Donald John Trump may not think of himself as a cowardly and smarmy con man, felon, mafia chief, or traitor to his nation in light of his own delusional, grandiose, and messianic character and apparent absence of conscience. However, all indicators point back toward cooperation with Vladimir Putin in relation to seeing himself installed in power–with immunity from felony-level wrongdoing, no less–by an overwhelmingly White Christian American Nationalist Front that itself appears to have America’s Republican Party leveraged away from its traditional adult, civil, Constitutional, lawful, and responsible navigation.
When Trump covered for Putin in the now infamous “Helsinki Moment”, mainstream media and moderate cognizant and good Americans were shocked but then gave that moment two minutes of squawking before some other drama displaced it.
Here, copied verbatim, is what Trump said in that now hideous and signal moment:
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all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia I have president putin he just said it’s not russia i will say this i don’t see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think that’s an incredible offer
And there Trump is, no different back then than he is today: inveigling, lying, infantilizing, pandering and far gone in the sordid business of trading country–and American law–for the lowest in the way of criminal, corrupt, and ruthless power.
And where has been the GOP in relation to Trump?
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…Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.
Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.
In X-speak, has #America tired of #FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts?
Today, Americans know that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election and with premeditation chose to lie to his base, which may now be considered either gullible or just plain traitorous and vicious, and then he drove a violent portion to insurrection in an attempted coup. Those whom Trump betrayed and inveigled in his madness should be especially angry with him.
Call him “Trumpolini” and hope America–the vast majority of Americans–will find the courage to defend their nation, its revolutionary Constitution and spirit, and be finished with him as well.
Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.
“The executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,” Johnson declared. “That’s the headline. That’s the takeaway today.”
While the Biden Administration’s program focused on integrity in the interest of the American People, Johnson and Republican attorneys general chose to hamper the effort in their own partisan interest, an interest that belies a lust for power unbridled by any interest in the bedrock that is truth x context x empirical observation x careful handling, sifting, and weighing of factual data x reasoning with good character and good sense — all of that to fool what they may presume to be their own sheep.
Call the sort of lie Speaker Mike Johnson uttered disingenuous speech or sophistry. Our “executive branch” encouraged honesty and integrity, but Johnson took it as a moment to call it censorship and thereby safeguard disinformation, chicanery, and fraud, which may to Johnson may rank among Christianity’s most fundamental and necessary virtues for they are not so useful to any sustained secular democratic republic.
Not all politicians lie so brazenly to their constituencies–and for the privileges of power itself, no less. Today’s Grand Old Party has stained itself with its abandonment of the Constitution, honor worth the recognition, and general integrity. Speaker Mike Johnson has only led the cowardly and seditious charge and been booted into place potentially to fully subvert the 2024 election.
How to Lie Like A Speaker (Representing the Devil)
For those daring to cross over to the forever burnt side of history, here is a smorgasbord of methods known to delusional or practiced liars: baseless accusations; defamations; deflections of responsibility; denials of culpability; erasures, omissions, and revisions in the telling of events; fabrications and frame-ups; fishing expeditions; libels and slanders.
For criminals, there are more potent forms of foul speech in the abuse of the law: conspiracy to commit crime and incitement to violence are two. Speech intended to defraud is another. Trump himself appears to own a special collection of tools with his finesse in vocalized or otherwise signaled coercion and intimidation–or marching orders. He has, after all, developed a reputation as a highly motivational speaker.
At the moment, the House has embarked on a programmatic impeachment of the incumbent President Biden and has done so without a single affirmed assertion or charge.
The US House of Representatives has voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden, moving forward a process that has been promised by Republican leaders since they regained control of the lower chamber in midterm elections in 2022. / Although no evidence has been produced, Republicans have accused Biden and his family of personally profiting from his position while vice-president under Barack Obama.
The order of events in the Trump business saga and the near thematic coverage of Trump-related dark money and Russian money support the case for “#CollusionNoDelusion.
When it comes to Trump properties in America, Donald Trump has never had an issue with Russian immigrants. Wealthy ones, of course. How did he find them? How did they find him? We might suppose that part of the business “proprietary” in the extreme.
Perhaps a little bit to be less blunt or hurtful in the criticism or solicited response to another’s cooking, demeanor, fashion, or life.
Perhaps now and then for hooky, nooky, and bong–that’s not so good but fair in a mood or pinch.
Perhaps a convenient compliment for a kiss.
Perhaps to spare another pain or worry in souring conditions, so one is thought just fine when things are dicey.
To hide something (not so big a deal); to get something (and make life a little more sweet).
