Get Out!
Curtains Closing on a Carnival of Crime
Down Among the Dead Men Let Him Lie’
by Thomas Adcock
NEW YORK CITY, near America
Happy New Year to all you fighting men and women of The Resistance! Ever since the surreality of a bellicose Know-Nothing’s criminal ascension to the presidency, back in November 2016, you have acted in the grand spirit of the American Revolution of some two centuries ago—a nervy peasant uprising, begun in 1776, that ousted a crazy-cruel British tyrant.
You own the triumphal moment at hand: Our modern-day Mad King George is in crackup mode, en route to irrelevance should he be lucky enough to avoid prison. One way or another, his exit is certain.
In a January 5 essay for the New York Times titled “The People v. Donald J. Trump,” columnist David Leonhardt thundered, “The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?”
Mr. Leonhardt continued:
The easy answer is to wait—to allow the various investigations of Trump to run their course and ask voters to deliver a verdict [on Election Day] 2020. That answer has one great advantage. It would avoid the national trauma of overturning an election result. Ultimately, however, waiting is too dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than the cost of allowing this president to remain.
… The biggest risk may be that an external emergency—a war, a terrorist attack, a financial crisis, an immense natural disaster—will arise. By then, it will be too late to pretend that he is anything other than manifestly unfit to lead.
Evidence amassed by career government prosecutors in Washington and New York has begun to reveal the near undeniable: Donald Trump, capo di tutti capi del sindicato del crimine di Casa Bianca, is politically and financially beholden to a murderous thug in the Kremlin and his mob of nefarious Russian oligarchs. The pretense of Mr. Trump’s legitimacy as president, a once pugnacious article of faith among his zombie cult and blinkered Republican Party pols, is rapidly wilting in the wake of his political rap sheet—
- Insistence on construction of a racist, pointless “wall” sprawled along the border between the United States and Mexico. Ultimate cost to the U.S. Treasury, according to Mr. Trump’s own figures: $25,000,000,000 (€21.89 billion). The imagined structure is opposed by 52 percent of Americans, according to a late December poll from Monmouth University.
- Over the weekend of January 27-28, Mr. Trump lifted an economically disastrous, thirty-five day government shutdown he said he was “proud” to launch, via executive order, as retaliation for Congress refusing to fund his beloved wall. In addition to the approximately 800,000 government workers injured during this period—they received no pay, but were required to show up for duty, under penalty of dismissal—the Congressional Budget Office calculated a cost to the national economy of $11,000,000,000 (€9.63 billion), with one-quarter of that amount a total loss.
- Consequently, the Monmouth poll now boosts public disapproval of “the wall” at 64 percent.
- The dizzying array of criminal and civil corruption within Mr. Trump’s regime and private enterprises—conduct both alleged and admitted—is under review by congressional oversight committees, U.S. Attorney offices in New York and Virginia, the New York State attorney general, and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller in Washington. Mr. Mueller’s team of lawyers, most of them specialists in Mafia prosecutions, is formally assigned by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General to perform a “full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
- To date, Mr. Mueller has secured eight convictions of high-level Trump campaign operatives, along with dozens of pending indictments against American and Russian individuals and at least three corporations. Latest to be charged is a curiosity by the name of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump acolyte, bespectacled body-building fop, right-wing scold, self-professed “dirty trickster” in a myriad of Republican campaigns, and apologist for the disgraced President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994).
- Enamored of a previous criminal president forced to resign office in 1974, Mr. Stone famously had an area between his shoulder blades inked with a tattoo caricature of Richard Nixon. The cartoonist Taylor Jones suggests an additional tattoo, lower down Mr. Stone’s back; call it Trump on a rump.
•
This is who you are, honorable ladies and gentlemen of The Resistance:
Foot soldiers in coast-to-coast protest demonstrations against a regime collapsing under the weight of its malefaction, cruelty, and stupidity; television celebrities employing comedy as a weapon that tunnels nightly under the orange skin of a dangerous fool; journalists chronicling the racist crudity and calumny of a yellow-haired boor; lawyers quietly documenting the indictable and impeachable treacheries and traitorous conduct of a Moscow-approved White House.
You are also the newly elected women members of Congress, women of elegant moxie who brush away the misogyny of troglodytes as if it was mere lint on your proud shoulders.
