Will Manhattan DA's case against Trump have deadly tentacles

 Will Manhattan DA's case against Trump have deadly tentacles

By Hal Brown

I read this article in RAWSTORY and the phrase shown above leaped off the page and sent me to DuckDuckGo Images to find man-of-war jellyfish.

The article begins:

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg may finally have changed his mind about indicting former president Donald Trump.

The recent conviction of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg gave a glimpse of evidence that could tie the ex-president directly to the tax fraud scheme, such as a memo he signed approving chief operating officer Matthew Calamari’s illegal request to reduce his taxed salary to cover the cost of his untaxed corporate apartment, reported The Daily Beast.

Here's the portion about the tentacles:

“This case has tentacles,” said Duncan Levin, a former prosecutor who now represents Jennifer Weisselberg and has been communicating with investigators.

The district attorney's office declined to comment on what Bragg meant about another chapter, but former prosecutors from that office say their experience leads them to believe prosecutors will go after Trump.

“For people who want a certain outcome — to go after Trump — it gives hope," said Catherine A. Christian, a former assistant district attorney who investigated financial fraud. "They’re going to be thorough. I’m doubtful he would have said ‘next chapter’ if they weren’t looking."

To tell the unvarnished truth I don't have anything particularly original to say about this. I just wanted an excuse to make a couple of illustrations. I leave it to readers to indulge in fantasies about the Teflon don Don falling into a jellyfish swarm.

I think he might a need a full immersion wetsuit rather than a coating of Teflon to protect him from the jellyfish swarming around him not only in New York (cue music video) but also in Georgia (cue video two).

Update:

Irrelevant to today's story, items to share:

Funniest puniest of the week:

More seriously, everyone should share this image.

This hopefully will be the final straw to break for Santos and humiliate McCarthy. It would be truly great if McCarthy has to take steps to remove him from the House, and at least to immediately kick him off his committee assignments. There are a number of Republicans who shoot their dogs because they can't hunt anymore, but far more are dog lovers. I just wish more articles shared this photo:

More people should see the video in this article. It is of a former Santos roommate describing how he used the Jewish sounding name Zebrosky on his GoFundMe pages because Jews give more money. 

"He would say, 'oh well, that Jew will give more if you're a Jew," Morey-Parker quoted his former roommate.

I wouldn't say that you can make a firm judgement of how smart someone is by how they look, but then again.... (article)

.....Comment below or on Facebook or on Mastodon. You can make a reply on Twitter too.

When it came to surviving Covid, Trump was really Teflon Don

When it came to surviving Covid, Trump was really Teflon Don 

By Hal Brown

Click images below to enlarge.

The original photoshop was tweeted by Trump himself:

Below: The original Teflon don

About the photo of Trump:

I wanted to find a photo of Trump looking as bad as possible and an image search of "Trump looking bad" turned up this one taken by an official White House photographer. Here's an article about it.

This word leaped off the screen when I read this article in Medscape.

Excerpt:

Which Treatments Improve Long-term Outcomes of Critical COVID Illness?

Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center.

Treatment with interleukin 6 (IL-6) receptor antagonists or antiplatelet agents improves survival and outcomes at 6 months for critically ill patients with COVID-19, according to new data.

However, survival wasn't improved with therapeutic anticoagulation, convalescent plasma, or lopinavir-ritonavir, and survival was worsened with hydroxychloroquine.

"After critically ill patients leave the hospital, there's a high risk of readmission, death after discharge, or exacerbations of chronic illness," study author Patrick Lawler, MD, a clinician-scientist at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at University Health Network and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, told Medscape Medical News.

"When looking at the impact of treatment, we don't want to improve short-term outcomes yet worsen long-term disability," he said. "That long-term, 6-month horizon is what matters most to patients."

Remember this?

Of course anyone who isn't a brainwashed and brain dead Trump cultist can't forget this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52399464

And then there's hapless Dr. Birx who has to forever live with these moments:

Then we had the publicity stunt which was meant to show both how invulnerable he was and how Covid was no big deal:

This is an excerpt:

In the midst of an aggressive course of treatment for coronavirus, President Donald Trump left the hospital with his security detail Sunday so he could ride in an SUV past supporters cheering him on outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. 

