Here comes the part where Donald Trump’s whistleblower scandal gets even uglier
This week has been a whirlwind. A gust of scandal turned into a political tornado, picking up and spewing out haphazard accusations and rumors in all directions. Trump threw Pence under the bus, Rudy Giuliani appeared to live out his fantasies as a pantomime villain, and it all crescendoed with claims from former and current officials that the White House stored calls from Putin and the Saudis in a highly classified computer system just like the call with Ukraine’s president. And this is how we know the whirlwind is turning into a category 5 storm.
I was in my car during late rush hour when I learned that Trump had essentially won the election in 2016. Specifically, I heard he’d won Michigan. I can’t remember if I just thought it loudly or actually said it aloud, but my reflex was “the Russians bloody did it.” And they did. Unfortunately, my intuition was right. Whether they indeed managed to alter the vote count or simply wage an information war is irrelevant. The Russian agenda was a success.
I should say that I also predicted Trump’s win. At this point, with you might want to know what my knee-jerk reaction was to hearing about the details in the call with Ukraine and prediction for what happens next. Two things: (1) Putin told Trump to jerk the president of Ukraine around, and (2) more stuff is going to start pouring out of the sinking ship.
With regard to Putin telling Trump to mess with the president of Ukraine, it seems as though it plays perfectly into Putin’s agenda: Trump plays both sides by getting played by both sides. He does Putin’s bidding, weakens Ukraine, and Putin gets dirt off his hands if the election meddling can be outsourced. Ever wonder what happened in those highly secret talks Trump had with Putin? The ones in which no American translator was present? It’s safe to assume they weren’t talking about adoptions or cooperating in space exploration.
With regard to the latent deluge of information that I believe will come out, it all will have to do with old fashioned corruption. Money laundering, extortion, and abuses of power. Trump has always seemed to have all this going on under a very thin veil. I suspect a few notable things, however, namely that Trump has effectively turned his administration into a criminal enterprise aimed at increasing his personal wealth, and that he has more than a few times changed US domestic and foreign policy at the request of foreign powers to achieve his goal of personal enrichment. The best part? Nobody wants to be part of a sinking ship, and people will try to save themselves before they can go down with Trump.
It was only a matter of time before the stupid, corrupt, and sloppy aligned in just the right way; now it’s only a matter of time before he becomes unelectable for a second term or, yes, forced out.
Democracy thrives in snarkiness