The Desperate Attack by a Bad Liar to Discredit His Victims

Vindictive little prick, trump is.

His revenge tour of using his corrupted Department of Justice to go after the people who held him accountable for his crimes is now targeting the one person who humiliated trump the most on the public stage: his rape victim E. Jean Carroll (via Alana Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker of AP News and PBS News Hour):

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist who has said Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store 30 years ago, lied during the course of civil litigation against him, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person who confirmed the existence of the investigation was not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors' office in Chicago, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has had no involvement because of his prior work as Trump's personal attorney, the person said...

A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her, and she was awarded $5 million. The following year, another jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case related to Trump's social media posts about her...

The Justice Department is scrutinizing a statement Carroll made in the course of the civil litigation that no one else was paying her legal fees. It later became public that a Chicago-based organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped fund Carroll's case. Trump's lawyers in the civil case accused Carroll of concealing that information, which they said called into question whether the case was politically motivated.

A month before the first trial in 2023, then-Trump lawyer Alina Habba sought to delay it, saying in court papers that new revelations about Hoffman partially funding Carroll's case "raises significant questions as to Plaintiff's credibility, as well as her motive for commencing and/or continuing the instant action."

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a Dec. 30, 2024, ruling, upheld the $5 million jury award from 2023. The court addressed Carroll's credibility after Trump accused her of lying, during a deposition, about how her case was funded.

The court cited Carroll's explanation that when the question about Hoffman's contributions was first posed to her in 2022, she had forgotten about "the limited outside funding" received in September 2020.

"It showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs," the appeals court said.

This is something trump's lawyers have already argued, this is something the courts have already accepted. And yet trump is still desperate to label Carroll as a liar in some form or another so that he can claim she's lied about everything else, especially the sexual assault.

There's been two separate trials covering this - one on the assault itself, another on trump's public defamation of Carroll - and both juries found Carroll credible enough to find for her. In one of these trials, the judge declared during his ruling that trump's act fit the definition of rape. That's how damning the facts in this matter are.

Yet here trump is, abusing the office of the presidency to get his DOJ minions to rewrite the legal system - rewrite all of history if possible - to erase this crime (and arguably set the stage to erase himself from all the other sex crimes he's accused of).

trump can never admit he did something wrong. trump can never admit he lost at something. trump must always present himself as a winner (never a sucker); so if there is someone out there who beat him, who exposed his sins and his failures, trump must do everything he can to label that person the "real" criminal, the "real" liar. he will insist on flipping all of reality so that trump himself is both victim and hero.

Even if trump's lackeys at the Justice Department find no evidence of perjury, or even a hint of Carroll lying (even on matters that don't even relate to her court rulings), it doesn't matter: trump will use this farce of an investigation to vilify Carroll to the media and to his Far Right allies.

Don't let trump rewrite history here. Stand with Carroll, stand with all the other women who stepped forward to reveal how trump harmed and victimized them. These aren't isolated incidents, these aren't projections or fantasies or lies. They're all telling us the same thing: trump is violent and vengeful and vulgar towards women.

trump can't keep lying about all the crimes he's done to so many. he can't be allowed to commit more crimes against the rest of us.

The Vanity of Plastering Your Ugly Face On Money No One Will Ever Use

Just remember this is all about trump's vanity (via Raquel Coronell Uribe and Gabe Gutierrez at NBC News):

The Treasury Department is preparing to print $250 bills with President Donald Trump’s face on them and is just waiting for Congress’ green light, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday...

I'm going to stop quoting the article right there because I just can't fcking handle the whole situation, this farce of leadership attempting to force trump's ugly mug into everyone's wallets. I'm not going to share any photos of what the planned $250 bill looks like, just to note here that the photo they're using of trump is the one of him scowling at everyone like a sociopath.

Most other depictions of people on our American currency usually have them looking upward or to the side, with stoic and thoughtful expressions implying wisdom, foresight, or peace. No, for trump he's going with the WANTED poster look.

