Trump's War Against... Fox News

Yesterday's New York Times carried a rather spectacular quote about Trump from Robert DeNiro, who knows a little something about organized crime. "[T]hat’s what he is. He’s a petulant little punk. There’s not one thing that I see in him or his family, not any redeeming qualities. They’re out on the take. It’s like a gangster family."

This slide up top, from a Fox News poll last week, indicates that just 41% of Americans think Trump should not be impeached. Half think he should be impeached and removed and another 4% think he should be impeached but not removed. So... 54% (to 41%) agree that the House should impeach him, which they will likely do on Wednesday. But it wasn't this poll that Señor Trumpanzee was screeching about over the weekend. Fox News in general was though.

Like Louis XIV, Trump actually believes he is the state and that the apparatus of the state belong to him and is there to serve his purposes. Trump isn't an educated man and has no idea what the constitution says and no interest in finding out. I'd say something like 40% of Americans agree with him-- either actively or passively and would embrace an authoritarian form of government. It speaks to what Fox News is that Trump also believes they are also there to serve his needs-- part of his team-- and act not as a legitimate news outlet, not even part of the time, but as a propaganda arm of his government. So... over the weekend he let loose with this tweet:

And then a few minutes later, obviously obsessed, this one:

Comey and Schiff were both Chris Wallace's guests on Fox News Sunday, where they gave Fox viewers the opportunity to get a glimpse of the real world outside the Trump propaganda bubble. Trump hates Wallace and calls him names and has tried to get him fired. Any glimmer of independence for a tyrant is intolerable. Wallace's speech to Newseum on Wednesday probably didn't soothe Trump's feathers. This is worth watching:





Wallace: "I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history... He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try to de-legitimize us... I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts when we report critically about him and his administration that we can be trusted. Back in 2017, he tweeted something that said far more about him than it did about us, quote: 'The fake news media is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people.'"

2017, A Hell Bound Train Of A Year (Part 2): Bernie Madoff & Donald Trump: A Tale Of Two Cons

-by Noah

People lost their life savings. They lost their homes. Their lives were destroyed. You didn’t think of that as stealing? People felt safe with you.

Yeah, but those were…

And yet you were betraying them all.

Well, but these people, you know they had a little greed in them, too. They were a little bit of, you know… Look, you know, and they didn’t wanna look too hard. They looked just far enough. So they’re accomplices in some way, too. - from a conversation between Bernie Madoff and his interviewer Diana Henriques

I recently watched HBO’s The Wizard Of Lies, a movie depiction of the $64.8 Billion Bernie Madoff scandal. The movie features one of Robert De Niro’s greatest acting portrayals, and it is so much more. As I watched it, I couldn’t help thinking about another big time con artist, a con who has perpetrated a tremendous con. The best con. The worst con. A con that makes your head spin. The con that put a conman in the White House. A con that makes Bernie Madoff look like a cub scout.

How’s this for perspective: Bernie Madoff’s con was sociopathic and evil. He ripped off $64.8 Billion, mostly from rich people, using his position and the trust he had built up over the years to his advantage. Many of his victims lost every penny they had. Many lost their homes. In the end, Madoff accused his victims of being greedy. Did they want more money? Yes, but they were really just looking for reasonably safe investments. The lion’s share of the greed was on the part of Madoff himself, as he looked to acquire massive amounts of money for his family. Some of his victims who weren't rich suffered because their pensions had invested with Bernie. They had their futures tied into Madoff's scheme without even knowing it, until it was too late.

Donald Trump’s con, on the other hand, was for an exponentially larger amount, $1.5 Trillion, an amount that, incredibly, makes Madoff’s con look embarrassingly small. But wait, there’s more. Trump’s con was every bit as evil but he stole from people who aren’t rich to give to the rich, including himself and his family. As for the trust element in regards to Trump, it’s safe to say the rich knew of his reputation as a conman and were all for it. Unfortunately, millions of other voters refused to see the obvious; letting their bigotries and emotions make their decision at the voting booth. They were easy marks and now they will pay, as will so many of us.

Despite the huge difference in the amounts conned, one almost has to ask if the two perps were separated at birth? Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump are both two American criminal masterminds: two of the very, very biggest and worst of all time. One is a sociopath. The other one, currently masquerading as a President of the United States, is even worse. He is a psychopath. It’s important to note that, in both cases, the victims looked just far enough to see what they wanted to see. When the history of both men is written, it will be noted that, in each case, the people around the victims also paid a price. To the perps and their defenders, none of that matters for a second, as long as the money is in their pockets, that is.

What does matter is the size, scope, and down the road effects of the scam. The Madoff scam ruined a lot of people. Tax Scam 2017 just might ruin the United States of America, turning it from a small d democracy to a large O Oligarchy.