It takes another kind of nut to snowball a whopper, to put one over on a community, to seduce, fuck over, and ruin an associate, family, institution, or state–but that’s what malignant narcissists wind up doing in the process of covering the memory of their own humiliation or mortification with a great projection of an undamaged and unassailable heroic self, courageous in adversity, heroic before all, and totally full of bullshit.
The type I have in mind: delusional, grandiose, messianic and in appearance absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience. In the cause of their own baseless glory, one may wade into their swamps of baseless accusations, defamations, deflections, denials, fabrications, frames, omissions, and revisions (some of them alibis). And downstream to be found in their targets: baseless belief, confusion, and eventual disappointment as the “reality” painted turns out having had nothing to do with reality at all.
Infamous Lies
Chechen Rebels Destroyed Apartment Buildings in Moscow
More likely, Russia’s secret political police, FSB, loaded basements with explosives in the dead of night, set off the detonations, and “credited” an allegedly unruly Chechnya resistance for the act in order to convince Russians to elect Vladimir Putin as their best problem solver and hope for security and stability. Code name: “Storm in Moscow”; on this blog: “Reference: Journalist Alexander Zhilin, Operation Storm in Moscow AKA Moscow Apartment Bombings” (May 3, 2023). And the payoff for the False Flag Operation? Not only election to power–and today absolute and imperious power–for Putin, but in his head and for his twisted spirit “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the adoration and validation of the Russian People without end.
Democrats Stole the 2020 American Election
The United States of America has for its defense against all enemies foreign and domestic the services of 27 integrated Federal security agencies. For election, the nation enjoys a full suite of relevant threat detection and law enforcement capabilities from Homeland Security on down to security assistance for local districts. Against all of that, Donald Trump has launched the lie, rumor, belief, and “alternative truth”–which is no truth at all!–that his opposition (how dare they…) stole the 2020 national election. “Election Denialism” appears to have become for some–including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson–their faith-based religious obligation, but no factual basis for it has surfaced, and without that, Trump’s efforts to overturn the previous election amount to no more than the most delusional and grandiose attempted theft imaginable.
A Note On Stealing A Modern Or Transitional State to Operate as Criminal Enterprise
Putin and the Russian Mafia State appear to have set a certain tone in the region of archaic-reactionary and brutally repressive kleptocracy, and my guess is Trump is trying to catch up. Well, this is for America’s Christians to know as regards how criminal power exploits faith and related institutions: “KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y” (January 18, 2021).
From gutter to mansion, America supports an extraordinary duality in relation to sinners and saints, and, quite frequently, the would-be saints turn out the most curious of sinners. The famous are known: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Pool Boy, Giancarlo Granda (People, Jan. 25, 2022)–and noted Becki in relation to the couple’s role at Liberty University, “We had to put on an act” ; Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye (maiden name LeValley) who together in marriage stumbled over the husband’s one seemingly acknowledged affair–one allegedly forced with Jessica Hahn, who was paid off for her silence–and allegations involving several homosexual flirtations or liaisons (The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1988). The less famous but in their own wild way as infamous, whether charmingly so (old rascal) or heinous (for having committed a crime), we may be collectively just not all that angelic. Penance, piety, prayer, and promise afterward may suffice for easing conscience and erasing guilt, and sometimes penance precedes change, present and future, for the better. In any case, I wonder if all Americans, and regardless of religious subscription, may not expect some level of pious hypocrisy in themselves, if honest, or in their ranks (if that’s more comfortable) while striving to do better, but to cover repetitive criminal intent or behavior with the appearance of piety, that is something else.
One may not refer to either Donald John Trump or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as ethically or morally good men. As the governors of nation-states, neither has offered much evidence of care, concern, or interest for the whole body and spirit of their respective nations–Russians suffer sustained abuse and neglect if beyond Putin’s near direct circles of influence and power; for ordinary Americans, Trump has bragged to his wealthy friends from his own gilded halls at Mar-a-Lago, “You All Just Got a Lot Richer” (Vanity Fair, Dec. 24, 2017) after signing into law substantial tax breaks for them. Having ceded substantial tax revenues to private sector interests–and the public be damned (which it literally might be if such power prevails)–why should the buccaneer not commandeer the entire ship of state for his own crony capitalist private enterprise–just as Vladimir has done? He has already developed a base ripe for ripping off.