Which is the other thing about this vanity project: It's written into the U.S. Code that bans living people from getting depicted on our coinage / dollars (also stamps, if I'm reading it properly). trump is more than willing to ignore the law, willing to mock a century-plus of tradition, willing to tear down an American culture that tries to avoid idolatry in our politics. But this is trump buying into the false worship of extremists who mock such values in order to promote their own egos. This is the trump who broke laws to desecrate the White House with a gaudy oversized ballroom, this is the trump happily engraving his name over federal buildings that have nothing to do with him.

Even the dollar value is degrading: this is trump trying to tie himself to the 250th year of the United States creating the Declaration of Independence that founded the nation's existence. They're looking to generate a dollar value that's never been used before - not replacing Ben Franklin on the 100, or Lincoln on the 5, or Washington on the 1 - to make it unique, unavoidable, something to stand out in the history books (and coin collecting indexes) for decades to come.

Thing is, almost nobody uses high-value currency in this day and age. Not only due to the commonplace use of banking debit cards to directly pay from our checking accounts, but because handling such large denominations is no longer useful in common (legal) business. Few places are willing to accept even $50 bills for payment anymore, let alone $100s. The risk of those bills being counterfeit are common enough to be a hit on the economy. Putting a $250 into circulation is going to make con artists printing their own fake cash salivate even more.

There is no honest reason in America to create a brand new currency, meaning this whole thing is driven by dishonest reasons. Above all, playing to the greed and vanity of a morally bankrupt thief who lied and bluffed his way into high office.

If the Republicans in Congress do succumb to trump's will on this and give him this farcical honor - something that no one else is really asking for - they will never live it down. They already deserve to get voted out of office for all their failures to rein in trump's crimes and excesses: This will be just one more reason to kick them out these midterms.

P.S. putting yourself on money is the depraved act of movie villains like Jack Nicholson's Joker or Raul Julia's Bison. trump is following the same insane game plan.

Failing One War in Iran, Starting Another with Cuba

We're in yet another week of trump proclaiming a peace deal with Iran is in the works, and yet every sign that trump isn't going to gain concessions or any true victory the way he thinks (via David A Graham at the Atlantic):

Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

(Absolute rage regarding that mess, but I digress)

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.

Take a moment to notice how trump is obsessing over the nuclear deal in 2015 Obama made with Iran that trump impulsively tore up: A deal that in hindsight was working in spite of trump's refusal to accept anything Obama did as President (or accepting Obama as human, period). trump doesn't even know what the deal is, or even cares: All he cares about is that it'll be "better" than what Obama did. And trump is too clueless personally to comprehend how fucked he is:

First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel...

Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. He has cycled through different rationales for the war, including regime change and stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but hasn’t landed on one. Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.

Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement...

There is another reason that Graham doesn't note for why trump is desperate for a deal, desperate to crawl away declaring victory in a war with Iran he's clearly lost: trump wants to start another war with a visible target, one that the Far Right would be happy to see (even if most Americans don't want any wars at all right now). The likelihood of attacking - if not straight-up invading - Cuba keeps ticking higher (via Paul McLeary at Politico):

The Pentagon has spent months positioning the troops and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba — all it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.

The president has floated an invasion of the island after economic and political pressure failed to topple the Communist government. But the Navy’s built-up presence in the region — the largest in the world outside the Middle East — would allow the U.S. to act immediately.

This is something that should get cleared with Congress, but Republican congresscritters have abandoned their role in government and so we're facing yet another unwanted war.

These strategically placed assets set the table for military action, from a capture of Havana’s leadership much like the seizure of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to a series of precision strikes. And they open the possibility that the U.S. throws itself into the third international conflict of the Trump administration.

Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday at a full Cabinet meeting. “Having a failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.”

Cuba is a failed state thanks to decades of American sanctions and a more recent blockade on any oil/fuel getting to Cuba to keep their lights on, but of course Rubio's not going to admit to that. It doesn't help that Rubio is a Cuban expat whose entire political identity is tied into being an anti-Castro advocate eager to invade his family's old country: Exacting revenge against the Castro regime that drove the hardline Cubans out.

I've mentioned these anti-Castro types before: I met some of the original generation - those from the 1960s - at various political functions in South Florida when I worked in Broward County and was a McCain supporter. That generation was rabid in their hatred of anything they deemed 'Communist' or favoring their demon Fidel. Given how Rubio is from my generation, that hatred has passed down to the current generation in power, and they are still fantasizing about pulling off a Bay of Pigs that won't fail.