Madoff’s con ruined the lives of countless people and destroyed companies with a financial ponzi scheme that stole their money, while telling investors that their money was being invested while, in reality, it was being put into his pockets and his company. Trump’s con is being sold on a myth that those getting the money from us will invest it for the great good. It’s called “Trickle Down.” It has already been shown to be nonsense going back to Ronald Reagan’s bogus “Trickle Down.” On top of that, today’s corporate CEOs made it clear that they weren’t going to invest the money in anything other than shareholder stock prices and their own offshore bank accounts.

Once the Tax Scam passed both houses of Congress, you could hear the laughter coming from Washington and Wall Street. It was the Republican Party’s biggest F.U. to date.

Trump, of course, has a history of, among other things, ripping off people who work for him by not paying them the contracted amount and goes Bernie one further. He doesn’t care if anyone dies from the acts of greed he plans and partakes in. Witness Trumpcare and now, the aforementioned Trump/Ryan Republican Tax “reform” Scam, both of which aim to take money from us and put it into the pockets of the super rich. Working with fellow congressional scammers, Trump even managed to combine the two in his $1.5 Trillion scheme. No doubt, he calls that efficiency.

Many of the victims of Trump’s ideas for “healthcare” will die of cancer and other diseases. Many now will go undiagnosed. It’s all in order to give himself, his family, and his allies in Congress (I’m talking ‘bout you Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, et. al.) and the corporate world that humongous tax break that will redistribute a historical amount wealth upward from out of the pockets of the middle and lower rungs of the class ladder to the pockets of very highest. Madoff just wanted the money. Trump wants to create dynastic oligarchies. It’s a matter of proporation or scope. And, forget about the idea of subsidizing Big Pharma as part of Obamacare. The Republican Tax Scam does much more than make up for any loss from that.

Trump and his party’s ideas for the alleged tax “reform” are part of a two-pronged plan that do the same thing, not just because the Republican tax scam contains some fine print that will all but end Obamacare, but also because of what it would do to the financial security of millions and millions of Americans and their families to begin with, all while those at the very top increase their financial distance from the rest of us. Cuts to Medicare and Social Security which will threaten lives, shorten lives, and lessen the dignity of lives are now planned in order to pay for the money being doled out to the rich and to corporations. No doubt more money will be borrowed from China, thus providing a further drag on the nation’s economy in the future. You have to have a very sick mind to want that any and all of this. You have to be psychotic. It’s called building a society of lords and serfs. Madoff was greedy alright. Trump is Madoff times millions, if not billions, with the deaths thrown in as an added touch that only adds to his smirk.

The rich will not be gaining from this plan.
- Donald J. Trump, at the White House, 9/12/17

If Bernie Madoff is “The Wizard Of Lies,” Donald Trump is “The Beelzebub Of Bullshit.” Gullible, naïve people fell for the cons of both men. Both promised the world to their victims. In the case of Trump, it isn’t just the individual investors that will be victims. Madoff was to the financial world what Trump is to the political world. Madoff was once even the Chairman of NASDAQ and built his con on a ponzi scheme.

Trump launched his candidacy for president on, among other lies, stories of a non-existent conspiracy of birtherism and false tales of thousands of Jersey City Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground. Now, he continues to con his gullible supporters by saying that news of his own particular scandals are “fake news.” His favorite “journalist,” Alex Jones, even tells his fans that the Sandy Hook massacre of children is a hoax, and, they believe it.

Madoff, incidentally, ignored the events of 9/11. He made no claims of seeing cheering Muslims. While everyone else in his offices had their eyes glued to the TV sets, Madoff stayed at his desk building his ponzi pyramid and ripping off his investors. Being a con artist requires a certain kind of single-mindedness.

Both Madoff and Trump knew that the world is full of easy marks. They made good use of that knowledge and caused staggering damage. In the case of Trump, the damage is still growing and there’s no telling where it will end: a final, total worldwide financial collapse? World War III? A screaming, babbling, madman, losing control of his bodily functions, clawing at the White House carpeting as he is dragged out?

People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is. I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.
- Donald J. Trump, 2007

Housing market crashes usually precede a greater economic crash. If you’re worried about the current rumblings in the housing markets, don’t go thinking that Trump is worried about it. For him, it’s an opportunity. He isn’t going to be thinking of people who lose their homes any more than Bernie Madoff did. He’s the maggot that eats up the mess.

In The Wizard Of Lies, we see Madoff sitting at his desk creating his fragile pyramid. He’ll smooth talk his marks in meetings on Long Island or at New York City restaurants, and also, interestingly enough, Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort. Madoff’s scam had global reach through the markets but his world is small, at least compared to Trumpworld. Madoff played stock market schemes. Trump casts a bigger net. Trump played the students of Trump University. Trump played Atlantic City. Trump says he doesn’t know convicted stock swindler Felix Sater, a Russian crime figure. Yet the photos say other wise, as do real estate scam lawsuits. Trump and his son bilked a kids cancer charity. I doubt even Madoff would have gone there.

