Donald Trump, The Movie!

When they produce the movie, “Trump, The Child President” the plot will be so thick and discrepancies so obvious as to be unbelievable to those who did not live through the actual events.  We will look back at an election process wherein 26 percent of American voters brought to power a child-like lifelong bully who had cheated people who worked for him or who had done business with him.  We will see a man who presented a deluge of incredibly obvious lies, duped thousands of people with a phony university, depredated women in general and anyone else who disagreed with him in the smallest way, showed no understanding of diplomacy or international affairs and no interest in learning and maybe most significantly, endorsed, promoted and encouraged an enemy of the very country that he was sworn to protect.  All that and yet, the so-called modern conservatives continued to support him, attacking legitimate long-time patriots who were appalled at the corrupt and perhaps criminal behavior of the child-like figure who had taken over a previously respected post as head of our nation.  The viewers of any such movie would surely leave saying, “Hogwash!  It could never happen here in the United States of America!

If we had heard the story a year before the election or decades before that, when conservatism was still a mark of patriotism, we would have laughed at its vulgarity and brushed it off as a fantasy.  Yet, here we are, watching that very story unfold, stunned by the gravity of the peril before us and wondering how the story could possibly have anything but a tragic ending.

I was just listening to the Shawn Hannity show and following his outright attack on John McCain and the lengthy list of other American patriots who have spoken out against Russia’s hacking.  I was shocked to hear Hannity support anti-American criminals such as Snowden and Assange who have undermined American security and released information which may have led to the deaths of dozens of undercover operatives working to keep America safe.  All of this it seems, to justify his support of President-elect Donald Trump’s love affair with Vladimir Putin.  He’s not alone there.  Rush and Laura and many small-time allegedly conservative commentators are on the attack along with Donald Trump calling anyone and everyone fools and idiots should they stand up for keeping the United States safe from the criminal acts of Russia.  Of course, we know there is nothing credible about talk radio’s monologue.  The purveyors of this nonsense don’t pretend to provide actual objective news or even to tell the truth.  In fact they hide behind the shield of entertainment and claim in defense of their preposterous statements that their audiences fully understand that they are not telling the truth, but rather, entertaining.  Nonetheless, seemingly mind dead followers in the millions quote their blabbering as fact in support of pseudo-conservative principles dictated by talk radio itself at the bidding and advantage of an extremely wealthy and powerful elite.  So, is it any surprise that the unthinkable has become everyday news or that the preposterous is being accepted by so many without question?

As our movie roles along it exposes how at a minimum, the Trump family businesses stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars if Russian sanctions are lifted.  Those sanctions have blocked the purchases of Trump condos and other offerings by Russian billionaires.  The Trump family has previously made hundreds of millions on sales to Russian elite and U.S. sanctions have brought that nearly to a halt.  Eric Trump has been quoted as saying, "As the experience of the past few years shows, the best property buyers now are Russian.  They’re different in that they can go around without a mortgage loan from American banks, that require income checks and they can buy apartments with cash.”  So, in this area alone Trump businesses stand to benefit at least hundreds of millions of dollars if Donald Trump favors Vladimir Putin at the expense of our national security.  To this, many Trump supporters say, “So what?”  The “so what” is obvious in that Russia remains a hostile foreign power that works to undermine the United States in every way it can.  Putin will play nice as long as we keep giving him everything he wants, but anyone who thinks he is, ever has been or ever could be a friend of the United States is daydreaming.
Now our movie has shown a rather clear channel of profit to the Trump family in a very direct way that should be enough to kill Donald Trump’s love affair with Russia, but it doesn’t begin here.  Like most modern movies, this one is filled with flashbacks and one of those takes us back to Sergei Millian in around 2007.  Sergei you see, is the head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the U.S.  While Sergei says that the Russian Chamber of Commerce has no actual ties to Russia, we know that the chamber is a front for Russian intelligence operations that dates back to Soviet times and has been heavily funded by the Russian government.  Sergei was instrumental in arranging for Donald Trump to visit Moscow in 2007.  According to Sergei, Donald Trump gave him the right to market Trump properties in Russia to Russians.  Donald Trump, with his penchant for denial, has stated that he never knew Sergei, but pictures of the two of them together and under-oath testimony make it clear that was not the case.