But that's the problem: Whatever promises Rubio and others are whispering into trump's ear to get him to sign off - the promise of an easy military victory, the hope of being more manly than the wimps who failed to recapture Cuba for wingnut glory - even something as simple as staging an invasion on an island 90 miles off the Florida Coast is going to be too hard for this administration. Back to McLeary:

But the administration faces a timeline to act. Many of the biggest warships deployed in the summer are approaching 10 months at sea, far beyond the usual six to seven months. This has caused defense officials to worry about overextending crews, and adds to the stress on a naval force that is also conducting a blockade of Iranian ships in the Arabian Gulf...

“These back-to-back long deployments will add up over time,” said a defense official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about military operations. “Keeping them out there so long creates more problems in the long run when it comes to refitting and repairing those ships once they come home.”

The prolonged missions come on the back of the record-setting 11 month deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which ended this month after sailing from Europe to the Caribbean for the Maduro operation and then to the Middle East for the Iran war...

But the long deployments take a toll on the crews and Marines, who had planned for a normal rotation and are now months past their initial scheduled return home.

With our military troops stretched thin already, do we really have enough manpower to go into a jungle-covered, mountainous region like Cuba to try and capture their officials and occupy the lands? And the problems with logistics are already showing with the current deployed fleet: We're already aware how supplies and food under Hegseth's command at the War Defense Department are mismanaged to the point of futility (if not starvation for the front-line troops).

All Cuba has to do is the same thing Iran did: Deny trump a quick victory, make enough strikes to bloody America's nose (it's obvious Florida would be a rich target to strike ports, utilities, and key transportation hubs to disrupt the state), and survive long enough for trump's declining poll numbers to sink the whole Republican Party by the midterms. P.S. Most Americans don't want to invade Cuba, making it likely trump's approval will go lower if he decides to.

This is an administration of Far Right Republicans looking for any kind of military success to justify their Alpha Male fantasies, driven at the top by a madman who wants to win peace prizes while bombing three to seven nations at a time. This is also an administration made up of the least-qualified people for the jobs they're handling, meaning they are making bad decisions into worse policy that will lead to disaster.

And our troops are going to be the ones paying for those bad decisions. At the least. In a fight with Cuba, that is something that can come stateside far faster and far bloodier than we could ever expect.

In a trumpian train wreck bound to get worse - WE WARNED YOU, AMERICA - by every moment, this is getting seriously worse.

Elect Clowns, Get Circus

trump's desecration of the White House - the People's House, not his - continues with this mockery (via Nicholas Kerr at ABC News):

Construction on the Ultimate Fighting Championship Octagon is underway on the White House South Lawn ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned fights this summer to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States.

The event, dubbed "UFC Freedom Fights 250," will take place on June 14 -- coinciding with the president’s birthday and Flag Day -- and feature a lightweight title matchup between undisputed champion Ilia Topuria and interim title holder Justin Gaethje alongside four other fights.

How the actual fuck can you tie in a cage match fight system to the anniversary of the United States' "birthday" that was the Declaration of Independence???

photo by Mark Schiefelbein (AP Photo)

Look at how much of an eyesore that stage is going to be, dwarfing the White House itself.

In all the years that the White House has stood - since the later days of the John Adams' administration - there has never been a spectacle like this staged on the property: It's not like there's a long history of boxing fights (Teddy Roosevelt himself was an avid boxer until he got blinded: then he switched to judo) or music concerts being performed there (most concerts are better staged on the Mall just down the way).

trump is doing this because he's enamored of - and probably has money in - the UFC organization, showing up at various fights over the years the way celebrities would at boxing championship nights. It also ties into the whole "alpha male" machismo identity - the open misogyny, the willingness to delve into toxic behaviors - that trump and his lackeys crave.

trump may really believe that this event would somehow promote the "American Way" of manhood, fighting, and success: ignoring how few people - about 3.3 million per average viewership for UFC fights, compared to 125 million who watched Super Bowl LX - may actually tune in. If he's expecting a large in-person turnout - they're talking about 75,000 to 100,000 people showing up - I doubt the locals in DC are going to show up at a trump-sponsored event, and uncertain about how many will travel all that way to be there (only 5,000 or so showed up for trump's riot on January 6th, and barely half of that actually raided the Capitol).