The short trip, where Trump waved to his supporters through the window while wearing a mask in the back of his SUV, was an attempted show of strength that displayed the President’s questionable judgment, his willingness to endanger his staff and the fact that he still does not seem to comprehend the seriousness of a highly contagious and deadly disease.

Trump’s doctors on Sunday provided concerning details about his condition to reporters – including two alarming drops in his oxygen levels. But the late Sunday photo op underscored that the chief concern for the President, who was furious at his chief of staff for telling reporters about his troubling vital signs, is projecting a commanding image to the public.

An attending physician at Walter Reed harshly criticized Trump’s Sunday drive-by as a risk to the lives of Secret Service agents who accompanied him in his SUV. 

“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity,” Dr. James Phillips tweeted.

The original Teflon don was Mafia boss John Gotti. He was given this nickname because of the way he avoided legal consequences for his crimes for so many years. He eventually was sentenced to life in prison. He spent the majority of his sentence in effective solitary confinement, allowed out of his cell for only one hour a day. This is how he spent the final years of his life at the US Penitentiary in Marion, ILL

It is a fortuitous coincidence that when referring to Trump with this moniker the word "don" has two meanings, don as the head of a crime family and "Don" as in Donald.

Not only has Trump followed in Gotti's footsteps when it comes to staying out of prison he managed to get elected president despite years of breaking the law. He proved to be Teflon in another way by avoiding dying when he contracted Covid prior to the development of vaccines.

It remains to be seen whether some of his off the rails behavior is a form of long Covid. There's no way to determine this now but one thing we can say for sure is that he's alive and kicking.

If Trump has an autopsy made public after he dies it is possible we will know whether Covid had invaded his brain. Consider, also from Medscape that 

Autopsies Show COVID Virus Invades Entire Body

The researchers said their work shows the virus "is capable of infecting and replicating within the human brain." They also said their results indicate the virus spreads via the blood early during infection, which "seeds the virus throughout the body following infection of the respiratory tract."

Can you imagine what would happen if Trump cultists learn that Covid has invaded Trump's brain, Trump who claimed he had the biggest brain, or as he put it a very, very large brain, also had, literally not figuratively, a very sick brain. 

Comment below or on Facebook or on Mastodon. You can make a reply on Twitter too.

Gen. Kelley called Trump dumb, immoral, ignorant, and lazy. Add this to the Dark Tetrad.

Gen. Kelley called Trump dumb, immoral, ignorant, and lazy. Add this to the Dark Tetrad.

By Hal Brown

DonkeyHotey has created uncountable caricatures of Trump, politicians, and others in the news, many of which are used on Crooks and Liars and other well known websites. I often find they capture the essence of Trump and use them in my blog, for example today. I spent a lot of time finding the right emojis for dumb, immoral, ignorant, and lazy and needed an image to put them on.

Click above to read article that prompted this blog

I am weary of writing variations of the same thing from my perspective as having been a psychotherapist for 40 years and analyzing Trump's psychopathology. Use DuckDuckGo to search my name and Trump delusional and the first three links are stories I wrote. Oh well, here's yet another.

Gen. John Kelley gives us another tetrad to add to an assessment of Trump in addition to the Dark Tedrad which is as follows:

The anti-social personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Narcissism involves the tendency to be overly concerned with one’s self-image, Machiavellianism involves the tendency to be deceitful and manipulative, psychopathy includes callousness and lack of remorse, and sadism involves pleasure from inflicting pain on others.

This is an excerpt from RAWSTORY:

Michael Schmidt told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about what Kelly learned about the former president and his abilities. Schmidt appeared Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to discuss the upcoming paperback edition of his book, Donald Trump V. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, which includes new revelations from John Kelly.

"So when Kelly came in as chief of staff, he thought that the problem around Trump was that he was not staffed properly and they needed to create a process around him, and that's what the chaos of the first six months of the administration was about," Schmidt said. "But when Kelly comes in as chief of staff, what he realizes is that the problem is not just the fact that there's not a process and that he's not being staffed as well as he could, but that Trump himself was the problem, that Trump was far dumber and immoral and ignorant and lazy than he ever thought he was."

