Why I HAVE to Vote for Biden

The Environment, the Middle Class, and the Functionality of US Government Depends upon it.

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What This is About

In a two-party system such as what we have in the United States, one can rarely participate in an election without holding one’s nose on some decisions. This is the central failing of such a system. Nonetheless, if one is to engage, little choice remains but to pick certain candidates, even less likeable ones. After all, while one can certainly elect not to vote at all, this usually comprises a de facto choice for one candidate or another, depending upon the jurisdiction of the voter. Like it or not, we live in a flawed democracy of relatively low democratic ranking—not the bastion of freedom so often bragged about by our marketing department. Within this context, I have come to my decision in this coming presidential election (barring any major upheaval). As part of my continuing endeavor to provide carefully researched articles on various subjects, I have written this not to promote my choice as the “right” one or to impose it upon another. But, after speaking with others, it is apparent that many people are inclined one way or another based on inadequate information or complete falsehoods. Articulating my basis for deciding is meant to provide some illumination for others who have not yet made a choice or feel that they lack sufficient knowledge about the candidates.

I do not expect anyone to agree or disagree with any opinions offered herein. I am under no illusion that someone who is “in the tank” for one candidate or another will be persuaded by my points. Those people will almost certainly not read this anyway, if they read at all. Such is American politics today. For those that have made it this far, and intend to proceed further, I implore you not to take my word on anything. I am not here to convince you, though I am most willing to hear differing, fact-based viewpoints on any of the following content. To support my points, I have provided links to all relevant information. Explore those links, explore your own, and, most importantly, make your own choice—but make an informed one.

One issue needs addressing up front. The talk of the cognitive abilities of one or the other presidential candidates is, for me, a non sequitur. Debating who stumbles (literally or figuratively) more than the other fails to appreciate that the political environment has led us to choosing between two very old, white men. Biden has misspoken plenty of times, just as Trump has touted his passing of a test for dementia patients as evidence of his own mental acuity, among other equally jaw dropping gaffes. As a deterministic measure of who to choose, this issue is ridiculous, and is not dispositive in any meaningful way.

Joseph Biden

I am going to start with what I like about the Biden term because I think it is important to be aware of these things which seem so alarmingly under-reported. Note that I fully recognize that a President has limited power in some respects and that these feats listed are not his alone. Nonetheless, the President does wield considerable influence, and is often the deciding factor whether something makes it through the morass that is the bill-to-law process. And, obviously, the President signs the bill into law. The President brandishes even more significant power when it comes to the Executive branch. And this branch can profoundly affect our lives or the lives of those around us. The use or abuse of this extremely powerful branch of government matters as much as legislation in many cases. Finally, I previously did not bother much with what politicians say. Back then, the issue usually revolved around whether a politician stuck to his or her campaign promises on passing various legislation, like cutting taxes, or whatever. In the current day, though, the things politicians now tend to say matter in a more profound way. Eliciting violence, bigotry, sexism, racism, xenophobia, or any other depravity is as disqualifying to me as any act or failure to act on laws.

I do not love everything about Biden as President. In fact, there is plenty not to like. I also do not like feeling forced to vote ‘against’ someone rather than ‘for’ someone. But in this case, that is not happening. Rather, I am voting both for someone and ardently against the other. On another note, I vehemently oppose voting by party allegiance. Doing so is absolute lunacy, or palpable laziness. Sadly, it seems a substantial portion of the American electorate does exactly that. This is not to say one cannot agree with and choose to vote for only members of one party. If that is where one’s careful analysis leads, fine. What should matter is what has the party (and individuals) done to deserve your vote? What has the party (and individuals) done to lose it? Here are mine for the Presidency.

The Good

The Infrastructure Investment and Job Act

The Biden Administration has pushed and successfully signed into law numerous bills that vastly benefit the American people. In the first year of his presidency, he managed to pass the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. One of the authors of the bill was Republican Senator Rob Portman (OH). Despite vociferous opposition by Trump and his allies, 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House Republicans voted for the bill enabling it to pass. Since its enactment, the White House has posted and kept updated all the awards granted under the law, a remarkable act of transparency. Equally remarkable (though it shouldn’t be), the awards have gone to states as requested, with no statistical political bias. In other words, so-called red states and blue states have all benefitted from the act proportionally to their needs or requests. The sector receiving the largest allocation (as a percentage) of funding so far is broadband. This is based on the Biden administration’s early vow to expand high speed internet to under-covered and under-privileged communities. Transportation, water, and coastlines received the next largest proportion of their allocation. As a result of the law, jobs in engineering and construction, both largely well-paying, have risen by 9% and 11% respectively.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