Marching Forward Into the Past
Around the world, constituencies will find leaders who prefer to treat the idea of the state as a private and family enterprise to be milked for their own profit and the securing of their family and their associates. They’re motivated by greed and lust and–given their underlying fear of humiliation and consequent delusional self-concept and obsession with their own aggrandizement–the allure of their own potential to control others without question. Centuries ago, that characterization would have fit well with a medieval world more than familiar with the concept of “Absolutism” or “Absolute Power” and its violent and not infrequently tyrannical enforcement. Today, the same personalities and personal psychology–associate what I have in mind with Erdogan, Orban, Putin, and Trump–appear archaic but difficult to address and ameliorate from the perspective of any democratic idealism, especially from the vantage of the still revolutionary Constitution of the United States of America (related in the way of inspiration for revolution and the idea of a new nation–Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, January 10, 1776). The named would be quite comfortable beneath the titles of Sultan Erdogan, Tsar Putin, King Orban, and, perhaps, King Trump.
Marching Forward Into The Future: A New American Community
Now that we’re all here, we’re going to have to deal with ourselves as a whole community and not so much as myopic and parochial islands fit for some Americans and not for others.
All American citizens are Americans.
Our guests are of two kinds: aspiring Americans or foreigners who have come here for business or travel.
As Americans, our challenges are not only American but by way of our own far expanded global awareness–apprehension or “consciousness”, actually–we have made ourselves global and universal in character. So have others, and with transnational business (and crime) all of the next functional steps have already been taken. Basically, our connections have changed and become enjoyable, essential, and permanent–or if adverse or made cautious by our own dependence, then a part of the challenge of an evolving new world.
Also as Americans, we have lived by a deeply devoted and earnestly defended Constitution designed to establish and sustain forever a secular democratic republic. Our western civilizational heritage–Judeo-Christian well acknowledged; Greco-Roman for the history, legends, and myths still echoing our own existence–has arrived here compassionate, down to earth, and reasoning. The wealth of the world has been brought here a long time, and as there is only one world, one Earth, we’re already blended with it and perhaps ready to adjust and assimilate, discard what’s not going to work, and appreciate that which proves good universally. We’ve been doing that a long time too, but for international relations, more may be involved than wearing cashmere and sipping tea.
We may see more than we once did; we may do more than we once could; and we should look ahead and do more than live in the past–or allow the greatest future ever to be stolen from all by evildoing feudal-medieval nutcases, whether religious extremists or criminal politicians who cannot contain their own worst compulsions.
So this much I may suggest about the next New World that is the one in which we are already living: it just hasn’t room for malignantly narcissistic “leaders” and their self-absorbed devotion to their own aggrandizement, enrichment, and power through fraudulent display and theft outright. The Next New World will need knowledgeable, powerful, and visionary high-integrity souls for its leadership in the development, establishment, and distribution of extraordinary systems for agriculture, business, education, health, justice, and general prosperity and security worldwide.
Donald Trump’s base claims to have been cheated out of winning the 2020 American election, and so there are a few cheerleaders on X apparently devoted to the surreal task of expressing outrage as an offensive measure. Trump hire Liz Harringtonhas been insistent about a lost election that Trump, in fact, has been trying to steal for himself.
DJT-delusional, grandiose, messianic and without normal boundaries and limits. The psychology’s well known. Nothing was taken away from the #AmericanPeople in the course of the 2020 election.
Our #UnitedStatesOfAmerica is no medieval polity. It is no “mafia state”. It is a modern secular democratic republic, and not one elected official, including President, “rules” by cabal, divine right, fraudulent claims, force, or violence.
In fact, the role of an American President is not to rule the country but to act as its most powerful management executive in compliance with the Constitution of the United States and its Legislative and Judicial branches. Only recently, so it seems to me, has the Republican Party embarked on or endorsed a program of what appears an effort to install authoritarian, corrupt, and evidently criminal control of the state.
The Xpression has been well received, and here you may see it yourself.
I have found “X-pression” becoming pointless as the forest wakes up, all of the birdies go tweet tweet tweet and one’s own expression drowns in the cacophony. Nonetheless, X interaction feels engaging and here serves as part of a morning routine involving strong coffee, access to a portion of the world’s best journalism online, and, sigh, also a collection of voices practically medieval in their bludgeoning unreason.
The Anti-Defamation League and Elon Musk have been sparring over the fate of hate speech on Musk’s “Digital Commons”, so I call it–#DigitalCommons–on X. The ADL appears to believe Musk is a publisher who should be responsible for the content of his web site while Musk appears devoted to the broadest legal freedom of speech concept and feel the obligation to sustain X uncensored. In the way of X, I’ve weighed in. Clearly, Musk neither authors nor edits the platform he administers in his role as a technologist. Forthwith, my opinion at X address https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim/status/1703418994139566319 –>
Single platform publishing has eliminated the boundaries that once sustained mainstream, fringe, and marginal communities in each their own domains. Today, the #DigitalCommons offers all everything at once in one place. That would not be a problem but for #AgitProp #Conspiracy #Disinformation #Incitement and #Recruitment into organizations or movements criminal or once marginalized by paper-based distribution.