And kudos to you: the voters!
Two months ago, the American polity halted (at least temporarily) a frightening march toward American fascism—led by Donald J. Trump and supported by his cult of yawping yahoos, die törichten Untergebenen of corporate greedheads, and sycophantic panjandrums of a once respectable Republican Party. A historically large voter turnout gave Washington a thumping Democratic Party majority in one half Congress. Left in place is a wobbly two-vote Republican plurality in the other half, where tenuous survivors tremble at the realistic prospect of Democrats sacking them come November 2020.
You, the voters, asked another necessary question of your fellow Americans: Which side are you on?
The choice is clear, even to Republican muckamucks who know where bread is buttered. One by one, they have their come-to-Jesus moments. Consider the case of Rick Wilson.
A veteran party consultant who acted as principal advisor to the imbecile Republican ex-Governor Sarah Palin in her 2008 quest for the vice presidency, Mr. Wilson excoriated Donald Trump in a January essay for the Daily Beast, an online news site. He characterized the Trump biography to date as a “shady, scummy, shiftless life” incorporating the future president’s “evasion of the Vietnam War draft…serial bankruptcies and business failures…wrecked marriages, and his current reign of misrule.” Even the president’s political base—a low-information third of the American public whose amygdalas are stoked by Mr. Trump at his blood and soil rallies, à la Nuremberg from 1923 to ‘38—is drifting away from the deity they know as The Donald, according to Mr. Wilson.
The old time religion is fading away. Mr. Trump’s concern for protecting the precious bodily fluids of English-speaking white people from an illusory border invasion of Spanish-speaking brown people bent on rape and homicide seems less urgent. Even “the wall” has lost its rhetorical zing. As Mr. Wilson wrote, “[T]he idea of a glorious concrete wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico is deader than that lemur the president glues on his head every morning.”
Meanwhile, as mentioned, legitimate government authorities are breathing fire down Mr. Trump’s neck. Facing the prospect of prison time, the president’s posse of hey-boys has lined up to coöperate with the notion of justice. Whatever else they are, these henchmen are creatures of logic and reason, if not strict practitioners of omertà.
Possessed of neither logic nor reason—and little intellectual capability—Mr. Trump plods through his days of disconnected reality. “Fake news!” he roars. “Poor me!” he whines. “Witch hunt!” he bawls.
Truth at last from the president! Mr. Trump is the witch.
•
At every turn, of course, the lemur-pated victor of November 2016 informs us of “No collusion!” between his campaign and Russian spooks. The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Washington-based research group Center for American Progress, begs to disagree. From it’s January 9 press release—
[Two years ago], the U.S. intelligence community issued a report that showed there were two campaigns to elect Donald Trump: one run by Trump and one run by the Russian government. Trump and many of his senior advisors and close associates have repeatedly denied any connections between the two campaigns, despite the fact that they were working towards the same goal, at the same time, and utilizing the same tactics.
Yet over the past year, we’ve learned about a series of meetings and contacts between individuals linked to the Russian government and Trump’s campaign transition team. In total, we have learned of 101 contacts between Trump’s team and the Russia-linked operatives, including at least 28 meetings. And we know that at least 28 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisors were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition. None of these contacts were ever reported to proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.
The crime that most concerns the Moscow Project may ultimately be classified as treason, per 52 U.S. Code § 30121. Under the statute, foreign individuals or governments may not make “a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” in connection with a federal, state, or local election. American candidates or their associates who thus collude are subject to felony conviction, and appropriate incarceration.
As a predicate for collusion with the Kremlin’s hush-hush intelligence agencies and the battalion of billionaires aligned with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, lawyers are poring through documents that likely offer proof of money laundering by shady Russian characters through the Trump Organization, the president’s Manhattan-based corporate entity.
Mr. Trump does not admit to being rattled, though I happen to know from reliable sources in Washington that he finds it difficult to sleep: He reportedly wanders the White House corridors in the wee hours, clad in his bathrobe and slippers, woozy from cheeseburgers consumed alone in his bedchamber. By his Twitter account, we know of his dawn ravings.