This shouldn't be how America should be celebrating it's 250th year of existence.

This is going to be a grotesque display of violence that only the sadists like trump enjoy.

Don't tune in. Don't watch this circus of stupidity. Look away. 

Find better ways to honor America, like protesting at ICE facilities or getting out the vote in Red states to flip them Blue.

Uh-Oh, It's a Podcast! (Tell Me If It Works)

So here I am this Memorial Day weekend, finally getting around to see if I can work with the Audacity recording app well enough to start my own podcasting.

There's not much, just a brief introduction, and a request for people to leave suggestions about what you'd like to hear as podcasting topics, if any observations I can make will appeal.

It's been uploaded to Buzzsprout. I've copied a link. Let me see if I can embed it to this blog article... hold on...

Also, the opening music "Midnight Drive" is from CHANO_1_NA at the Pixabay free media store.

What do you think, eleven blog followers?

An Abuse of Prosecuting Power: trump's Destruction of the Rule of Law

When last I reported on the struggles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia - one man among hundreds of thousands of immigrants getting hunted, jailed, and punished by trump and his lackeys - he was facing false allegations about gang ties while the courts untangled the lies over what was or wasn't an "order of removal".

In the midst of all that, Abrego Garcia got hit with criminal charges, as part of trump's escalation having made this all a personal vendetta. If there's any good news today, it's that the judge overseeing the case dismissed all charges while highlighting that vendetta as a major reason why (via Sergio Martinez-Beltran at NPR):

A federal judge in Tennessee on Friday dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego García, an immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia was charged last year with human smuggling after being returned to the U.S. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. He didn't face charges then, but the Justice Department reopened an investigation into the traffic stop after a federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return from El Salvador.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw said the actions by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche "taints the investigation with a vindictive motive."

"The reopening of the closed HSI investigation is the source of the vindictiveness," Crenshaw said, referring to Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts federal criminal probes.

Crenshaw said the government would not have prosecuted Abrego Garcia if not for his successful lawsuit challenging his deportation to El Salvador.

"Blanche's now unrebutted public statements tying the reopened investigation to Abrego's successful lawsuit taints the investigation with a vindictive motive," Crenshaw said. "The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power."

One of the things about the American legal system is how much power a prosecutor wields: it's insane what DAs can get away with, and rare are the times that judges ever rein in those powers. That our nation's judges have been overruling and dismissing a lot of criminal matters brought to them under trump's broken Justice Department should tell you how inept and failing the current prosecutors are acting to serve trump's whims.

Just yesterday in an unrelated criminal case, a judge in Chicago tossed out a matter involving a group of ICE protestors - the Broadview Six - when the judge found out the AUSAs heading the prosecution violated a ton of regulations involving the grand jury. 

Marcy Wheeler over at her blog goes into more detail just how screwed up it got:

For months, the defendants in the Broadview 6 case had been trying to get the transcripts from the grand jury, arguing that DOJ’s theory that they had conspired to impede an officer whose car they were accused of blocking did not accord with the law. On April 9, Judge April Perry permitted the government to simply file the jury instructions for her review, rather than responding to the defendants’ argument. But the government actually had to get an extension before they did file the transcripts.

When Judge Perry reviewed the transcripts after receiving them on April 23, she found there were three presentments. And while the instructions on the law were problematic before the first one, it got cleaned up by the time the grand jury returned an indictment...

But she also found they were redacted, and so instructed the government to bring unredacted copies to a hearing on April 29.

The government dismissed the felony, 18 USC 372, and therefore mooted the transcript order.

The defendants, smelling a rat about the redactions, nevertheless persisted in asking for the transcripts. And after the government expressed a willingness to do so, Judge Perry got the full versions earlier this week.

She almost immediately ordered every AUSA involved in redacting the transcripts to show up to a hearing yesterday...

I can tell you on Bluesky when the legal eagles heard about that order, they knew the judge was pissed.

