On Auditioning for the Trump Show 2024:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mob boss in the possession of megalomania, must be in want of a slavish sotto capo."
“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff”.
- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act III, Scene V
Putin, Trump and the meaning of a mafia state
Demands for personal loyalty and an obsession with revenge are hallmarks of the Godfather style in politics
Gideon Rachman
https://www.ft.com/content/19ac2cb1-8cb4-464d-9683-18c632146755
[Excerpt:]
"Trump’s emphasis on personal loyalty is reminiscent not just of Sammy the Bull but also of Putin. Both leaders enjoy and even encourage rivalries between factions in their staff. That creates a system in which the leader is the final arbiter of all disputes — the big man whose favour everybody needs. As president, Trump sometimes conducted foreign affairs as if he was negotiating with rival Godfathers: Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia.”
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Roger and Me
The relationship of mob boss and underboss is weird, for sure. By nature, it’s an unholy alliance - no solemn oath to We the People or undertaking to protect and defend a venerable Republic. It begins and ends with the insistent need of each “to be somebody” and a shared transactional undertaking “to do it to them before they do it to us.”
These two kindred spirits also share an insistent desire for unearned respect, a need forever unmet except in the comedy clubs of Rodney Dangerfield impersonators and staged Trump political rallies.
Thus is Roger Stone. Forever Trump’s slavish bag man, forever consigned to conjuring one Republic-destabilizing dirty trick after another, ranging (thus far) from perjury to insurrection to intent to murder. Content to sacrifice our sacred Republic for the petty adulation of Boss Trump, incarcerated Proud Boys and degenerate members of today’s New York Young Republicans Club.
More telling? In the dominance hierarchy of every Trump organization, this mob boss/underboss management model prevails.
Within the Trump family, the Trump Organization, the Trump RNC, the Trump GOP and the Trump 2016 White House. As for Boss Trump’s 2024 campaign, cut-throat auditions are well underway for Trump sotto capi and consiglieri. All are loyal, only the slavishly subservient will be chosen.
Within the Trump 2016 White House, Fifth Amendment fans Stone and Bannon were senior advisors, Stone de facto, and fatuous Bannon ostentatiously bullying generals, intelligence heads and Cabinet members alike. Priebus and Kelly were booted one after the other, until, at last, subservient, document-burning, subpoena-avoidant Meadows landed.
And Trump’s “Roy Cohn” (long-time lawyer to the mafia) nearly arrived in the form of bootlicking Jeffery Clark but for the patriotic intervention of the DOJ’s grounded Republican leadership.
At the RNC, slave-like Ronna-not-Romney McDaniels is out, 110% loyal Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump reportedly in. Within the Trump 2024 Campaign, Trump VP contestants abound, with “Trump’s Shadow” Stefanik far outpacing discretely servile contenders Sanders and Conway.
Within the Trump GOP House (otherwise known as the Freedom Caucus), McCarthy and Jordan are exiled, while Speaker Mike tries ever so desperately to fall into line. In the Senate, poor Mitch is close to breaking, while shameless Ted Cruz and Rick Scott vie in the wings to be Senate sotto capo.
Only the Trump Family and Organization are in search of candidates, the latter requiring only a lone bankruptcy clerk to pay judgment damages and dissolve that house of cards, and the former perhaps best advised to explore Russian adoption as the best hope for the Trump Family future.
Trump’s mandate of absolute servility makes unfit to serve all who sign on, and that alone should cause patriotic applicants to run to the nearest Mar-a-Lago exit. To choose a career shamelessly fawning over Trump is the clearest symptom of contagious grandiosity, a malady that bleeds directly into the misanthropic and criminal. Just ask Cohen, Chesebro, Ellis and Sidney Powell (the loyal sotto capo of Trump 2020 voter suppression, the Trump co-conspirator in Georgia whom Boss Trump called “crazy” even while he was considering Powell to head a special DOJ task force on voter fraud - in Georgia!).
The lived reality, the one unfolding before our very eyes? This Don will never earn respect, only the perpetual castigation of an embittered nation and the Free World. Having no values, he is wholly unworthy of respect. He is impulsive, vindictive, without judgment or compassion, an “eight-year-old in a perpetual temper tantrum.”
Slavishly throwing roses to Putin, forever arguing about hand size, crowd size or what a “beautiful” effort he made to tamp down the insurrection he and his sotto capi so ignominiously planned to end the long-lived experiment of our venerable Republic.
It’s high time to end this crime spree.
Postscript:
Criminally-minded audacity:
In his brief to the Supreme Court of the United States, Boss Trump not only brazenly pleads for immunity from prosecution for crimes committed outside the scope of his presidential duties, he ominously points to “destructive cycles of recrimination” to follow if his judicial appointees and their fellows fail to fall into line:
If a president can be criminally charged for actions taken while in office, Trump’s lawyers warned, “such prosecutions will recur and become increasingly common, ushering in destructive cycles of recrimination.” They added: “Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist.”
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Vote, and generously support grass-roots efforts to get out the vote.
Support candidates opposing the madness of Trump & enablers.
*****
Here’s your morning shot of Blackjack:
https://www.defendyourvotingrights.org/play-card-game/
played with a Card Deck of 54+ Trump Enablers:
https://www.defendyourvotingrights.org/54-enablers-of-voter-suppression/