied-presidency-100496
The presidency has been a godsend for a bumbling, inept buffoon who couldn’t successfully run a taco stand, much less a business. Stealing is ever so much easier than figuring out ways to earn money.
…whatever deluded bullshit somebody peddled to him to put his ass in the gilded sling a term of being president has visibly shaken his decades-long belief that he could out-lawyer anything & thus had blanket immunity from the consequences of his actions…& since it turns out the post isn’t remotely like the job description he fondly imagined it to be my money is on it being about 80% the stay-outta-jail thing & maybe 20% on the income thing
…he hasn’t been “actual” rich in so long he’s forgotten what that shit even felt like…his belief that the insane Ponzi scheme that is his financial “dynasty” is anything more than a pathetic sham covering a vehicle for the avoidance of debts larger than some countries is almost pathetic enough to be laughable but I don’t doubt he’s certain he could keep that income stream up by bypassing the middle man & directly fleecing the faithful like any other tent-revival-charlatan
…but, yeah…if he could tear the copper out of the walls of the white house on his way out I bet he’d do that too
“Bolton’s book is full of claims about the desperation Trump has to be re-elected, which is weird, because the guy doesn’t want to do the fucking job.”
True, but what Trump wants less than being President is being branded a “loser”. Winning this election is about being a “winner” and only that.
Can’t remember where I heard it the other day, but someone said that with advance copies of Bolton’s books already in the hands of the major media outlets, they would be happy with the double win of the media reporting on Trump’s bullshit from the book, AND Bolton not getting a dime in sales from the book if the lawsuit stands up.
That was Hannibal and it’s worth another look because of the links and vid.
“the humid hellscape of a miserable state like Florida”
Hey, wait a minute, that’s …*steps outside*… fair. Okay, I’ll allow it.
I think Biden wins Florida easily. If even just 10% of the 1.5 MILLION felons that are now entitled to vote come out, he wins. And given that it was the repubs that tried their darndest to keep them from voting…