Perry described four problems with the unredacted grand jury transcripts:

• Vouching, in which a prosecutor invokes her own assurances in lieu of evidence
• Improper communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room
• Dismissal of the grand jurors (one in particular) who objected to the charges
• The redaction of the transcript to hide all that

I'm not a lawyer, but I know what "vouching" is: it's where a guy is basically gaslighting you with "trust me babe, I know what I'm doing" without presenting the actual evidence for a trial that a grand jury is supposed to review. I know what "ex parte" outside communication is, which is something of a no-no. Removing grand jurors - or forcing them out - is supposed to be a huge no-no. And redacting all of that to hide it from a judge tends to make judges believe the prosecutors are straight-up lying to them.

Judge Perry said as much when dismissing the Broadview case (via Edward Helmore at the Guardian (US)):

Perry said she was “incredibly shocked” by the government’s redactions, and that she had never seen the “types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts”.

She added that “trust has been broken”.

These Justice Department officials deserve to face all sanctions and even disbarment once the dust settles. In all, a complete breakdown of ethics, professionalism, and trust. 

Which is what we expected when trump regained high office and brought back his style of bullying, vindictiveness, and incompetency.

trump truly believes the legal system is there to punish enemies, as a reaction to all the times he's been brought to court for all the actual crimes and frauds he's committed over the decades. It doesn't matter how things are supposed to be done in the legal system, trump doesn't care: All he wants are results of everyone he hates and fears suffering in courtrooms under his brand of (in)justice.

Which is why I worry still for Abrego Garcia and all the others facing these miscarriages of justice. The courts may have tossed out these attempts at prosecution, but trump will demand his Justice Department minions generate a new set of criminal allegations based on trump's fearmongering... and that won't CAN'T be proven real in a court of law. 

As long as trump is there to twist the rule of law into his law of misrule, no one is really safe.

Keep fighting. And for the LOVE OF GOD throw every elected Republican official out of office this midterms.

trump and His Cronies Aren't Even Hiding the Theft Anymore

This is how corrupt trump's administration is: he sued his own government for billions of dollars so he could then weasel out of the lawsuit and claim an imaginary settlement for a mere billion to pay off his foot soldiers among the insurrectionist ranks (from Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin at ABC News):

The Justice Department announced Monday that as part of a settlement agreement in President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the attorney general is establishing an $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration. 

The announcement came after attorneys representing Trump informed a federal judge in a court filing earlier Monday that the president was dropping his suit against the IRS.

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, subsequently ordered the case closed -- signaling that she does not plan to challenge the controversial settlement. 

In a brief order issued Monday, Judge Williams said she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing the case. She noted that the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, so there is no "settlement of record" -- leaving her with no authority to adjudicate the private settlement. 

Do you see it? There's no official settlement of record. There's no paper trail the legal system is supposed to rely on. And yet, there's a billion dollars that Congress never approved of getting set up in a slush fund that I doubt will have any real oversight to where it gets turned into a funnel of illegality where even more money gets siphoned off to gods know where.

As thought making the payment amount symbolic to make it say 1776 like it's for FREEDOM on our nation's 250th birthday is going to patch things over. GODDAMN THIS IS CORRUPT.

This is Paul Krugman over at the National Memo:

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

If there's any true justice, trump's move here should get tied up in the courts - especially over that fact that there's no judge-approved agreement on record - long enough for the Democrats to win back Congress this midterms well enough to guarantee they will use their Article I constitutional powers to block trump and his cronies from stealing one more nickel from our nation's coffers.

This is why the Republicans are so desperate to gerrymander the hell out of congressional districts, this is why the Republicans are so desperate to suppress voter turnout to keep their Senate seats safe from statewide anger. They're not that stupid to ignore the polls showing how unpopular they've gotten among even independent voters (and even enough registered Republicans willing to flip their ballots).

Voter turnout still matters: that's the good news. The Republicans can't rig enough barricades and tip enough scales to stop all of us angry at them and trump. Everyone needs to understand the mission this midterms: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS. VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE BALLOT.

We can save this nation from an eternal void of Far Right grifting and greed, if we show up and vote goddammit.