Who will flip on Trump? If not Rudy or Walt, what about Carlos and Yuscil?

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We see articles like these about Rudy Guiliani flipping:

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Of course there's this: Rudy Giuliani Denies He 'Flipped' On Donald Trump In DOJ's Jan. 6 Probe

This tweet is from one of Rudy's lawyers:

Here are some of the replies to the tweet:

Whether the first mate will realize the ship is sure to sink and decide to go down with the captain remains to be seen. Bravado is cheap until only the wheelhouse is above shark infested waters. 

I doubt they read HUFFPOST where this is the main story...

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I also doubt they watch MSNBC where it is being reported that Jack Smith has this on tape:

Now there are new players who served in much lesser roles than Rudy on Trump's luxury cruise liner. In addtion to Walt Nauta a new Mar-a-Lago lacky, Carlos De Olivera, has been charged.  (Read article here.) Here's an excerpt: The newest defendant in the case places the former president in the middle of the attempts to delete the security footage. According to the indictment, De Oliveira told another Trump employee, who was director of IT at Mar-a-Lago, “that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the indictment. 

De Oliveira is the property manager at Mar-a-Lago, and helped move boxes to obscure evidence. He is charged with multiple crimes, including making false statements. The following is from Business Insider:

Law professor at the University of Richmond Carl Tobias said De Oliveira was likely charged because he "just wasn't cooperating. They were finally so frustrated that they realized he wasn't going to talk," Tobias said. "He probably wasn't because he would incriminate himself… if you push and push and someone isn't responsive, then the next logical step is to charge them as well."

This is what De Olivera faces:

Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice (20 yrs.),
Altering, destroying, mulilating or concealing an item (20 yrs)
Corruptly, altering, destroying, mulilating or concealing an item (20 yrs)
False statements (5 yrs.)

And then there's ‘Trump Employee 4’ in the superseding indictment identified as Yuscil Taveras. Taveras oversaw the surveillance camera footage at Mar-a-Lago.

Taveras is at the center of the new accusations added to the indictment, including an exchange he had with De Oliveira on June 27, 2022. In that conversation, De Oliveira asked to have a private discussion in an “audio closet” with Taveras, including questioning how long the footage from the security tapes lasted and whether it could be deleted.

When Taveras said “he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” De Oliveira said “the boss” wanted it deleted, according to the indictment.

Despite the fact that Trump and his associates are now being charged with conspiracy laws used to prosecute organized crime figures Trump isn't a Mafia capo who has both truly loyal underlings who will go to prison for him and those who stick by the boss because to rat them out (i.e. flip on them) would result in termination with extreme predjudice. Typically they are not only offered immunity to testify but go into witness protection.

We still don't know what De Olivera or Taveras looks like.

Once people with first-hand knowledge of Trump's crimes like Nauta and De Olivera, Tavares, and even Rudy, can only punish them with Truth Social rants calling them lying traitors and can't literally order hits on them  we might see them flipping him like he's a pancake on a hot griddle.

So far Trump is praising Nauta, De Olivera, and Yuscil Taveras. 

While all this may have similarities with how the government makes a gangster organized crime case Trump isn't Al Capone, Albert Anastisaia who had the nickname Lord High Executioner,  Carlo Gambino who had the nickname The Godfather, John "Dapper Don" Gotti who murdered his boss Paul Castillano, or Pablo Escobar. 

Another way to look at Trump is that while he wants to be seen as Billy the Kid or Jessie James, he's firing blanks.

Update:

This is from the (subscription) Washington Post:

The last count on the superseding indictment — No. 42 — involves alleged false statements by De Oliveira, and they would appear to put him in serious trouble.

In a January interview with the FBI, De Oliveira allegedly offered blanket denials that he participated in unloading White House boxes when they arrived at Mar-a-Lago in January 2021. He said he wasn’t aware of the boxes and “never saw nothing.” He said he didn’t know where they were even stored.

The government says in the indictment that De Oliveira “personally observed and helped move” Trump’s White House boxes in January 2021.

The least serious of the counts against De Oliveira might just be the easiest to prove.

Update, July 29

This was on Raw Story as an exclusive (subscripton required) story.

Here's an excerpt:

Giuliani’s promotion of a debunked conspiracy theory about two election workers falsely accused of mishandling Fulton County ballots also implicates him in an infamous phone call from Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — also a focal point of Willis’ investigation. During the phone call, Trump tried to pressure the state’s chief election officer into flipping the election in the former president’s favor.