In 2022, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act took effect. This was the first major gun safety law passed in almost 30 years. While nowhere near enough to address the ridiculous state of war in which the American streets have found themselves, passing the bill nonetheless proved an astounding achievement given that the Republican party has inextricably tied its identity to unfettered gun ownership, thereby strongly resisting passage of this law. In addition, the Supreme Court of the US has engaged in no end of chicanery to thwart any restrictions on guns. Nevertheless, the law passed; it limits legal access to guns for those involved in domestic violence, increases background checks, and incentivizes states to pass red-flag laws. The bill passed the House 234 to 193, and the Senate 64 to 34, just one month after the Uvalde massacre in Texas. Every vote against the bill was by Republicans, including most Texas Republicans who represent the very people who had just witnessed 19 children murdered by gun.

The Pact Act

On August 11, 2022, Biden signed the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act into law. The law expands health care access to millions of veterans injured or disabled from exposure to burn pit smoke and toxins, including Vietnam-era Agent Orange. It closes a previous gap where the Veterans Affairs (VA) denied benefits to nearly 70% of claims by veterans asserting injuries from this kind of exposure, and provides nearly $280 billion in funding. Upon signing, Biden said “The PACT Act is the least we can do for the countless men and women … who suffer toxic exposure while serving their country.” Eleven Republicans voted against the bill, allowing it to pass 86 to 11. Before that, even more Republicans blocked the bill until they relented under pressure from more than 60 veterans’ groups led by comedian Jon Stewart. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) claimed he opposed the bill because of concerns it would be used toward “other Democratic priorities.” He further stated:

People take a sympathetic group of Americans — and it could be children with an illness, it could be victims of crime, it could be veterans who’ve been exposed to toxic chemicals — craft a bill to address their problems and then sneak in something completely unrelated that they know could never pass on its own and dare Republicans to do anything about it, because they know they’ll unleash their allies in the media and maybe a pseudo-celebrity to make up false accusations to try to get us to just swallow what shouldn’t be there. That’s what’s happening here.

Jon Stewart had something to say about that.

America’s heroes, who fought in our wars, outside sweating their asses off, with oxygen, battling all kinds of ailments, while these motherfuckers sit in the air conditioning, walled off from any of it. They don’t have to hear it. They don’t have to see it. They don’t have to understand that these are human beings. Do you get it yet?

Stewart then read a tweet from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL):

“I was honored to join the USO today and make care packages for our brave military members in gratitude… in gratitude… of their sacrifice and service to our nation.” And there’s a beautiful picture; I wish you could see it. He’s standing with a little package… I don’t even know what to say… I am used to the hypocrisy… She (a woman from the VFW) sat in the office with Mitch McConnell, and a war veteran from Kentucky, and he [McConnell] looked that man in the eyes and said ‘we’ll get it done.’ And he lied to him because Mitch McConnell yesterday, flipped… Senator Pat Toomey won’t take a meeting with the veteran’s groups… I am used to the cowardice.

Despite Republican lies about the funding of the bill, it nonetheless passed. In its first year, 4.1 million veterans received free screening for toxic exposures, the VA processed 1.65 million claims for benefits—the fastest ever—and veterans diagnosed with cancer received $215 million in aid.

Inflation Reduction Act

On August 16, 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. The bill includes $369 billion to fight climate change, which experts believe will reduce US greenhouse gas emissions to rates 40% lower than what they were in 2005. This is critical as the world plummets toward an ecological disaster. A year after its passage, the US saw $70 billion in investments in electric vehicles, $10 billion in solar manufacturing, and has aided in $240 billion in new clean energy investments by the private sector. To benefit from the Act, employers must pay the prevailing wage to workers on funded projects and hire a minimum percentage of apprentices in various trades. The law extends the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit of up to $1,200 annually for people who install efficient windows or doors, heating or cooling, and certain other green improvements. Relatedly, Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement from which Trump had unilaterally pulled out. The Paris Agreement represents a legally binding commitment of countries across the globe to combat climate change and pollution. Before Trump pulled out of it, the US was one among 196 countries signed on to the agreement.