Trump has spent years traveling to Russia and China. God knows what he’s been doing but you know it isn’t good, at least not for anyone who isn’t a relative or an associate. His world is so much bigger than Madoff’s was. What pieces of the action has he sold to America’s adversaries and for what price? What has he bought with scammed and laundered money? When he works to destroy our budding solar industry, China laughs, knowing that he’s handing it over to them while we lose staggering amounts of jobs in the new industry as a result. The TPP had flaws, but now that Trump has pulled out of it, China’s dream of unrivaled domination of Asia and the Pacific Rim is coming to fruition.

Russia? Putin wants to move and strengthen his sphere of influence over Eastern Europe again. Trump talks down the importance of NATO while he seeks to build hotels in Russia. Where does that partnership go? Where does it end?

Whatever Robert Mueller and his team find out about Trump and his crime syndicate; it will just be the top of the pyramid. Even with whatever Mueller does find, it will be so awful that they’ll never tell us the complete story. Any trial will just be the farce of a pantomime trial. Why? Simple. As they allude in The Wizard Of Lies a full trial would require putting many of the richest men in the world on the stand. That ain’t gonna happen. You’re not going to see people like Putin, the titans of the banking world like Jamie Dimon, the Koch brothers, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, various oligarchs, drug lords (legal and non-legal), or any of the top political donors for either party facing questions on the stand from smart inquisitive lawyers. We got that story with Madoff. Anything we do see will be well scripted in advance. The Trump scams are so much bigger and so much uglier. Some in charge will think we can’t handle the truth. They’ll say that if we knew the truth of what goes on with our leaders and the financial community, the whole world economy would disintegrate in a giant explosion of flame. Others in charge will want to keep it from us, keeping the roadmap

The message must be sent. Mr. Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil. This kind of staggering human toll.
- Judge Denny Chin, presiding judge, Madoff sentencing hearing.

There are other similarities and differences between Madoff and Trump, of course. Although, to this day, Madoff rationalizes his 150-year prison sentence by saying that, after the 2008 crash, “they” just needed a “face to blame,” and although Trump will blame others as he always does, both parasites will never admit to their frauds. In the end, Madoff plead guilty; something Trump will never do. Madoff went to jail but he couldn’t admit to his failure. Trump would rather be paid to go away like Nixon was, or get to keep his swag, also like Nixon (his pension and aides paid for by us). Also, Madoff was turned in to the authorities by his sons. None of us will hold our breath waiting for Eric or Don, Jr to do the same.

By the time the era of Trump and his cohorts is over, who knows how much money disappears into thin air? With Madoff, it was billions. Trump will take pride in how much more he makes disappear.

If he’s allowed to continue, Trump will follow his idol Putin’s ways. Every exchange of money will involve a cut for hm. That is his dream. If allowed to continue, he will do it with his little puppy Paul Ryan on his lap and slobbering hound Mitch at his side. He will take the ultimate perverse pride in being the best conman who pulled off the most tremendous con of all; getting to the White House and using his power and position better than anyone, better than any two bit dictator ever, to ruin the lives of millions and millions of people, if not billions. Caligua and Hitler, and Stalin. Louis XVI, Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao, Ferdinand Marcos, Idi Amin Dada. Putin. He longs to top them all, paint the White House gold, inside and out, and yell “Let them eat cat food.” That, too, is his dream. It is the dream of a true psychopath. Only the 2008 crash stopped Madoff. What will stop Trump? Mueller? A bigger crash due to insane Republican policy?

Madoff’s dreams were puny compared to those in the sick mind of Trump. Trump and his cronies look at all of us as marks, not just a relatively small list of clients like Madoff kept in his desk. Trump and his cronies seek to take more of our money, bigger percentages of our money to finance their dreams of a 1000 Year Reich Of The Rich. They don’t need armies. They just need our money to make more money and to gain more power over us. Lords and serfs. The con is on. Over 60 million Americans gave it their stamp of approval last November. To paraphrase Diana Henriques, the reporter who broke the Madoff story, the true measure of the con was not what was lost but what people had left after the fraud was revealed. The thing with Trump is that, the longer the fraud goes on, the worse the world will be when the full extent of what he’s done and is doing is revealed, and he’s gone.

In a recent commencement address at Brown University, De Niro, who had so deftly played Bernie Madoff artist, spoke of Don the Con, saying

When you started school, the country was an inspiring, uplifting drama. You are graduating into a tragic, dumbass comedy.