 "Within a few days, he becomes terrified because here he is, the top staffer to the president of the United States, and he's realizing that the president of the United States is far more limited and potentially dangerous than he ever thought, and at that point, there was no one else to call," Schmidt added. "He was -- it was just him and Trump, and he basically spends the next 18 months trying to manage Trump as much as he could.

I don't know what to call being dumb, immoral, ignorant, and lazy. 

Add these personality traits to being an extreme narcissist prone to outbursts of rage when he feels attacked, a psychopath who has engaged repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized, a sadist who takes pleasure in causing and observing the suffering of other, and believing that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power, i.e. Machiavellianism. 

While looking at Trump through the lens of my being a retired psychotherapist I have to add that if Trump believes some of the things he says he believes he is also showing signs of having a delusional psychosis. Read my blog from a a few days ago:

I characterize Trump as being a witches brew of toxicity emanating a deadly miasma which is intoxicating to members of his cult who unfortunately represent a base of voters that GOP politicians must pander to lest they risk not being elected. 

Those who should know better, who should realize that he, to reference another psychological concept, is a malignant narcissist. This includes the same traits of the Dark Tetrad. It is defined an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate. 

A person with malignant narcissism exhibits paranoia in addition to the symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Because a malignant narcissist's personality cannot tolerate any criticism, being mocked typically causes paranoia.

The social psychologist Erich Fromm first coined the term "malignant narcissism" in 1964, describing it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity"

Wikipedia

If one objectively adds up all that we know about Donald Trump we see that there as only a few aspects of personality that makes him different than despotic genocidal leaders like Hitler and Putin responsible is three of the four characteristics described by Gen. Kelley: his being dumb, ignorant, and lazy. Of the four what he has in common is being totally immoral.

Almost irrelevant to governing is the observation made by NY Times columnist Jennifer Senior that Trump is a preening narcissist (I wrote about this here). Historic despots haven't always been as narcissistic as Trump. Idi Amin and his garb comes to mind and Putin liked to be photographed bare chested or practicing martial arts.

Recall that Trump missed the anniversary of the end of World War I because he was afraid of the rain messing up his hair.

Below from Schmidt's book: It was raining and Trump told Kelley he didn't want to go.He didn't want his hair to be ruined, and he didn't understand why he should go to a memorial site for troops who had been killed. "They lost" he told Kelley.... and then he went on to call them losers and suckers.

Return to current blog

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

By Hal Brown 

Archives on Right >

Posting, i.e. Tooting, now on Mastodon - see right column there

DonkeyHotey, background from InPixio

One of the two specimens shown above in the DonkeyHotey caricatures was a threat to American democracy. Hopefully we will soon know how close he came to turning our country to a fascist dictatorship and whether justice will prevail so he pays a price for this.

With Trump, putting him in  certain perspective, he's a tragic comic figure. He's a pure idiot who stumbled into a position of power by malignant guile and grift which was enabled by the gullibility and fears of his base. Add luck to that and we have the spectacle of a grandiose narcissist that began his presidential campaign riding down a golden escalator being cheered on by people who were paid to be there and who survived the "I could grab them by the pussy" incident. 

All this could have been the subject of the exploits of comic strip character.

The other, who like Trump belongs on a petri dish in a CDC lab where highly contagious microbes are studied is Elon Mush (typo or Freudian slip) Musk. He's not a garden-variety idiot. Rather, he is a rare breed because he's an idiot savant with a reported 155 IQ. 

When it comes to having a human version of hoof-in-mouth disease (which can be fatal in animals) he's just as much of an idiot as Trump. Both have recently engaged in a self-defeating crime spree against themselves. Anyone reading this follows the news so I don't have to list what they been doing.

Giving credit to caricaturist DonkeyHotey, a name meant to be pronounced Don Quixote, for leading me to think of this comparison: both Musk and Trump remind me of the Cervantes character:

From Wikipedia:

In the course of their (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goat-herders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts and scorned lovers. The aforementioned characters sometimes tell tales that incorporate events from the real world. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote's tendency to intervene violently in matters irrelevant to himself, and his habit of not paying debts, result in privations, injuries, and humiliations (with Sancho often the victim).

