Donald Trump can’t stop the cascading series of events that’s taking him down

| 10:35 pm EDT March 13, 2019
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Just yesterday Walter Shaub, the former government ethics chief, retweeted this from Kenneth P. Vogel: “Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg spoke by phone with TRUMP this a.m., urging him not to ground 737 Max 8s after Sunday’s crash. * Muilenburg has tried to cultivate Trump. He visited Mar-a-Lago after AF1 dust-up, & Boeing donated $1M to Trump inaugural.

So the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 are grounded all over the world, but here, Trump has a chummy phone call with his donor, and we can all roll the dice and take our chances! Sad! Grounding was inevitable, but I do wonder at the timing of it all. Boeing should have taken charge of this problem, and Muilenburg should pay a very high price for that very suspicious phone call with Trump. We Americans flew an entire extra day on planes with software an ex-pilot described as criminally defective.

This is a good example of cascading events. Another good example is the criminal prosecution of Paul Manafort. The former campaign manager sleazed his way through the federal court system, and ended up with a total of 7 1/2 years placed on his head. He didn’t even get back to his prison in Alexandria before he was slapped with multiple charges brought by New York State.

Events continue to cascade. You can’t stop that process, nor know where it will end. The judge in the latest Manafort sentencing, Amy Berman Jackson, was crystal clear about Russian collusion not being addressed at all in the case. To make her point, she even condemned the defense’s insistence of “no collusion” with Russia as being a “non sequitur.” When Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, tried to bring it up again in his statement after sentencing, he was justifiably shouted down as a liar by the audience. We don’t know how this will end, but if I were Trump Jr., Kushner, Ivanka, and Eric, I wouldn’t be humming the tune, “I Love New York!”