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GUEST WORDS--U.S. President Donald Trump stands in the colonnade as he is introduced to speak to March for Life participants and pro-life leaders in the Rose Garden at the White House on January 19, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent almost two years to produce a $25 million report that is a flat tire. Still unreleased in full to the American people, Trump’s acolyte, Attorney General William Barr, a longtime friend of Republican Mueller, gave us what Trump long craved—by stating that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” during the 2016 election. As for obstruction of justice by Trump, Attorney General Barr cryptically burped, that “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”—whatever that means. Give people the whole report now, as the House of Representatives voted 420 to 0 to do.
What a farce and distraction this whole exercise turned out to be! Mueller’s assigned subject was Trump. So, does this prosecutor demand to interview Trump, to subpoena Trump? No. Does this special investigator conclude with any legal recommendations at all? No. He just wants to be forgotten as he slinks away into deliberate silence (unless he is made to testify before the House Judiciary Committee).
Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?
"Really, what should we have expected from someone who, as FBI Director, testified before Congress as part of the Bush/Cheney regime, pushing for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003?"
The assignment to Mueller was doomed from the start. Its charge was far too narrow and proof in such matters is very difficult to find. Intent to collude requires direct examination of the President himself. But why would Trump have to collude at all? The Russians interfered in his favor in various ways to the detriment of Hillary Clinton and all he had to do was accept such foreign largess.
An inquiry into Trump and all his business deals and business proposals with various governments point to Trump’s disregard for the law. By the way, whatever happened to the IRS audit that Tricky Donald kept using as an excuse in 2016 for not releasing these voluminous tax records depicting suspicious relations that Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has written about for years (see his book The Making of Donald Trump)?
The endless speculation and successful prosecutions of Trump’s associates largely focused on ancillary lies and thefts not leading directly to the White House.
Trump couldn’t have distracted the mass dittohead media any better from his true crimes. Those include unlawful war-making, corruption, wasting public funds, and unlawfully handcuffing or firing the federal “cops” whose job is to save the lives, health, safety, and economic assets of all the American people from big corporate predators across the land.
Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump’s cruelty and viciousness from his brazen “deregulation,” or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions.
These policies have directly harmed innocent children, the elderly, patients, consumers, and workers and have wreaked environmental ruin, polluting the air, water, and soil with lethal toxins. He proudly took away protections leaving defenseless humans to suffer more deadly coal dust, coal ash, and coal pollution.
"Consider all the print, TV, and radio time the mass media used on the Mueller Russian probe compared to Trump’s cruelty and viciousness from his brazen “deregulation,” or open flouting of statutorily mandated government missions."
He has blocked our government’s responses to the climate crisis looming everywhere.
He has gotten away with massive federal deficits caused by his tax holidays for corporations and the rich, including the Trump family. Take that, next generation of Americans!
He backs for-profit colleges who have committed serial crimes against their impoverished students while heavily subsidizing these corporations with your tax dollars.
He is pushing to weaken or eliminate modest controls over imperial Wall Street, upsetting even Wall Streeters like Timothy Geithner, setting the stage for another Wall Street collapse on the economy, causing workers to lose their pensions and savings, before they, as taxpayers, are required to again bailout the Wall Street speculators and crooks.
He lies repeatedly about current realities, falsely brags about conditions he is actually worsening. He opposes any increase in the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and does not adequately enforce fair labor standards. He has hired and personally profited from many undocumented workers while attacking their presence in the U.S.
He pays more attention to one golf ball than he does to the estimated $60 billion in annual wage theft or $350 billion a year in the health industry’s computerized billing fraud, or the gouging drug prices he falsely promised the people he would reduce.
Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump’s victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly.
"Never mind impeachment, millions of Trump’s victims, regardless of how they voted in 2016, should demand his resignation. A million-people march should surround the White House and peacefully make this demand repeatedly."
Enough of lying Trump’s slimy bigotry and his snarling, hateful, bullying speech always directed at the powerless. Enough of his destructive impact on millions of children imitating his coarseness toward siblings and parents who, when admonished, blurt out that the President says this and does that. That daily acidic intrusion into family life—a cultural time bomb—has yet to properly interest the media.
Cheating Donald J. Trump has gotten away with everything in his failed businesses and his Electoral College-caused Presidency. In so doing, he has taught us much about ourselves, how much we tolerate with chronic indifference to the flaying of the rule of law, and the principles of decency, helpfulness, peace, and justice.
He has taught us about the costs of not doing our political homework, of staying home civically and electorally. He has taught us that if we do not look ourselves into the mirror, the three horsemen of fascism, lawless plutocracy, and oligarchy will run our beloved country into the ground, if not over the fiscal cliff.
(Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. This perspective was first posted at Common Dreams.)
-cw