Rx. Defenders of laws and within bounds civil behavior may have to go direct to their antagonists. Conspiracy, defamation, incitement (to crime) needs must be fielded, and the #DigitalCommons may not be itself the policing element.
Note: in the United States, not all speech has been protected under the First Amendment. Defamation, libel, and slander may be brought to court by suit or tort; conspiracy to commit crime or incitement to violence may be detected and met by the power of the State through its law enforcement agencies.
I’ve been conversing via Twitter with fellow blogger Benjamin Chayes (History is Now; Pertinent Food), and I want to share it here in a more permanently placed showcase for expression for that reason plus basic cogency and, as always with BackChannels, distillation.
My country, the United States of America, finds itself politically divided, rancorous, and stressed today, and there are reasons for that, including Russia’s “Active Measures” and related “Destabilization and Reflexive Control Operations”–Moscow appears to mess with the U.S. first and foremost, but it does it sideways with cyberwarfare and disinformation. Much coverage falls to specialized OSINT (start with CISA.GOV–and then let curiosity and imagination run wild).
Setting The Bear aside, the quick-thought Twitter platform (and here not yet “Blue” and upgraded for lengthier speech) lends itself to the compression of language and a fast but unhurried parlay.
The replay has some fragmentation but I think the main points are together and unified by the exchange.
The America I both experience and imagine has been a Christian majority but secular enterprise, compassionate and inclusive in its cultural and geographic expanse, and it has been practical about balancing its defense and security obligations, foreign and domestic, with the necessity of building up trade and national revenues as well as the treasuries, corporate and public, that in turn define our national lifestyle.
We have in the way of all nations through time our national underbelly where the degradation goes so far down that whatever hasn’t sunk so low needs must look like some kind of “up”.
Yes, I criticize #Trump for his lack of #Integrity & apparent absence of related #ModernAmerican credibility, education, & insight along with his disastrous American banking & business record, cooperation with Moscow and Putin-shameful moment- https://t.co/ywMzsMgCBL -& mafia….
"And of such sort I would have our Courtier’s aspect; not so soft and effeminate as is sought by many, who not only curl their hair and pluck their brows, but gloss their faces…."https://t.co/br51vT7zm9 Keyword for Castiglione: "manly".
I'm like Mulder: I want to know. I want to believe–just not in aliens so much. 🙂 Is "Orwell" in America in your opinion? Cradle to grave x totalitarian management: yes or no?
And I regard Putin as Trump's companion in the world of the narcissist's dark mirror. He looks into the pond, sees his reflection and the sky behind it, and that's his reality. The further he goes into his own reflection, the greater the darkness.#Putinhttps://t.co/9SO99Ig1T4
Trump, covering his smallness with his big image, could care less about America's Constitution, democracy, and flag. He's a standard issue malignant narcissist, imho, a damaged soul without boundaries or limits, a nothing grinding up wealth and power.
Every chief wants his people to have money, and while money has no conscience–it serves every one–some of it has a history that the good strive to discourage.
For the United States, Trump's grasping is the power grab. He tried to overturn an election and usurp a Presidency.
London has been working the issue-https://t.co/7qgBrGFrVa 🙂 Business has a damnable side, unfortunately, and that's made so at the point-of-purchase. At least a little bit, blame the buyers.
There is no one sinking Trump with lies except Trump who lies.
If any want to go all #Pogo on this, in large measure, Europe and North America pay fair share for the transnational crime and corruption that so bedevils them. 🙂
Neither #ModernAmericans nor their #ModernRepresentatives need much to dismiss #Trump from public life. A vote will do. However, advanced technology has produced new barbed wire and related tangles for investigators. Add perpetually deniable (or else!) mafia methods for Trump.
There has been more in the early conversation, but I will stop here for those whose patience may be similar to mine–that’s part of art as well, i.e., knowing when the painting’s done.
Oh, heck….
#JoeBiden's a seasoned politician with a now phenomenal record and so far solid Democratic and Republican voting power behind him. This "senile puppet" has more character, determination, integrity, knowledge, and political skill than the dumb and fraudulent #DJT can even imagine. pic.twitter.com/zfxwJX852Z
You're still going after #Trump and #CollusionNoDelusion? Are you looking for briefcase full of money? A signed contract? I would suggest the powerful don't do things like that anymore.
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