Donald Trump solicits $1 billion bribe
I told you so...
If you have not already, read the piece linked below. Its title is so prescient, it virtually puts Nostradamus to shame. Then scroll below.
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A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.
—The Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ, a history of Roman civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325
Broke as a Joke
In the above article, I was completely wrong about one thing—whether the New York Appellate Division would reduce the required bond Trump needed to post as part of securing the roughly $450 million judgment a civil court imposed upon him for his engaging in decades of fraud. I expected the Appellate Division would not.
As it turned out, the Appellate Court cut the required bond to $175 million, a nearly 75% reduction. To be clear, this does not affect the judgment—Trump still owes nearly half a billion dollars. The bond is just a sort of insurance payment posted up-front while the case goes through other avenues of litigation.
Make no mistake, the Plaintiff—the New York Attorney General on behalf of the people of New York State—will eventually execute the judgment (unless an appellate court completely overturns it, a possibility I am now a bit more hesitant to address). If Trump lacks cash at that point, the court can force him to sell properties or handover other assets to satisfy the judgment. Even bankruptcy will not fully vanquish this sort of debt, as Trump’s own fool henchman is learning the hard way right now.
One errant prediction notwithstanding, I was spot on about another—that Trump would sell out the office of the Presidency, or the United States itself, for a billion dollars. I wrote:
Now facing the probable liquidation of his properties, there seems no bottom to which Trump will sink to try to save them. Half a billion dollars can buy any number of policies or resources of the executive branch. As a matter of routine Trump surrounds himself with criminals and engages in criminal conspiracies to acquire and hold power…
On March 3, Trump met with serial fraudster Elon Musk and a number of big Republican donors, likely to beg for money. So far, Musk has been noncommittal, going so far as to dismiss the import of the meeting altogether. He blubbered through a response to a question posed by Don Lemon asking why Musk and Trump met. “I was at a dinner—I wasn't at a dinner. I was at a breakfast at a friend's place and Donald Trump came by. That's it,” he told Lemon…
What’s to stop [Trump] from selling out the country to save his gaudy trophies like Mar-a-Lago and possibly prevent himself from going to jail?
Indeed, the answer to that question is: nothing. While in the article I discussed that he owes just a bit over half a billion dollars, I titled it with the for-sale sign set at a full billion. Why? Because Trump needs money. Not just to pay his civil judgments, but also to pay massive ongoing legal fees to try and defend his rampant criminality and to continue upholding the myth that he’s a billionaire. As his niece explained:
Donald has always presented himself as a man who is, in his words, “really rich”; a multi-billionaire who as of last year had $400 million in the bank. Today those claims are revealed to be the fiction they always were.
The fiction came to light when in his court filings, Trump reluctantly admitted he did not have the money to post the bond for his New York civil case.
The World’s Most Prolific Prostitute and his Johns
Recently, Trump revealed that he would happily accept bribes to help re-prop his financial delusions. He held a meeting with energy executives at Mar-a-Lago in Florida about a week or two ago. His goal was to receive $1 billion in campaign contributions. He explicitly asked for it. Never the type to give anything away for free, these corporate bosses brought executive orders their own people drafted that would roll back a number of Biden environmental policies.
For reference, “An executive order is an official directive from the U.S. president to federal agencies that often have much the same power of a law” [emphasis added]. These arrogant starvelling, elf-skinned, dried neat’s-tongue, bull’s-pizzle stock-fish shamelessly told Politico that they created the orders because they would be “more effective than anything a second Trump administration could devise on its own.” Many of these mouldy rogues complained previously that “The Trump administration has tried to do a lot [to help the energy industry profit], but it’s done it in an extraordinarily sloppy way,” and further that:
The energy policy mechanism for the president [Trump] is through individual donors and friends who he’ll have a conversation with at a fundraiser and take action the next day, but there’s no meaningful process to push energy issues through the quote-unquote ‘system’ in the White House.
In other words, Trump favored his friends and donors over other oligarchs who failed to sufficiently coddle his corrupt administration. And the fossil fuel barons are not about to let that happen again.
Stephen Brown, one of many shills for the Gas and Oil Lobby, warned that undoing Biden administration environmental policies will be a major priority should Trump somehow buy or steal his way back into power. Some examples of what Brown and his ilk wish to change: eliminate fines on leaks of methane from oil and gas equipment on federal land, increase offshore drilling, cut taxes on oil companies, speed up work for oil and pipeline projects, and reverse Biden’s pause on gas export permits. This is in spite of the fact that oil production under the Biden administration is at record levels. At the same time, the planet is literally burning, with records being smashed Every. Single. Day. Every one of these stated goals is for pure profit purposes, and all will be and have been destructive to the environment.