The inflation Reduction Act also lowers several different prescription drug prices. The first drugs covered under the negotiated reduction included Eliquis, Jardiance, Xarelto, Januvia, Farxiga, Entresto, Enbrel, Imbruvica, Stelara, and Fiasp, as well as certain other insulins.

The[se] medications treat heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes and autoimmune diseases, among other conditions. Medicare enrollees paid a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Those who didn’t receive additional financial assistance shelled out as much as $6,500 on average.

Compared to citizens of other leading economies, Americans pay two to three times more for most of these medicines. Insulin in the United States costs ten times the price charged elsewhere before the renegotiation under the Act. Merck's cancer drug Keytruda costs $100,000 more in the U.S. than it does in France. To get a sense of the effectiveness of the Act on making pharmaceutical prices fair, one need only read the numerous lawsuits drug companies have filed. For example, “Merck & Co. and Bristol Myers Squibb are attacking the IRA using the First and Fifth Amendments while industry lobbyists and co-litigants also include the Eighth Amendment in their lawsuit.” Merck called the law a “sham” and wrote that it is “tantamount to extortion” in a lawsuit it filed in 2023. This “victimized” company reported $59.3 billion in sales in 2022, an increase of 21% from 2021. Shareholders earned an increase of 15.3% in 2022.

The Inflation Reduction Act also provides nearly $80 billion in additional funding to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Many Republicans opposed this provision, proclaiming that somehow it would be ‘weaponized’ against ‘regular’ people. Representative Adrian Smith (R-NE), for example, said this is “part of the broad Biden administration strategy to tax and audit exponentially more Americans.” In reality, only half the amount allocated by the law applied to collection or enforcement, while the rest went to taxpayer services, technology, staff attrition, and the development of a free e-file system for taxpayers. Filing for tax year 2023 is now available for free (for qualifying filers) through the IRS website for the first time ever (I know, I used it. You can too: here). As for enforcement, in 2023, the IRS collected $520 million of additional delinquent taxes. This amount was collected from taxpayers with over $1 million in income. As of October 2023, the IRS has initiated compliance alerts for 480 entities with assets valuing over $10 million. This is the largest number of audits targeting the wealthy in decades, maybe ever, and the agency has its eye on hundreds of billions more in unpaid taxes by the wealthy. Furthermore, Janet Yelling, the Secretary of the Treasury and the effective “boss” of the IRS, instructed the agency as follows:

Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels. This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.

Arguments about weaponizing the agency against middle class people are simply a lie. The Act instead has led to some rich folks finally paying their proper dues, like everyone else is forced to do. That’s the real basis for the opposition.

The Chips and Science Act

Signed into law in August 2022, the Chips and Science Act allocated $39 billion for “semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the United States by providing financial incentives for building, expanding, and equipping domestic fabrication facilities and companies in the semiconductor supply chain.”  It also includes billions in tax incentives and research and development, among other provisions. As of 2023, private sector companies announced $166 billion in investments in semiconductor ventures across 42 states. NIST received an increase of $400 million in funding under the Act. NIST is the USA’s oldest physical sciences lab and promotes “U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.” The fund also supports STEM education and workforce development, about $13 billion over five years. Experts predict a growth of 115,000 jobs in the semiconductor industry by 2030.

Student Loan Forgiveness

Throughout the beginning of his term, Biden made several attempts to forgive some student loan debt. This was met by fierce resistance by Republicans and some of the electorate, and even faced—and lost—some lawsuits. The resistance to this move largely stemmed from jealousy rather than sober analysis. Some Republican politicians proffered the argument that the President does not have the authority to do it, and did not consider or care whether it benefits Americans. In its opinion prohibiting Biden’s original forgiveness plan, the US Supreme Court adopted its usual foggy logic to support its obviously partisan opinion. The majority wrote:

The HEROES Act allows the Secretary [of Education] to 'waive or modify' existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, but does not allow the Secretary to rewrite that statute to the extent of canceling $430 billion of student loan principal.

The Court’s reasoning was more tortured than that. It is hard to imagine that “cancelling” is any different than “waiving.” Cancelling only some loan amounts also seems to qualify as “modifying.” Curiously, the court spent an entire paragraph defining modify, but spent no time whatever on “waive.” On modifying, the Court found that the word carries “a connotation of increment or limitation.” To juxtapose that assertion with the loan forgiveness program, the Court repeatedly accused the administration of “introducing a whole new regime,” rather than merely forgiving a portion of some loans—an obviously incremental approach. For the record, the same dictionary cited in the Court’s opinion for modify defines waive as “to relinquish (something, such as a legal right) voluntarily” or “to refrain from pressing or enforcing (something, such as a claim or rule).” Likewise, to cancel is “to decide not to conduct or perform (something planned or expected) usually without expectation of conducting or performing it at a later time,” or “to destroy the force, effectiveness, or validity of.” The Court’s semantic pokery jiggery was reminiscent of the late disingenuous wordsmith, Antonin Scalia.

