Trump hush money trial completes fourth week of testimony

by V. K.Chandrasoma

Stating the obvious, Trump and incumbent President Biden are still the nominees of their Parties for the 2024 presidency. The mystery that defies logic is that Biden, the incumbent president, having brought back sanity to a White House disgraced by the former president, is unable to put any distance in the national polls between himself and Trump.This is the most pathetic choice for the presidency the American voters have ever faced in history. The election of Trump will mean the end of Democracy. Period. The election of Biden will result in a backlash of violence by Trump’s white supremacist domestic terrorists, especially if he is convicted and imprisoned. Violence which may approach the intensity of a second Civil War.

It may be pertinent to look back on the history of the US presidency in living memory, to reassure ourselves that America was not always like this. The White House had never before plummeted to the fascist depths reminiscent of the Third Reich of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.US presidents after WW II, Democratic and Republican, have been much like a curate’s eggs: some good and bad at the same time, others having distinct good and bad parts. But every single one of them, from Roosevelt to Biden, even Nixon, revered the sanctity of the Constitution of the United States and the dignity of the Oval Office. Bar Trump.

President Roosevelt guided the nation well on the path to social and economic justice with his New Deal after World War II. The beginnings of the social safety net in America which Republicans contemptuously decry today as “Commie” ideology, while enjoying its benefits. Benefits that still fall far short of the social and economic safety net enjoyed by the citizens of all other developed countries.FDR was succeeded on his death by President Harry Truman, who in 1945 had to make the most heartbreaking decision any president would face: to authorize the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 6 and 9, 1945, killing more than 100,000 men, women and children.

Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, officially ending a war in which 70 – 85 million people had perished. The alternative to this seemingly inhumane decision was to sacrifice millions more lives in the invasion of Japan, which would not have surrendered under any other circumstances.

Eisenhower, a Republican, continued FDR’s “socialist” New Deal programs, expanded social security, prioritized taxes where the wealthy paid taxes up to 90%, which made for a thriving middle class. He played a major role in the construction of the nation’s freeway network. Every Republican president who came after him pales by comparison.

Then came Kennedy, a war hero and the most charismatic president in the nation’s history, who with his style, soaring oratory and a beautiful wife brought a new glamour to the White House, renamed during his administration after Camelot, the legendary court of King Arthur in 12th century England. Kennedy is mainly remembered for his unflinching courage during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he stared down Khrushchev to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba, and for his determination to conquer space, when he famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
Kennedy was extremely popular with the ladies; his numerous extra-marital affairs, notably with sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, were legendary. He is supposed to have told British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, in 1961, “if I did not slip the presidential sausage to a woman once every three days, I would get a splitting headache”. Much to the horror of that strait-laced gentleman, whose experience of stiff organs certainly did not include political sausages, confined as they probably were to the traditional British stiff upper lip.

Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the presidency on Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Like President Biden, he was a fine president, a decent man. He presided over the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, amongst other progressive legislation. But in the end, he was undone for his role in escalating the Vietnam War, which prompted him not to seek re-election in 1968.
Biden is continuing to fail in traditional national polls, mainly because of his unqualified support of Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s disproportionate revenge against the atrocities committed by the terrorist organization of Hamas on October 7, is fast being transformed into a genocide against the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza. So far, 35,000 innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed and two million displaced, on the verge of starvation, since October 7. The violence shows no signs of abatement.
Biden has, at last, probably too late, censured Netanyahu and threatened to stop the flow of arms until Israel agrees to a negotiated ceasefire. A threat which is falling on deaf ears. Netanyahu has vowed “to fight tooth and nail” and continue to wave the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitize the Zionist intention of an ironical twist to Hitler’s Final Solution – the genocide of the Palestinian people and the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel.
Since 1948, the world has done nothing while the Jews have, with American support, illegally, violently and with impunity annexed Palestinian land, purely on the basis of a Biblical statement made 3,000 years ago, that Palestine is the homeland of the Jewish people. The Divine Title Deed, notarized by the Christian God Himself.

Richard Nixon, who lost the presidency to JFK by a whisker in 1960, won the White House in 1968 and 1972 by landslides. He counted many achievements during his presidency, including ending the Vietnam War and negotiating a detente with the Peoples Republic of China.However, his presidency will always be held in disgrace because of Watergate, a cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building in the nation’s capital. Compared to the treasonous felonies of sedition and espionage that implicate the contemptible Trump, Watergate is a mere peccadillo.
Nixon’s vice-president, Gerald Ford, succeeded him on his resignation.

Ford’s only “achievement” during his brief presidency was his pardon of Nixon for crimes committed during Watergate.Ford was succeeded by Democrat Jimmy Carter. A disciplined and compassionate president, Carter championed human rights, bolstered Social Security, added nearly eight million jobs and sought to improve the environment. He helped to bring amity between Israel and Egypt with the famous Camp David Agreement of 1978. He also established full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Carter was a fine president but a principled, therefore terrible, politician. He was outmaneuvered by the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan after one term, in 1980.

Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, which he should have received in 1978, “for his decades of untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social welfare”.

Since 1984, Jimmy Carter (now 99 years-old) and his wife, Rosalynn, have been personally involved in building and renovating homes with Habitat for Humanity. He is still actively involved in the project, since his devoted wife of 77 years died in November 2023. She was 96 years old.

Reagan was a worse president than he was a mediocre Hollywood actor. Credited with having ended the Cold War, Reagan’s signature achievement was his infamous policy of trickle-down economics, which cut the maximum tax rate of corporations and the wealthy from 65% to 40%, that began the process of marginalizing a thriving middle class.The two presidencies of the Bushes, George H.W. and George W. served as disastrous bookends for the prosperous eight-year presidency of Bill Clinton.

The older Bush started the Gulf War against Iraq. The younger Bush tried to outdo daddy, and waged an illegal war against Iraq, also doomed to failure, with enormous costs to lives, property and reputation. Both left their presidencies in financial and environmental crises, which were rescued by their successors, Presidents Clinton and Obama, in 1992 and 2008, respectively.
Clinton’s two terms resulted in the longest economic expansion in American history, added 22 million new jobs, the largest expansion of education opportunity since the GI bill, among many other stellar achievements. His administration ended in a surplus of $230 billion.

Clinton also had a fondness for the ladies, though he was an altar boy compared to JFK. His presidency was marred by a consensual affair with an intern, for which “crime” he was impeached. He was, like JFK, a man of great charisma, and never had to pay to have sex with porn stars. The two-term administration of President Barack Obama rescued a nation on the brink of recession, and in eight years, transformed it to a prosperous country with 72 weeks of continuous economic growth, well on the path to social and economic justice. A president who had adorned the mantle of the Leader of the Free World with universal respect and admiration, achieved in the face of Republican obstruction at every progressive turn. A scandal-free presidency that ranks among the greatest in history.

Four short years later, from 2016 to 2020, the USA became a different country. One which had lost the confidence of its allies and consorted with its adversaries; sacrificed the threat of climate change at the altar of pollution and corporate greed; cost the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the pandemic in a failed and cynical effort to safeguard the economy; forsook the financial plight of the neediest for the benefit of its billionaires and corporations; and, most importantly, polarized the nation and rekindled racial and religious tensions to the cusp of a second Civil War.

This brief history of American administrations since WWII till 2016 shows the depths to which Trump has dragged the values of the presidency.Trump’s hush money trial resumed on Thursday, with the salacious evidence of Stormy Daniels, the porn star who, on Tuesday, described her sexual encounter with Trump as “the most disgusting 90 seconds of her life”. She was constrained by presiding Judge Meachan not to reveal the juicier parts of the encounter, like a description on Trump’s genitalia, which Stormy had hilariously likened to a little mushroom at previous TV interviews. One that would produce a tedious “mushroom cloud” that would cause no fear to the nation’s adversaries, much less an exultation of gratitude to the Almighty from the ladies.

Stormy Daniels continued her testimony on Thursday. In cross-examination, the defense counsel attempted to throw mud at Stormy with references to her “dialog with the dead while living in a haunted house”, while badgering her with her past sexual fiascos. A defiant Stormy refused to be intimidated by these combative tactics and more than held her own. The day ended with the same defense I reported last week – that Donald Trump paid $130,000 to a porn star as an incentive for not going public with the “fact” that he didn’t have sex with her.

Perhaps Stormy Daniels referred to the most damaging point to Trump’s defense: the fact that his lawyers dare not have him testify at the trial, fully aware that he would commit perjury before he completed his first sentence.
Or as Stormy tweeted, “Real men respond to testimony (against them) by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh …. Wait. Never mind”.

The next prosecution witness will be Donald Trump’s erstwhile “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who has already spent a three-year prison sentence for his part as the architect of this hush-money scheme. Having taken the fall for Trump, he certainly has no love for him, and his testimony against Trump next week should be both interesting and hopefully, disastrously conclusive.

The extraordinarily archaic rules of the Electoral College make it almost impossible for a Third-Party candidate to successfully vie for the presidency. However, the main Third-Party candidate for 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of RFK and nephew of JFK, added some improbable though rueful humor to the current presidential race. The New York Times revealed last Wednesday that a neurologist, after reviewing a brain scan in 2010 of the then 56-year-old Kennedy,

had told him that his health issues could have been “caused by a worm that got into my brain, ate a portion of it and died”. Of starvation?Kennedy said he would be prepared “to eat five more brain worms and still outclass Trump and Biden at a presidential debate”, joking, in golfing parlance, that he would “beat them both with a six-worm handicap!”