He's A Mutt?

Far right extremist Martha Roby represents a blood red (R+17) hellhole-- ethnically cleansed-- in southeast Alabama. Romney beat Obama there 63-36%. No Democrat will ever win her district; the DCCC doesn't even run candidates there. This morning she woke up-- perhaps having slept badly because of yesterday's Trump revelations-- and withdrew her ill-advised Trumpy-the-Clown endorsement. "Trump's behavior," she said, "makes him unacceptable as a candidate… and I won't vote for him." GOP crackpot Barbara Comstock, who represents a very swingy (R+2) northern Virginia district Hillary is going to win handily, didn't need to sleep on it. She denounced Trump and called for him to step down from the ticket last night as the media began pounding the "pussy" revelations nonstop. Unlike Roby, she's in a very tough reelection campaign with the DCCC heavily backing reprehensible Blue Dog LuAnn Bennett for the seat. By the June 30 FEC reporting deadline Comstock had already spent $2,256,613 (and Bennett had spent $871,830). The NRCC had spent $1,189,109 to hold the seat-- $431,582 just last week! "This is disgusting, vile, and disqualifying," she said minutes before Trump's carefully crafted non-apology apology was issued. "No woman should ever be subjected to this type of obscene behavior and it is unbecoming of anybody seeking high office. In light of these comments, Donald Trump should step aside and allow our party to replace him with Mike Pence or another appropriate nominee from the Republican Party. I cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump and I would never vote for Hillary Clinton."

On the other hand, Tony Perkins, head of the neo-fascist (but Christianist neo-fascist) Family Research Council-- which claims in its mission statement that its goal is to "make a lasting difference for timeless values across our land"-- says he's sticking with Trump. "My personal support for Donald Trump," he admitted this morning, "has never been based upon shared values." Oh. So is Dr. Ben.

This morning John Harwood speculated that Trump "has brought the Republican Party to its nightmare scenario... Trump, trailing Clinton by several percentage points nationally and in most battleground states, was on track to lose the election before disclosure of the tape. Republican confidence that he can close that gap and win has vanished as Trump approaches Sunday night's second debate with Clinton in a severely-weakened position. The principal question now is how many other Republicans go down with him. Democrats need to gain at least four seats to win back a Senate majority; their odds are good. It remains unlikely that Democrats can achieve the 30 seat gain they need to win back the House. But the moves Friday night by jittery Republican members suggest that they are alarmed by the possibility. The theme of the next month will be the scramble of Republican politicians to protect themselves."

This is starting to smell like when Rahm sprang the trap on Mark Foley in late September, 2006... one day after it was too late to get his name off the ballot. The Democrats had the best of all worlds: Foley withdrew from the race but his now-toxic name remained on the ballot as the GOP nominee. The question, of course, is how badly it will hurt down-ballot Republicans... like Peter King on Long Island, Pat Meehan in the Philly suburbs, John Faso in upstate New York, Cresent Harding in North Las Vegas (a Mormon who, after defending every Trumpist outrage for the last year, finally pulled his support for the sociopathic billionaire this morning), Mario Diaz-Balart in Miami-Dade, Darrell Issa in San Diego and Orange counties, Fred Upton in Kalamazoo, Frank Guinta in New Hampshire, Sean Duffy in northern Wisconsin, Lamar Smith in Bexar and Travis counties. Is this-- and Trump's reaction over the next couple of days-- going be enough to wipe the GOP out? Please help that along here. Damn shame that doddering Pelosi doesn't have an even remotely competent DCCC in place to take advantage of this!




A short time ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Reince Priebus told party officials today to start redirecting funds away from Trump and to down-ballot candidates.

The speed and breadth of the abandonment of Mr. Trump’s candidacy shocked some long-time party members and exposed a shattered party without a clear path forward.

“Our party is in its deepest crisis since Watergate in 1974,” said Ron Nehring, former chairman of the California Republican Party, referring to the mid-term election when the resignation of then-President Richard M. Nixon led to a Democratic landslide. “It’s compounded by the fact that it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump were to bow out. It’s too late to change the candidate on the ballot."

The immediate consequence of the RNC’s decision on allocating resources is a halt to the party’s mail program so it can be redirected toward a new universe of voters, the official said. News of the mail program stopping was first reported by Politico. Mr. Priebus and top party strategist Sean Spicer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

...Trump’s latest imbroglio is also widening a chasm between the party’s old guard and the legions of voters drawn to his anti-establishment message.

Those divisions surfaced on Saturday when House Speaker Paul Ryan appeared at a rally in his Wisconsin district after disinviting Mr. Trump from that event and denouncing his crude comments. Mr. Ryan’s own welcome was mixed with boos and pro-Trump hecklers in the crowd.