We can easily see the profit motive behind the love affair, but the plot falls short as the love affair continues beyond all reason in the face of a hostile nation’s attack on the United States.  Our movie is full of suspense though and the plot gains new life as we learn of the possibility of blackmail.  As we begin to see how Donald Trump’s trip to Russia and the wining and dining at Russian expense could have left this self-indulging chauvinist in a compromising position duly recorded by Kremlin actors.  This scenario follows Vladimir Putin’s previous success with blackmail.  In 1999 Putin, as head of Russia’s security service (FSB) ordered the filming of one of Russia’s top prosecutors, Yuri Skuratov with 2 very young naked women.  Skuratov had been investigating Kremlin corruption uncovering activities that might have put Russian president Boris Yeltsin in an awkward situation.  Putin’s blackmail strategy worked and embarrassed Skuratov out of office.  Soon after, Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister of Russia, putting him on the road to be President.  That Putin was capable of doing the same with Donald Trump is well within the realm of the believable and gives the claims of others credibility.

As our movie progresses and audiences shake their heads in disbelief that anyone of Trump’s ilk could have ever been supported by patriotic conservatives, we begin to look at the connections Donald Trump had, knowingly or not, with Russian mafia figures who bilked thousands of Russian citizens out of billions of dollars laundered through Trump businesses.  Indeed, after the last bankruptcy which left those who had trusted Donald Trump holding the bag for his bad judgement, Trump managed to regain and eventually surpass his wealth. It was done not with new adventures into brainy business opportunities or with shrewd business tactics, but by selling very much overpriced apartments to Russians in cash deals that remain rather secretive today.  From bankruptcy to billionaire in a few short years built on cash deals with Russian mobster money is not a business plan that should garner admiration.

To understand why the patriotic American conservatives in our movie didn’t rise up to tar and feather a President who was to profit greatly from coddling a known enemy of the United States, we have to come full circle to the treatment of Russia’s efforts to put Donald Trump in the White House.  While America watched, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin metaphorically gazed longingly into each other’s eyes as Putin’s propaganda engine leaked every tidbit of information it could scrape up to demean Trump’s opposition.  The so-called conservative media machine sang along with Donald Trump in denying that Russia could be involved, even in the face of overwhelming expert testimony.  Eventually yielding to the obvious truth that, “The Russians did it,” Fox News and right-wing talk radio switched to a new tactic to support Russia and Trump.  The pseudo-conservative media set their focus on the Democratic National Committee as the real problem.  The retreat position became a let’s-blame-the-victim campaign. “The DNC didn’t use the best anti-hacking protection,” they wailed.  Real conservatives have long argued that when a thief breaks into someone’s home, the homeowners are not to blame even it they only had one lock on the door.  Nor, can you blame the little old lady for not holding on to her purse tight enough when she was mugged.  Real conservatives understand that you must blame and punish the criminal in the criminal act and not the victim!  We do understand, yet many so-called modern conservatives stand with Russia, Donald Trump and talk radio against true patriots who argue for justice.

The closing scenes of our movie are not yet written, but good people are screaming for a happy ending; one in which America comes out on top.  Our movie hasn’t shown us (with perfect clarity) what all the motivations might be, but we do still see a President of The United States who is Putin’s patsy.  So, how will it end?  It’s not so simple as to be easily predictable.  There are too many questions unanswered.  The really big question is, of course, will real conservatives, patriots and the rest of America be able to overcome the ultra-rightwing all-out support of Donald Trump and Russia?  Can we rally behind the patriots and cast off the disrespect shown by Donald Trump and ultra-right to veterans, the men and women of our armed forces and intelligence community, all of whom understand the threat of an appeasement policy toward a sworn enemy?  Can we dull the glamor of the love affair between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin so as to preserve the security of the United States?

Will we be able to “Make America Think Again?”  Or, are the American people to be forever declining into ignorance, the victims of their own elected government crafted from fake news delivered through talk radio funded and steered by a wealthy elite serving their own interests?  Or, will our movie close to the jubilant applause of a relieved America as its Congress drops the impeachment gavel?