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The Witness Chronicles, February 17, 2024

The courts start to get real for Donald Trump and the nation

Feb 17, 2024

blue and white water splash — Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Yesterday held about a normal (?) month’s worth of big news stories. The fines, the death of Alexei Navalny, a noble human, and Mike Johnson’s shameful and stupid adjournment of the House to avoid having to pass a Ukraine aid bill. That action alone made me realize just how far gone these people are.

And these things all link together to paint a picture of a Republican Party unraveled by their loyalty to a man who will destroy them to protect himself. Digesting it all is a challenge to say the least. The apparent prison murder of Navalny was extremely disheartening, but unfortunately not surprising. Here’s a little bit of my take.

$440 Million, So Far. So Much For Mr Business President

A well-deserved catastrophe for America’s biggest loser

Why would we elect a man whose lack of self-control has cost him unimaginable millions? Engoron’s fine decision in the New York civil case about Trump’s business practices, on top of the E. Jean Carroll millions, leaves the billionaire without a business and likely no cash. Not to mention the tens of millions for legal fees.

Republican donors are already balking about paying those legal fees.

He can appeal but he has to post a huge bond in case he loses that appeal. It’s questionable where that cash will come from. No sympathy there but it brings us to why anyone in this country would continue to support and vote for him. His claims of business savvy were at the core of his election strategy in 2016.

Those claims are empty now. They always were but his appearance as a businessman in The Apprentice reality TV show apparently convinced his supporters that he was actually a real businessman on the program. It was entirely fake. And now we know his acumen in real life is a house of mirrors.

In addition to the huge fines, he is banned from doing business in New York for three years. But even worse, his company cannot do business with any bank doing business in New York, which is basically every bank on the planet. The organization is a real estate developer and developers are in the business of borrowing money, so this essentially puts them out of business.

It is doubtful how much cash Trump can access and now his source of cash may dry up for years. Watch for asset sales and when you’re selling because of pressing legal issues, you are unlikely to get a good deal, especially when the legitimate value of those assets has been questioned in a losing civil case.

You would think the Republican Party would have panicked by now and be scrambling to find a new candidate. Any sane organization would have done that years ago. Now we can expect even more whining and crying about fairness, reverse racism, crooked Biden conspiracies, and on and on, endlessly.

He has moved past being the biggest loser to being the biggest victim, and he deserves every fine thrown at him. So when does the American political system finally draw a line?

The answer is apparently never. The Republican candidate for President is crazy and now we know his business success was a sham and a grift. Simply put, when do we wake up and realize who this man really is? It’s simply impossible to understand or justify.

As I write this the news media is tearing this apart in detail with special reports on all the networks pointing out the repercussions of this and the events that led to it.

This constant chipping away of his last shreds of credibility is eventually going to erode his support and we have not even started the criminal trials, which begin on March 25th. The man is going to be flying between court locations non-stop while running for President.

A normal human would probably fall apart with stress and fear but Trump is far past being any flavor of human, much less normal. His monumental ego and lack of self-control has destroyed his business and facing possible prison time, it is likely to crack in public.

He may very well incriminate himself in the much more serious felony crime indictments just by opening his mouth constantly.

What a circus. It’s a one man freak show and it’s just getting weirder and weirder.

He Can Run But He Can’t Hide: The Criminal Trials

First date set and this won’t be pretty

The delaying tactics are not working and that is a huge problem for Donald Trump because the rest of his defense tactics are very weak to non-existent. He is a man who never had to pay any consequences for his actions, no matter how outrageous, so he stopped bothering to cover his tracks long ago.

And now the prosecutors are following those tracks to their logical ends. And it doesn’t require much in the way of tracking skills. He will almost certainly get convicted of something this year and it may very well be the least consequential of the criminal cases, the coverup of his hush money payments to a porn star.

The fact that we will see an ex-president in court for something as sordid as this says volumes about the man, but it also says a lot about the caliber of the Americans who support him. The word that comes to mind is shameful.

The media will portray the Stormy Daniels case as trivial when it becomes the first criminal trial to start on March 25th, but the charges could carry a jail term of up to four years. That is a reality that likely keeps Trump up at night as he rages on TruthSocial about the unfairness of it all.

His idea of unfair is getting caught. So he puts a spin on his appearances by trying to treat a day in court as a campaign rally. That gets him the publicity but it also has a way of ticking off judges and juries.

Besides his failure to delay the first trial this week, that March 24 date is undoubtedly a shock to him and it won’t be the last this week. Judge Engoron in the New York civil trial about his business practices is expected to set the fines for his guilt and they will be huge.

They have to be huge to get his attention, likely in the hundreds of millions. Otherwise he would probably try to get his supporters to pay the bill, but there is already negative PR about the fifty million in donor funds already spent on legal fees. At some point that well runs dry.

There is an interesting ripple effect to this money situation. Democrats are outraising Republicans across the board by as much as 100% across much of the nation, with various state Republican Committees finding themselves broke or near to it. In Michigan, their ousted leader attempted to sell a building they used before finding out the Party didn’t own it.

That tells us a lot about the competence of the ‘talent’ they are attracting. It also tells us that Republican donors are a lot more worried about Trump’s legal issues and costs than much of the media tells us. They are keeping the powder dry while they watch how the circus unfolds.

He is not getting any help from his rabid supporters in Congress either as they rattle on about issues and people they won’t or can’t do anything about. At this point it is already impossible to imagine them doing any governing at all this year because they are consumed by Trump’s fear that any accomplishment of any kind will give credit to Joe Biden.

One conclusion to draw from this week’s events in court is that even a trial many probably think was resolved will suddenly be in our faces next month. My primary prediction for this election year is still Trump’s gradual crackup mentally as events start smashing into each other at a terrifying rate.

It’s unlikely that he would face jail time in the Daniels case because of his status as an ex-president, but his inability to control himself could very well result in multiple contempt of court incidents. And one of those judges might get fed up enough to send him to the pokey to cool off.

He of course would try to spin that as a huge boost to his campaign, but it would only be a boost with his most rabid and conspiratorial fans, and there are not enough of them to make any difference. But the indignity of seeing a president in jail, especially in a case involving a porn star, will likely peel off some of his supporters, especially those who still believe in the rule of law and civility.

It’s an erosion process and that erosion isn’t limited to Trump’s own actions. Those of his congressional followers may have cost them the Long Island Special House seat election where their intransigence on any border reform backfired spectacularly. In that election to replace disgraced Rep Santos, it was widely considered to be a very close race.

But the Democrat won by 8%, a landslide by today’s standards and he went directly at the House Republican failure to do anything, giving the Democrats a clear issue they can take the lead on. That failure was directly attributable to the actions of Donald Trump, actions he proudly owned in public.

Doing and saying things anyone would know were self-destructive is a sign of mental instability and terrible judgment, yet Trump keeps doing them. One question I think we will hear more often is why we would elect man who has terrible judgment even when it comes to his own survival.

His recent statement about NATO and Russia should have all of us questioning that judgment when it comes to serious global events.

The court cases could highlight that fact even more if possible. The dominoes are falling, first the $87 million fine in the E. Jean Carrol case, them the likely huge fine and closing of his New York business empire, and soon a possible criminal conviction. And we won’t have even started his much more serious cases in DC, Georgia, and Florida courts.

Finally, for now, I have one more question. When will Republicans stop their manufactured rage at Biden and start getting mad about what one man’s giant ego trip is doing to the future of their Party, not to mention our democracy?

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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