Sunshine and warm this early-evening Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley — we received near-about nothing off Hilary’s wrath, and like I mentioned yesterday, most of the heavy rain and deep-seated flooding struck south and east of us.
We dodged a catastrophic-weather bullet this time around, but there’s no rejoicing because there’s way-more where that came from, and then some.
Meanwhile again, back East the insurrection/riot spawned by the T-Rump and his legal-lethal pals continues to shine with some noteworthy items today. First, a couple of the 19 defendants in the RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case in Georgia did their dutiful/required appearance to the charges — scheming-plotful attorney John Eastman was formally booked and released on a $100,000 bond; Scott Hall, a bail bondsman implicated in the alleged breach of election data in Coffee County, Ga., went through the same thing and released on a $10,000 bond.
Two other crooked clowns in the insurrection/riot posse, T-Rump’s last chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former DOJ ego-asshole Jeffrey Clark have filed separate “emergency” motions to allow them to ignore a deadline set by Atlanta DA Fani T. Willis to surrender by noon Friday — Fani said fuck you:
Willis refused. “I am not granting any extensions,” Willis wrote in a email sent at 6:25 a.m. Tuesday, disclosed as part of Meadows’s motion. “I gave 2 weeks for people to surrender themselves to the court. Your client is no different than any other criminal defendant in this jurisdiction.”
And the T-Rump his ass-self will reportedly turn himself in Thursday evening, having workied out an agreement with Willis’ office for a prime-time scheduling, thus, energizing a most-likely shameful, humiliating scenario for the Orange Turd who always keeps up a look/appearances — even from a jailhouse set location:
Actually Trump's self-chosen first official Presidential photograph (2017) has the look of a mugshot: pic.twitter.com/CDGDrSFKTp
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) August 22, 2023
In the use of the RICO apparatus, Willis is going for the T-Rump’s love of being the godfather of all godfathers. A scenario from real life but way dumber.
David Remnick at The New Yorker this morning on T-Rump’s mob-like qualities — but as an idiot:
Trump, Richman (Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor) added, has “the affect and sometimes the communication style of a mobster. It’s a combination of clear signalling as to who has power and the source of that power with an obliqueness of expression that, intentionally, barely conceals the threat.” Trump used the same tactics, Richman said, during a 2019 phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, in which Trump leaned on him to “look into” the Biden family in exchange for unlocking a weapons sale. Richman said that in many rico cases, the government will display charts that resemble the orderly hierarchy of the Ford Motor Company. But the Oval Office in the Trump years seemed more like a mob social club, in which “people come in and out without clear titles, and access is freely given as long as they pledge fealty. If you say you have a good idea, you’re told to run with it.”
Paul Attanasio, who wrote “Donnie Brasco,” a 1997 Mob film starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, told me that Trump, though he deploys the swagger of a mafia boss, is in no way a wise mafia boss. “It would be highly unusual for the boss to get involved and make a call like the one to Raffensperger,” Attanasio said. “There’s no way Vincent (the Chin) Gigante would make that call. He’d have someone do it for him. But it’s Trump’s arrogance, his belief that he can do it better and successfully intimidate Raffensperger.”
In a full-blown overview, Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at Princeton University, notes in an op/ed at the Guardian, also this morning, the mafia-like frame of the Georgia charges:
The Georgia indictment is particularly important: what many have long suspected – that Trump operates like a mafia boss – is confirmed by the ample evidence of Trump and his (increasingly bizarre and brutal) associates forming a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. Unlike mobsters, Trump used the power of the state itself to try to get his way, even if his making offers one couldn’t refuse ultimately failed. If Trump were brought back to power in 2024, there is every reason to believe that he would not only engage in all-out retribution for alleged wrongs against his political clan, but also erect what some observers describe as a mafia state.
[…]
It should have long been obvious that Trump operates with methods familiar from the mob: He tried to make James Comey kiss the ring. He demanded that Volodymyr Zelenskiy do him a favor. He threatens those who try to hold him to account for illegal behavior (“If you go after me, I will come after you”). This pattern is not unique to Trump; rather, it can be found among autocrats, or aspiring autocrats globally, who also happen to be kleptocrats. The Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has coined the term “mafia state” to describe the creation of “political families” (which can include a ruler’s actual family, as in the examples of Trump’s, Orbán’s, Bolsonaro’s and Erdo?an’s children, with especially nefarious roles reserved for sons-in-law); these families then use the state to enrich themselves.
Unlike with ordinary corruption, envelopes with cash are not changing hands under the table; rather, the perfected mafia state is about using ostensibly legal procedures like public procurement where, strangely, only one bidder ever shows up. Yet the methods to keep such a system going are recognizably mafia-style: absolute loyalty is given in exchange for material reward and, equally important, protection for an indefinite future through capturing the judiciary. Unlike with the ideologically driven authoritarian states of the 20th century, the main aim is not, as a Hungarian observer put it, “To persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
With protagonists like Sidney Powell, and stage settings like Four Seasons Total Landscaping, it is tempting to dismiss Trump’s conspiracy as a farce, more Corky Romano than The Godfather. Yet, as Willis’s indictment makes clear, it had real victims, such as the two Black election workers who were relentlessly intimidated by Trumpists. It’s crucial that these stories, with all their sordid details, come out. The law, as Gerald Ford, about to pardon his predecessor Richard Nixon, claimed, is not a respecter of persons, but a respecter of reality.
However, in this space and time. ‘reality‘ is in the eyes of the beholder. And with the lies-like-breathing T-Rump, actuality is a confused, seaweed cheeseburger with fart fries.
In the mafia tone, T-Rump’s “finding him votes” is not the real gangland approach to an “offer” of consequence:
A ‘Don,’ or a way-dangerous imbecile Donald Duck — you decide — yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here.)