It is no secret that the oil industry has lied for decades about its damage to the environment—damage its own researchers accurately predicted long ago. Executives and shareholders have received trillions in subsidies, while simultaneously raking in jaw-dropping levels of profits. That wealth has infused within them such a sense of impunity that they are openly telling the media “We’re going to have to write exactly what we want, actually spoon feeding the administration. There’s 27-page drafts moving around Washington.”
The industry has already injected $136.8 million into the 2024 election, with all of the top bribes donations going to Republican organizations or candidates with only two (extremely) small exceptions. They are paying the quid (bribe) in plain sight and brazenly offering and acknowledging the expected quo (implementation of their handmade executive orders).
Judicial Flop House
It should not be possible that this is legal. But, alas, experts say it probably is. A bribe under 18 U.S. Code § 201 occurs when anyone “directly or indirectly offers or promises anything of value to any public official or person who has been selected to be a public official to give anything of value to influence any official act.”
I have not found anyone making the direct argument why this is not a bribe, but it undoubtedly goes something like this. Trump is neither an elected official, nor has he “been selected” yet. As such, you can give him any amount of money you want because you know he cannot make any official act (yet) that, under the statute, is necessarily subject to influence. This activity, goes the hypothetical argument, is merely some form of campaigning or supporting a campaign.
The American Justice System, if these experts are correct, and I have no reason to doubt they are, literally condones—arguably endorses—selling Presidential power to the highest bidder. And in the name of what? Ah yes, free speech.
There is no single path that landed us here, but one milestone emphatically stands out—Citizens United. That case involved a political nonprofit that bemoaned rules preventing certain political action groups from airing commercials or films in the days right before an election or primary. The rules applied to all groups, no matter their political leaning or penchant for truth or lies. The rules had been in place for more than a century.
As the plaintiff whose case came before the Court sought to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the right-leaning Court opted to take the case and waive away a hundred years of precedent to allow this plaintiff and others to proceed in their election chicanery. In the process, the Court reached the ridiculous conclusion that injecting money into elections is a matter of free speech. Money talks… quite literally.
In perhaps the greatest perversion of American judicial providence since Dred Scott, the 2010 Court essentially applied personhood status and its requisite rights to corporations while entertaining the fantasy that “independent spending cannot be corrupt and that the spending would be transparent.” By releasing corporations and other entities from limitations on financial support of candidates—so long as they “did not coordinate” directly with the candidates themselves—corporations became free to spend as much money as they choose on elections.
I worked many cases like this involving smaller and less sophisticated candidates and conspirators. National campaigns manage coordination far more carefully, backed by legions of lawyers to ensure that any intended lawbreaking merely enters “gray” areas that prosecutors are loath to touch. Anyone who believes the Court’s or statutory presumptions about prohibitions on “coordination” has any effect is incredibly naive, an utter fool, or a liar. Daniel I. Weiner of the Brennan Center cogently explained the very predictable result:
This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality, the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.
Weiner is absolutely correct.
To defend this homicidal assault on American democracy, the alleged luminary Antonin Scalia, who blessedly no longer pollutes the Court with his presence, launched a vapid concurrence of the majority’s opinion with this piece of profundity:
Despite the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged up, it is far from clear that by the end of the 18th century corporations were despised. If so, how came there to be so many of them?
Scalia—the guy who so-called conservatives have vaunted as the “gleeful, brilliant combatant” of the Court, rather than the self-adulating corporate stooge he always was—was simply confounded by how widely-hated corporations could have cheated their way into lavish copiousness. He was using this observation to assert that what the Founders thought of corporations was irrelevant to the analysis of their free speech rights, even though just a handful sentences later he proclaimed:
Modern corporations do not have such privileges, and would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders — excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian society.
Overall, Scalia twisted the dissent’s argument into one that asserted corporations had no free speech rights, dithering about in historical nitpicking to make some parcel of his point here and there, without ever addressing in substance the legal and policy justifications for limiting speech at certain times for all speakers. He was a Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, dazzling non-sophisticates with flare and flamboyance—his self-proclaimed textualist and originalist Holmesian deduction—while engaging in judicial activist lawcraft behind the curtains.