Trump has had several "squires" (aka sycophants) who we could say have been akin in their loyalty to him Sancho Panza was to Don Quixote. Musk has none. The reason for this difference between the two of them is fodder for psychohistorians. 

I'd hazard a guess that Musk never mastered the ability to put aside his obnoxious authoritarianism with people working under him. Trump has the need to be worshiped up close and it appears that Musk only is comfortable wielding power without letting anyone get close to him. It may be possible to gain some insight into his personalities by analyzing his three marriages and why the first two ended in divorce. From YaHoo News:

Excerpt: His first marriage was to author Justine Wilson in 2000, ending in an acrimonious divorce in 2008. In an article for Marie Claire in 2010, she claimed: “Elon's judgement overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.

"‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’ ‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.’”

From Cervantes to Shakespeare's Macbeth and the title the of my blog today. Here's the actual version of the altered quote in context:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 I can't envision Trump or Musk uttering something like this on their deathbeds. They are both as shallow as the puddle left on the street after a light summer drizzle which will fast evaporate when the hot sun comes out. 

Deep people, those we consider to be self-aware and introspective, live their lives informed by knowing they are mortal. They consider that when they die their legacy will be the good that they have done for their children and for those who were in a position to do so, for society.

Addendum:

This excerpt is relevant to today's blog:

Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he's rapidly turning into a sad and pathetic figure. According to this report in the Washington Post, the former president tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver "affirmations" and cheer him up. One former adviser characterized his new life as sad, saying he wanted to replicate the grandeur of the White House but it's more like "a Barbie Dream House miniature." Ouch.

This is not a picture of someone gearing up for an arduous presidential campaign. It's a picture of an old man trying to grapple with the fact that he's retired and doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.

Musk and Trump vying to win the Gold Cup for Chaos Creation

 Musk and Trump vying to win the Gold Cup for Chaos Creation

By Hal Brown

Follow the latest news about Mastodon here

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon - see right column there 

Caricatures by DonkeyHotey

As I finished writing this and was watching MSNBC reporting on what Musk was doing on Twitter Mastodon was mentioned at least 10 times.

I think it was Jonathan Lemire on MSNBC this morning who said you can take any story about how Elon Musk or Donald Trump, through aspects of their personality, thrive on creating chaos and substitute one name for the other and the story would still be true. 

Yesterday I wrote about Trump and Musk here:

Click image to enlarge

I wrote about how the media normalizes megalomania and other psychopathology here so I won't cover the same ground again.

I think that over the past week we have both Musk and Trump to thank for making things better in a sense since they, for want of a better metaphor, have gone from being a "mere" train wrecks to being train wrecks where the toxic and flammable tank cars exploded engulfing everything around them in flames and deadly chemicals.

With the World Cup final game approaching I wondered it it could end in a tie. I looked it up (here)

World Cup games can no longer end in a tie now that the tournament has advanced to the Round of 16. Draws are only permitted in the group stage where there is a point system used to determine who advances out of the group. If a game ends in a tie at the end of regulation time, the match goes into extra time with two 15 minute periods. There is no golden goal so teams are guaranteed to play both periods for a total of 30 minutes plus stoppage time. Here’s how FIFA explains the “overtime” rules.

Between Musk with his making the news for kicking journalists off Twitter and Trump and his card con it seems like they are in the extra time part of the World Cup for Chaos game.

Musk gets a goal, Trump gets a goal, Musk, not to be outplayed, gets a goal, Trump comes up with an insane kick and scores, and it goes on and on.

I tried to figure out (here) what would happen if a World Cup final game remained tied indefinitely. From all I could tell it would continue until one team broke the tie.

This could mean that a game would end when enough players died. In a one on one game Musk has the edge because he's younger and presumably likely to live longer than Trump. Not to wear out the metaphor, but if US marshals came to arrest Trump I think he would forfeit.