“He’s in the thick of it,” Kevin O’Brien, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York with experience trying public corruption cases, told Raw Story. “I don’t know how his lawyers are going to argue to get him off the hook if the day comes when they tell him he’s a target and he’s going to be indicted. What is their response to all this evidence? I don’t know, except to say he was confused, or he was impaired.

Without going into more details  here, it lays out all of his involvement in illegal scheming and why Guiliani is at more risk of facing prison than I thought he was. This leads me to reassess the chances he may flip. If it gets through his thick skull that he could  be the star inmate at not just some country-club federal prison from which Trump or another GOP president could rescue him, but as a guest of the Georgia Department of Corrections, he could decide to cut a deal.

Addendum: 

I post on several other platforms. Bookise is the one where I get comments. They are often from Trump supporters. This is what someone psoted on this article.

Who's gonna flip on Joe Biden aka "The Big Guy". I could see Hunter doing a Henry Hill from the movie, Goodfellas turning rat to get a sweet deal.

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Wordsmitng: Here are some good lines from a Brian Karem Salon article

 By Hal Brown

I enjoy reading excellent wordsmthing and hope that at times I come up with a clever turn of phrase that conveys an idea in a particularly succinct and snarky way. I appreciate it when others do this. For example here are my favorite lines fron the Brian Karem article shown above:

In Florida, in one of the most insidious moves ever made by any legislature since the end of the Civil War, new laws demand that school children be taught that there were benefits to slavery. You know, skills. 𝐀𝐬 𝐢𝐟 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐝.

Then there are Kevin McCarthy, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and the usual gang of idiots, now including Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who want to impeach Joe Biden without any evidence to justify it. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬.

. It's enough to make the hair dye run down his face. "𝐈𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐥 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐬 𝐆𝐢𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐢, 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐲," Eisen explained on the podcast "Just Ask the Question."

from

Donald Trump unleashed a war against the U.S. government — and now he can't control it

I liked this paraphraph I wrote from yesterday's blog:

If Trump gets reelected we will see his most extreme pathological impulses powered by the rocket fuel of the presidency. He'll be a guided nuclear missile with mutilple warheads aimed at American democracy. He already has his targets selected and has a plan for turning the United Staes into a dictatorship where he can destroy his enemies on a whim.

I don't want to write "it's not like we weren't warned" a year into Trump's second term.

 

Click above to read

Thom Hartmann posted this excellent article which clearly explains Trump's psychopathology. Reading it prompted me to revisit a topic I've written about numerous times. (Read Hartmann's bio on Wikipedia here.) He is a fellow Michigan State graduate who worked as a psychotherpist for a time and now, like me, lives in Portland, Oregon.

When I began to think about Trump's psychopathology I wasn't even aware of malignant narcissism. This is the combination of severe personality disorders described by Erich Fromm. I'd been a psychotherapist for 40 years and thought I knew all the diagnostic catergories whether they were in the official diagnostic manual or not (maligant narcissism never was in a diagnosis manual).

Then I joined psychologist Dr. John D Gartner's Duty to Warn group. ( It still has a private Facebook page here. 

Gartner (see his Wikipedia profile) started an online petition which called for Trump to be removed under the 25th Amendment back in 2017. 

2017 mental fitness for Office of President Trump petition

In the first months of 2017 Gartner collected the signatures of more than 25,000 mental health professionals and laypersons. The petition, "Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill And Must Be Removed", was sent to the Minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. At the end of April 2017, Gartner sent the petition to Washington D.C., with more than 41,000 signatures, although he failed to disclose that it was not only of mental health professionals.

The petition's declaration stated that: We, the undersigned mental health professionals (please state your degree), believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office".

According to Gartner, Trump's mental handicaps are a mixture of narcissism, paranoia, sociopathy and a measure of sadism. 

I learned about what what malignant narcisism was. Erich Fromm was a preeminent social psychologist,  psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanistic philosopher.   He described it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". It wasn't a new psychiatric condition, rather it was a combination of the already deliniated diagnoses of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial, paranoid, and sadistic personality disorder.

 Wikipedia describes it here.

John went public with what for years was the only article, Donald Trump's malignant narcisism is Toxic, about this in a national non-partisan publication, USA Today in 2017. Now many people, at least among those who follow progressive media, know what malignant narcissism is because of Trump. Lawrence O'Donnell regularly has mental health professionals on his show discussing this. Even back in 2019 George Conway said Trump was a malignant narcisisst who was both mental ill and evil (Newsweek article).

Since then until recently until the last couple of years only anti-Trump and progressive media covered the dangerous psychopatholgy of Donald Trump. Gartner's 2017 USA Today article is is worth a read or re-read since it is precisent.

