Donald Trump is a Full-Blooded Criminal
Donald Trump is a full-blooded criminal. He’s been a criminal since he emerged as a real estate developer in the early 80s. Back then Graydon Carter mocked Donald Trump with such burlesque purity that it became a meme that defined Trump forever. Carter called him a “short fingered vulgarian”. Trump was not admired back then; he was lampooned constantly. He was an object of ridicule – a loutish buffoon performing an artless parody of himself. He channeled Muhammad Ali’s, “I’m the greatest of all time”, and sought to imitate the message of Ali’s song, “And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts 10, you pray that you won't have to fight me again”. When Ali made his commencement speech at Harvard in 1975, with that endearing twinkle in his eyes, he said, “I don’t do no Uncle Tom; I don’t do no shuffling…. Ali shuffle, but no Uncle Tom shuffle.” Muhammad Ali famously opposed the war in Vietnam and lost years of his career for standing up for morality and decency in our government.
Donald Trump is no Muhammad Ali. But he does do an outstanding shuffle.
As Trump pranced his way through the world of New York real estate, his corruption blossomed into gaudy displays of gilded wealth. And he became a tabloid celebrity who exemplified the big-shouldered Reagan era – a decade that celebrated the accumulation of wealth over all other endeavors. It was a time when the best and the brightest - graduates from America’s finest educational institutions - went to work on Wall Street in droves. The money was so good that you were a chump if you did anything else. In a sense, the “greed is good” Reagan era spawned a brain-drain in America that denied us the benefits of an intelligentsia and the contributions to society that the most educated among us have traditionally brought. And this brain-drain continued well into the 1990s and 2000s, ultimately culminating in the financial cataclysm of 2007-2008, where a veritable feeding frenzy of financial malfeasance brought our economy and the global economy to its knees.
And yes, while Muhammad Ali refused to do the Uncle Tom shuffle, Donald Trump performed the Reagan shuffle with a vengeance - and with no discernible twinkle in his eyes as he spouted polemical nonsense and divisive political rhetoric such as his “birther” theory. Donald Trump is a full-blooded criminal, and he exemplifies the Übermensch that arose from the Republican ideology of the 80s and morphed into what the GOP is today. In fact, with his politics of racist nationalism, authoritarian control of government, celebration of purity of race, - with his immigration cruelty, his worldview of the supremacy of the strong over the weak – it’s no longer hyperbole to say that he’s really doing the Nazi shuffle.
But he didn’t get here alone. He rose to power with a little help from his friends. And I don’t mean his criminal courtiers like Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Gates, Papadopoulos, and the 13 Russian spies who have already been indicted or have pleaded guilty in the Mueller Investigation.
I mean the Congressional Republicans who continue to run interference for Trump; U. S. Senators like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Orrin Hatch, and Mitch McConnell. And Congressmen such as Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Trey Gowdy, and Devin Nunes, to name only a few of the most outspoken.
Trump couldn’t have gotten here without them. In fact, he can only remain here if they remain in office. The Republican Party is now a malignant force in America. And it is they who need to be removed from office in November if we intend to preserve our democracy.