Addendum:

Here's a recent toot I made on Mastodon:

Trump grift goes on despite losing NYC case

 Trump grift goes on despite losing NYC case

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

DonkeyHotey caricature, illustration by Hal Brown

Despite losing the NYC case he will stay wealthy and stands to get richer with his deal in Oman. Only in prison his money won't do him any good. The easier to make documents case must be won but only the conspiracy to subvert the Constitution case could result in a long prison sentence. Getting out in a few months or years a wealthy man would be an affront to justice. 

So the Trump Organization lost the case in New York City and was fined a paltry $1million. If his pending deal to build a multi-billion dollar despot in Oman goes through it will be a drop in the bucket. Here's the story from Arab News.

Excerpt:

RIYADH: Saudi developer Dar Al Arkan has signed an agreement with former US President Donald Trump’s company to develop its $4 billion project in Oman, it said in a filing on the Tadawul on Sunday.  

The Trump resort will include residential villas, a hotel and a golf course. It will be located at Aida, a 100-meter-high hilltop project jointly developed by Dar Al Arkan and the Oman Tourism Development Co.   

The project will be developed over 10 years on an area of 3.5 million square meters and is expected to reach a joint investment of SR6 billion ($1.59 billion), the filing said.  

“We are always looking to enhance Dar Al Arkan's unique projects with premium facilities and experiences. Our partnership with Trump will distinguish our first venture in Oman and put it on the global map,” said Yousef Al Shelash, chairman of Dar Al Arkan, in a company statement.  

The 100-meter-high hilltop development is one of the largest premium mixed-use real estate projects in the world, situated by the sea. 

While here in the United States a Chicago paper called for 'jackhammering' controversial Trump name off of their Trump Tower (below).

It appears that in some countries having the Trump name emblazoned, no doubt literally in gold letters, on a humongous project is considered a major selling point.

Trump is beloved, even worshipped, by a terrifyingly large minority of Americans who would, if they could, elect him president for life. Residents of Democratic countries around the world look at the United States and are dumbfounded by how Americans could be taken in by this mentally unbalanced grifter. Of course, as I wrote yesterday, Democracies like Germany also have their problems.

The only way Trump can be punished for his crimes can will be to imprison him. As long as he stays out of prison he will be very, very rich. He'd luxuriate in all the trappings money buy. His wealth means he will have sycophants fawning over him. He won't have a true friend but he's a malignant sociopathic narcissist and as such doesn't care. With people like him, relationships, even with their spouses and family, are all transactional. They love themselves,  being worshipped, money, and power.

If Trump goes to prison he'd probably be isolated from the general population so he'd lose having inmates fawning over him.

If he's lucky the prison will let him play with his little putter in an isolated area of the prison yard:

He'd have to settle for guards who admire him to make his life a little more comfortable. Money will do him little to no good in prison unless he can bribe the guards to smuggle in goodies for him.

Perhaps they can bring him a poster for the wall of his cell:

 He can't buy out the commissary where his spending would be capped. Of course, regular readers know I try to document claims like this:

Excerpt:

Most facilities have individual limits of the amount of funds that inmates can have for commissary. Most do not allow an expenditure of over $ 300 per month on commissary items. However, in many federal and state facilities, an amount between $120 and $ 200 is quite a reasonable budget. There is always the question of how does an inmate know they have money? Well, after a deposit is made, an inmate receives a receipt after 24hours to three days.

He'd be able to buy snacks but the prison kitchen won't prepare special foods just for him. The best he might be able to do is convert to Judaism so he can get kosher meals. I heard kosher meals in prison were better than the regular fare. It turns out that generally this is true and has led to the "fake Jew" phenomenon.

Maybe yarmulke wearing Trump will go from Jerusalem to the big house...

They're two kinds of juries who will determine Trump's fate.  Grand juries are now or will be deciding whether to indict him, however only a trial jury can convict him of a crime and send him to prison. When it comes to where Trump ends up, it is fair to say one kind of jury is still out, and the other kind hasn't even begun to hear his case.

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'If you're new to the blog the archives in the right column will take you back through the period I began posting political stories and before that when the blog only had photo essays documenting road trips around Portland and Washington with photos of both scenery and unusual restaurants. Remember you can click the small images to enlarge them. These are from 2021.

 I started the blog in 2012, here.