The Jackpot And The Threat

As always in Trumpistan, the Bad and Terrible comes at you so fast and in such volume that it can be hard to keep up.  As we've processed the Twelve Days of Mueller, certain nuggets have slipped through the cracks.  One of the biggest is probably the AMI/National Enquirer story.

The Enquirer was basically Trump's media shield.  They would buy up damaging stories - and the exclusive rights to publish them - and stick them in a safe somewhere.  In other words, there is a trove of damaging Trump stories, and Mueller has them. Now we have a former editor, who presumably has seen most of those documents, who claims that there is outright evidence of criminal activity by Jared and Ivanka.

When we look around the Trump Clan, there has always been a desperate effort by certain media voices to normalize them whenever possible.  Don, Jr. and Eric were hopeless from the start, but efforts to make Ivanka, Jared and Melania somehow less complicit in the awfulness of Trumpistan are falling apart.  Melania is a Birther, an awful woman with cruelty stitched into her DNA.  But let's look at Ivanka and Jared.

These two are the Michael Corleones of this saga.  They are well scrubbed: boarding schools and Ivy League degrees.  They don't tweet semi-literate screeds in an Adderall fueled rage at 4:30AM.  They are quiet, respectable...and absolutely crooked and incompetent, too.  Jared has failed upwards and likely turned his privileged position in the White House into outright graft.  A lot of the sucking up to Prince Muhammad bin Salman has been Jared's doing.  Perhaps calling them Michael Corleone is too generous, since at least Michael was competent.

What seems inevitable in all this is that as the walls collapse around Trump, they will take his children with him.  I dunno, maybe Tiffany escapes.  Everything Fred Trump built and illegally siphoned to his son and that has been built for Fred's grandchildren will whither away.  That's fine.

My worry is that imagine if Trump had been more like Ivanka. What if he had been more Choate/Georgetown/UPenn and less Queens slumlord?  What if he had not tweeted so much?  What if he had buried the cruelty better?  What if he hadn't praised the Charlottesville Nazis, but simply issued a banal statement and then done nothing to counter the rise of RW extremism?

It is hard to separate Trump's politics from his policies.  But the GOP has, for years, been thumping the base with shit it doesn't really believe - abortion, for instance - in order to pursue the goals it does - stripping away everything possible from the working classes of the country to give to the rich.  Someone will come along and whisper all the parts that Trump shouts. He or she will be slick and say the right thing at parties or before the press.  Tom Cotton seems a likely candidate, Harvard with a Bronze Star, devoid of empathy or kindness, nakedly Machiavellian. 

And the press will fall for it.  And 49% of strategically dispersed Americans will fall for it.  Probably not in 2020 or 2024, while the lingering stench of Trumpistan still lingers over the body politic.  But sooner rather than later, someone will be Trump without the vulgarity; without the catalog of easily defined crimes.

That day scares the shit out of me.