Anyway, Anthony Kennedy who wrote for the majority in Citizens United, was equally intent on protecting the “so many of them” corporations. To do so, he first announced that “The purpose and effect of this law is to prevent corporations, including small and nonprofit corporations, from presenting both facts and opinions to the public” (pg. 907). This is a rather cute way to describe the kind of tripe the organization Citizens United and its progeny have actually presented as ‘facts’ or ‘opinions’ (2,000 Mules produced by fraudster and felon Dinesh D'Souza comes to mind).
Kennedy then excoriated the purpose of the law (that he fabricated) by sagaciously stating, “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy” (pg. 911). Oh how both right and wrong you were Kennedy, you who also thankfully no longer stains the Court.
Kennedy was right that the “appearance” of influence or access would not cause the electorate to lose faith in democracy. Of course he was also wrong. That is because there is no mere appearance, there is actual influence and access that has all but “cause[d] the electorate to lose faith in our democracy” entirely . The corruption of the Court and of Congress, at least since Scalia, is so omnipresent that it permeates the air like a Monday morning chipotle crop-dusting in an office elevator.
Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and even Roberts appear to be taking what any rational person might call bribes, or at the least are under the influence. They meekly refer to fishy offerings as ‘gifts’ from ‘friends’ while suspiciously neglecting to report them. Then, they play stupid when called out.
Some are so impudent that they have openly supported an attempted coup of their own government. For example, Clarence Thomas’s own wife appears to have played a role in Trump’s attempted overthrow of the government. Yet, Thomas found no ethical issue with overhearing a case to decide whether evidence of her crimes should be released. He, unsurprisingly, voted no, but he lost and her treachery slowly leaked out to the public. Nevertheless, the worst Thomas has dealt with is a few “nasty” news articles.
Alito, not wishing for Thomas to totally upstage him on the scandalous front, opted to fly the American flag upside down at his home in the days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Flying the flag this way was co-opted by people who continued pedaling the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats—including the many who attacked police at the Capitol.
Alito persisted in hearing cases about issues surrounding both the election and, currently, whether Trump has immunity for his criminal efforts to overturn it. This would be a violation of ethics in any other circumstance, but the Supreme Court is above provincial things like complying with basic propriety. Deciding to take a different tact from the “I’m too stupid to understand ethics reporting forms” that Thomas employs, however, Alito blamed his wife.
With all this in mind, why would anyone be surprised that oil executives would flagrantly flout to the media their intent to buy one of the current candidates for president? Even if any prosecutor showed the stones to charge one of these energy-industry reprobates, this bought-and-paid-for Court would almost certainly overturn any conviction for bribery. Indeed, this Court has a history of doing just that.
While it is clear that a second Trump term will be an unmitigated disaster for the country should he manage to succeed in stealing one, the disease may already be terminal. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance recently changed the rating of the United States to a “backsliding democracy,” but that seems an understatement.
What we are seeing is the result of unchecked elitism, fueled by oppressive capitalism, that portends dark times for everyone, not just Americans. While corruption and malfeasance are the bellwethers of stale, feckless democracies, selling out the environment is harkening misery and death for everyone the world over. Until the people muster their collective power to round up and remove these succubi from any hand of power or influence, all of our days are numbered.
For my latest political-legal piece titled, “According to Trump, Joe Biden can Kill You; That’s his literal legal argument,” click here. Here is an excerpt:
Sotomayor made perhaps the most profound inquiry ever seriously raised in a US courtroom:
If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity? [Sup. Ct. Oral Arg., pg. 9].
That this question came before any United States court of any jurisdictional level was nothing less than astonishing to legal experts, commentators and, frankly, anyone else listening. In the lower court hearing when the same issue arose, Department of Justice Lawyer James Pearce could not believe his ears. He stated, “what kind of world are we living in?” Shockingly, Sauer responded in both courts: “It would depend.”
…Trump is only concerned about evading accountability for his litany of crimes committed in the lead up to, during, and after his administration. He does not give the slightest regard for the long-term implications, even if the result is decidedly negative for his supporters. His supporters appear equally concerned with the short-term result, loath to see their chosen leader imprisoned — however justly — but cannot comprehend the long-term consequences such immunity might instigate.
For a detailed accounting of Trump’s crime of trying to overthrow the United States government in my online book “Just Say We Won,” click here.
To read more about the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s villainy, click below.
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I am the executive director of the EALS Global Foundation.
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