Shortly after the USA Today article was published, the best seller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" came out (Gartner was a contributor). It is interesing to read some of the reviews of the book below (from Wikipedia entry).

Estelle Freedman, the Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University, said of the book:

This insightful collection is grounded in historical consciousness of the ways professionals have responded to fascist leaders and unstable politicians in the past. It is a valuable primary source documenting the critical turning point when American psychiatry reassessed the ethics of restraining commentary on the mental health of public officials in light of the "duty to warn" of imminent danger. Medical and legal experts thoughtfully assess diagnoses of Trump's behavior and astutely explore how to scrutinize political candidates, address client fears, and assess the 'Trump Effect' on our social fabric.

Reviewing the book for The Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim wrote "That the authors differ in their diagnoses does not give one great confidence in the field of psychiatry or, indeed, in the book’s value.", and stated that the essay authors sound "paranoid".

According to Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker, "A strange consensus does appear to be forming around Trump's mental state," including Democrats and Republicans who doubt Trump's fitness for office.

In a blog post republished on Salon in September 2017, journalist Bill Moyers wrote that "[t]here will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump". In an interview with Robert Jay Lifton, Moyers said that Trump "makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary." Lifton said, "He doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion." As an example, Lifton said, when Trump claimed that former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya, "he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part."

If Trump gets reelected we will see his most extreme pathological impulses powered by the rocket fuel of the presidency. He'll be a guided nuclear missile with mutilple warheads aimed at American democracy. He already has his targets selected and has a plan for turning the United Staes into a dictatorship where he can destroy his enemies on a whim.

I made it though this blog story without proving Godwin's Law to find examples to illustrate this, well, at least until now:

Addendum:

I used to be a columnist for Capital Hill Blue (my articles). Many of my essays there were about Trump's psychopathology. 

Musk's Twitter rebrand and name change: will it be an Edsel?

 

Musk owns Space X. He shoots rockets into the air. Did he just shoot an arrow into the air and instead of a successful flight he killed the iconic bird of the company he overpaid for and turned into a purveyor of hate and lies?

By Hal Brown

Read on a single webpage here.

The very top illustration above showing the article which was the No 1 trending story from Time Magazine here.

Elon Musk Rebranded Twitter as 'X.' Users Immediately Rejected the Change

This is another Time article: 

By Turning Twitter Into X, Elon Musk Risks Killing Billions in Brand Value

Here's an excerpt:

Analysts and brand agencies call the product’s renaming a mistake. Twitter is one of the most recognizable social media brands, said Todd Irwin, founder of brand agency Fazer. Bird decals adorn small businesses and websites worldwide, alongside Instagram and Facebook logos.

Twitter’s popularity has also made verbs like “tweet” and “retweet” part of modern culture, used regularly to explain how celebrities, politicians and others communicated with the public, said Joshua White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.

X will require the company to rebuild that cultural pull and linguistic consensus from scratch. But that may be part of the motivation, so users stop comparing Twitter post-takeover to what it was before. “It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” Yaccarino (an expert) tweeted.

Below are from the newly rebranded social network with Elon Musk's Xing (I guess we'll have to get used to that term instead of tweeting, kind of like Trump's "truthing" on Truth Social) that he enjoys negative feedback. Whether he's a mascochist or believes that bad publicity is better than no publicity can't be determined. It could be a bit of both.

As far as publicity goes, Musk certainly has gotten a lot of attention with this:

This all made me think of the 1985 failed New Coke so I did a web search and was surprised to see that there's a new new Coke and the rebranding of Twitter was featured in the search results. I was't the only one to think of New Coke when considering what Musk did. This is from the NY Post:

Elon Musk risks ‘New Coke’-style marketing blunder after ditching blue bird for ‘X’ logo

It turns out that there's a new New Coke:

Coca-Cola Launching Bizarre New Flavor

Will the new new Coke be the rousing success despite the failure of the old New Coke that CocaCola hopes it will be? Time will tell. The same holds for the rebranded Twitter. However there's a big difference between the two products. Brand introductions in large successful corporations usually aren't made to satisfy the ego of one person. They are made with careful deliberation between innovators and a marketing team. Edsel Ford didn't come back from the grave and decide a car should be named for him. 

Will X be an Edsel? Perhaps it will be come to be called the Xsel. The new Ford Motor Company car was advertised to be the car of the future. Here's what Wikipedia says about why Edsel failed:

Historians have advanced several theories in an effort to explain Edsel's failure. Popular culture often faults vehicle styling. Consumer Reports has alleged that poor workmanship was Edsel's chief problem. Marketing experts hold Edsels up as a supreme example of the corporate culture's failure to understand American consumers. Business analysts cite the weak internal support for the product inside Ford's executive offices. According to author and Edsel scholar Jan Deutsch, an Edsel was "the wrong car at the wrong time."