Never mind, the president of the United States carries on in the confident style of a man from another era, one who seems to have presaged The Donald—namely, Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum (1810-1891). As an American politician, business tycoon, and sideshow barker, the late Mr. Barnum is best known for his years as impresario of Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre in lower Manhattan. Due to his Trump-like balding scalp, Mr. Barnum was rarely seen in public without a top hat. His string of celebrated hoaxes began with an exhibition of “Feejee the mermaid,” a creature with the head of a monkey and the tail of a fish. New Yorkers who believed devoutly in the unbelievable flocked to his theatre, eager to buy admittance to a carnival of the preposterous.
As Mr. Barnum famously said of his audiences, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
•
Erosion of The Donald’s sucker base is approaching landslide proportion. Besides the aforementioned yawpers and corporatists and Republican hacks, Mr. Trump’s partisans include—included—expensively educated conservatives and relatively harmless Christian apostolics. Bestriding each of the latter two precincts of Trumpworld is—was—the journalist Michael Gerson.
Mr. Gerson is an affable man long associated with the bow-tie Brahmin wing of the Republican Party, most recently as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is listed in Time Magazine’s “Twenty-five Most Influential Evangelicals” survey, of importance to the pious. Commencing April 13, he will host a tony new PBS Television talk show unlikely to be popular White House fare, though of keen interest to those Republicans concerned with party schism.
By way of a January 28 jeremiad he published in the Washington Post, under the remarkable headline “Trump is a Fraud,” Mr. Gerson planted his influential flag—
Compared with polling from when Trump took office, perceptions of the president’s performance have plummeted…[He] was elected, in part, by giving his supporters an impression of business acumen. This was, in fact, the image carefully cultivated by book publishers and TV producers. And by Trump himself as a presidential candidate, who claimed to be a peerless negotiator, an unrivaled businessman an excellent manager.
These claims can now be believed only by the ideologically addled.
…[H]is methods are blunt and transparent. His typical tactic is to raise the stakes of a negotiation impossibly high—government shutdown or nuclear war—then to make a maximal demand and trust in the triumph of his stronger will. …That Trump [ends up] in abject humiliation [is] fated by biology: You can angrily hold your breath for only so long.
In a variety of global negotiations, American opponents need only master one method: flattery. …It is pathetic gullibility elevated into the realm of theory. It should concern us that the American president is a source of global derision and national shame.
His reputation as a self-made billionaire lies in ruins. An extensive New York Times article on Trump’s wealth found a bassinet millionaire, consistently bailed out of bad bets, who dodged gifts taxes, milked his empire for cash, and [manufactured] a deceptive image of business brilliance.
Who can take Trump seriously? We have plumbed the depths of his shallowness.
•
Eventually, perhaps in February, Robert Mueller will issue a report that promises to be as damningly meticulous. Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University and Mr. Trump’s frequent defender, has told reporters that he expects Mr. Mueller’s findings to be “devastating to the president.”
A congressional aide tells me of a palpable death twitch in the nation’s capital, emanating from the White House; in the dark of night, one can almost hear each slippered step of its resident insomniac. The curtains are about to close on a carnival of crime, he advises.
I was reminded of an English drinking song from early in the eighteenth century—a song that references a would-be king, and Bacchus, the Roman god of wine-soaked sorrow. My informant recited the verses of “Down Among the Dead Men”—
Here’s a health to the King and a lasting peace
To faction an end, to wealth increase.
Come, let us drink it while we have breath,
For there’s no drinking after death.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down;
Down among the dead men let him lie!
Let charming beauty’s health go ‘round,
With whom celestial joys are found.
And may confusion yet pursue,
That selfish woman-hating crew.
And he who’d woman’s health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down;
Down among the dead men let him lie!
In smiling Bacchus’ joys I’ll roll,
Deny no pleasure to my soul.
Let Bacchus’ health ‘round briskly move,
For Bacchus is a friend to Love;
And they that would this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down;
Down among the dead men let him lie!
— Thomas Adcock is America correspondent for CulturMag
Copyright © 2019 – Thomas Adcock
tadcocknyc@gmail.com
Additional photo credits:
David Leonhardt—twitter.com
Roger Stone cartoon—facebook
Resist logo—Freepressed Magazine
Rick Wilson—thedailybeast.com
The Moscow Project logo—dailykos.com
P.T. Barnum—biography.com
Michael Gerson—scoopnest.com
‘Down Among the Dead Men’ art—facebook
