Trump: Breaking the Law

#Jane Mayer, "Gaming the Endgame," The New Yorker, November 9, 2020.

"No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense." "Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly." " 'The Financial Times,' meanwhile estimates that, in  all about nine hundred million dollars' worth of Trump's real-estate will come due within the next four years." " 'It's the office of the Presidency that's keeping him from prison, and the poorhouse,' Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies  authoritarianism, told me." 'As the President ponders potential political defeat, he is "a terrified little boy." '

"Martin Flaherty, a founding director of the Leitner Venter for International Law and Justice, at Fordham University, and an authority on other countries' struggles with state crimes, believes that in America it would have 'a salutary effect to have a completely corrupt guy getting thrown in jail.' He acknowledged that Trump might get pardoned, but said, 'A big problem since Watergate is that elites don't face accountability. It creates a culture of impunity that encourages the shamelessness of someone like  Trump.' "

Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, and Bob Bauer, former White House counsel, have proposed a rule explicitly prohibiting Presidents from pardoning themselves. "They also propose that bribery statutes be amended to prevent Presidents from using pardons to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice." Bob Bauer has said: 'In this country, the President is No. 1. But until  then, the biggest danger is that Trump will implicitly or explicitly tell his supporters to be violent.' "Bauer has argued that Presidents should be subjected to the same consequences for law-breaking as everyone else." He asks: 'How can the highest law-enforcement officer in the U.S. achieve executive immunity?'

#Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R- SC) started off the day by saying that he had talked to the secretaries of  state in both Arizona and Nevada. He later said he had also talked to Arizona's governor and other Arizona officials, and he wasn't sure who he had talked to in Nevada. Later, on Tuesday, November 17, he realized he had never spoken to anyone from Nevada.

Senator Graham also talked to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, and Raffensberger has said that Graham wanted him to throw out legitimate ballots, along with absentee ballots in which the signatures didn't match. A Georgia elections official who was on a call from Graham, also said that Graham wanted legitimate ballots thrown out, along with those in which the signatures clearly didn't match. Graham has said that he only wanted to find out what the process was for matching signatures. 

Well before the November 3rd election, senior campaign advisor Billy Kirkland allegedly burst into a meeting on election procedures being held in the secretary of state's office, and demanded that Raffensberger endorse Trump. 

Graham's Senate colleagues dismiss his confusion as a one-man show, and there is considerable doubt that he will face a hearing before the Senates ethics committee for what appears to be a serious violation of election standards. Graham has not been able to give a credible explanation of the authority by which he is intervening in election procedures in at least three states.

#President Trump has made multiple claims that he is the greatest supporter of African Americans among all the prior residents in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. He is once more using this same claim to try to get African American support during all the troubles he is having in the transition period. He has been harshly critical of cities and states where minorities, especially African Americans, are concentrated. He called Baltimore "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess." He said former Rep. Elijah Cummings' (D-MD) district and hometown were "FAR WORSE and more dangerous than "conditions at the border." Chicago is an "embarrassment" and "Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison." L.A. and San Francisco had squandered their "prestige" by not "expelling homeless people." He said California is "a disgrace to our country." And, of course, he called Black majority countries, shxxholes." 

It is not therefore unusual that Trump's lawsuits and rhetoric are highly focused on African American concentrations of voters. These include Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin, and Detroit in Michigan. 

In conclusion, President Trump took full credit in January 2018 for bringing the unemployment rates for Blacks, Hispanics, and women to historic lows. Remarkably in all three cases, the rates decreased by one percent, and all the rest of the reductions from the financial meltdown culminating in October 2008, took place while Barack Obama was president.