Most people couldn't identify the Edsel logo which to me looks like an open mouth.  At least it was unique unlike the new X.

I think the Edsel grill, which came to represent the car, was just plain ugly even compared to the Ford built Mercury.

 

Will X be an Edsel? Stay tuned...

Addendum:

In 2020 Musk named one of his chuldren  X Æ A-Xii.  is considered a letter in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and and Faroese and is prounced as a long E sound. (Reference) I assume his name is pronunced XeeA, or Exy-A and for formal introductions he'd be XeeA the seventh.

His wife, the Canadian singer Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, explained the name's meaning to her fans.The singer  has used Æ before, naming a song on her latest album 4ÆM.

The A-12 is a Lockheed plane built for the CIA. It was known by designers during its development as Archangel.

She also claims Archangel is her favourite song but does not explain who the song is by.

I wonder how the child will do when he reaches school age.

Perhaps since Elon loves X so much he should change his own name. Of course, Malcolm Little did it when he change his name successfully to Malcolm X, someone I doubt Elon is a fan of.  This probably rules out him changing his name to Elon X although it does have a ring to it.

Prince ended up being called the artist formerly known as Prince even after he changed his name to a symbol that had no pronunciation. 

Cassius Clay paid homage to his friend and mentor Malcolm X when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali although throughout the 1960's the media referred to him by what he called his slave name. (Reference)

Thanks to everyone who read this far. I know that I have a habit of digressing into lengthy afterthoughts only tangenital to my main blog story.

Does the Barbenheimer weekend tell us anything about our country?"

By Hal Brown

Please bear with me as I explain why watching the wonderful Danish TV series "Seaside Hotel" relates to this topic. The series starts in the early 1930's and follows the characters of guests and staff and their intertwined soap-opera lives. Now we're watching season six and it's 1939 and Hitler has already been elected PM of Germany and anti-Semitic violence has erupted across Germany. Only one character has been following the news from Germany since the series began and is sounding the alarm about the growing threat to German democracy and the danger to Denmark. 

Sometmes mocked by other guests for listening to the radio to keep up with the news Hjalmar Aurland (left) followed events in German since the beginning of the series. He has the newspapers delvered secretly to him by the staff because he knows that his wife gets upset when he reads them.

He tries to explain this to other guests but they don't take it seriously. One is even trying to invest in German industry. Another is a young German woman who worships Hitler.

There is a chilling parallel here. The light themes of the early seasons are getting darker and darker. We know that what is going to happen not only in Denmark, but in the world. Without giving too much away, there are two gay characters, one in the closet and one out, and both have already suffered because of not just prejudice but actual visiting teenaged NAZI youth.

Now we get to what I make of the Barbenheimer weekend. My sense is that there are two kinds of people who decided to venture into the theaters despite some of them having friends or acquaintances who recently came down with Covid. Those who went to see Barbie I would hazard a guess mostly wanted to either escape from worrying about the threat to democracy posed by Trump or someone like DeSantis becoming president or actually want to see us become a fascist state ruled by a racist dictator. Both want to see the fluff of an escapist movie like the hyped up Barbie film which has reviews called it WITTY, IMPECCABLY DESIGNED, OVERBLOWN FUN.

Then there are those who opted to see the can't get much more serious movie Openheimer. I'd bet my pile of chips that the majority of these viewers are those who are very concerned about what having a far-right president would do to democracy in America.

They are like the Hjalmar Aurland character in Seaside Hotel. They are like Thom Hartmann who just published "How Democracy Dies the First Month of the Next Trump or GOP Presidency."

Hartmann concludes his essay as follows:

As Trump told a group of young people last week of his plan to destroy the American government: 

“This will be the most important election with your country, your freedom, and your future on the line. We are in trouble. This country is in trouble. The election will decide if your generation inherits a fascist country or a free country, if you will have the rule of tyrants or the rule of law, if Marxist radicals burn our civilization to the ground, which they are looking to do, or young patriots like you propel America to glorious heights greater than ever before. … When I get back into the oval office, I will obliterate the deep state.”

Gradually, then suddenly.

People like Thom Hartmann and I, and probably almost everyone reading my blog including the 2,280 weekly readers in Germany and 468 in Russia (see below) have been following the news and are anxious over the prospect that what happened in Germany in the 1930's could happen here.

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