What’s more, the plan was a ‘modification’ irrespective of how the Court chose to look at it–the forgiveness amount was limited to $20,000 per borrower at the highest, and $10,000 for most of the others, and all recipients must have been below the income cutoff to qualify ($125,000 individually or $250,000 for couples). SCOTUS’s usual corrupt partisanship notwithstanding, Republican objections had little to do with law and everything to do with avoiding giving a “win” to the Biden administration, helped by its ideological Court. Politicking to prevent “wins” continues now with the immigration debate. But I digress.

The administration continues to move toward loan forgiveness, announcing in December another $8 billion in relief. Why is this good? Around 90% of all qualified recipients of forgiveness have income of $75,000 or less, many of them our own children. Private loans are extraordinarily expensive and largely contain unscrupulous and unfair conditions, and up until 2021 shared many of the same protections as federal loans. Loan forgiveness may reduce or eliminate the need to take one or more of these predatory loans. Furthermore, Pell Grants—federal grants one does not pay back—once covered 80% of tuition costs, but because of college price gouging, they now cover only about one third. Opposition to the loan forgiveness is little more than a decision as to who should benefit—loan corporations or college kids (and adults). America’s higher education system to this day remains a profit racket for loan distributors. European students studying in the European Union pay little to no tuition compared to American students studying in the USA, and American students studying in Europe typically pay substantially less for tuition than they would at a university in their own country.

This topic could have gone into the “medium” category, but the reality is that executing a loan forgiveness program seems the only option available to the President as neither party in Congress has shown any gumption toward reforming this obscene system.

Economics

In July of 2022, US employers added more than 500,000 jobs, twice the number economists expected. Such has been the trend from the beginning of this administration to now. Throughout Biden’s entire tenure to date, his administration has added 13.9 million jobs, 4.5 million higher than before the pandemic. US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose 3.1% in 2023, which is above average since the year 2000. Biden’s per month job growth from January 2021 to March 2023 averaged 485,000—the highest of any president since the fed started tracking figures. As of January 2024, unemployment was the lowest it has been in 50 years. Almost 23% of all workers worked from home at the end of January, twice the rate of teleworkers in the months before the pandemic. This is better for companies, workers, and the environment.

If the measurement of the economic condition of the country goes by the stock market (a metric with which I—and many economists—do not fully agree), the Biden administration still scores extremely well. Had one invested in the S&P at the beginning of the Biden presidency, the gain would have reached almost 24% to date. This is a strong above-average return. Moreover, both the Dow and the S&P reached record highs in the last week of January and first week of February 2024. The numbers are so good, Trump—who has not been president for over 3 years—is claiming credit for it (somehow), despite previously saying:

If Biden wins, you’re gonna have a stock market collapse the likes of which you’ve never had. You will have a collapse…

Source: Macrotrends - square section covers the Trump administration, the section to the right of it is the Biden administration.

The Medium

Inflation

An issue of concern during the Biden administration is inflation. In 2022, it spiked to a 40-year high when it hit 9.06%, but has slowly come down since then. As of January 2024, the rate was 3.35%. Globally, the US currently sits at the lower end of the rankings among other large economies. The rise and fall of inflation in the US has largely tracked or been slightly lower than the global average rate over the last 3 years. The EU is currently at 3.4%, the UK 4%, India 5.69%, Australia 4.1%, and Brazil 4.62%. The problem with inflation is not the administration’s economic policies, as the above data shows them performing well by nearly all metrics. Instead, the administration has been weak on reigning in greedy corporations. Take Pepsi, for example. In 2021, it announced that it needed to raise prices (I guess because of the pandemic, or supply chain, or **insert some other BS here), but it profited $11 billion that year. Since then, its CEO has said it would not drop prices. Perhaps this is because its primary competitor, Coke, declared a similar hike. James Quincey, Coke’s CEO, told shareholders on a company earnings call that they had “the right” to hike up prices because Coke products are bestsellers. By the end of the third quarter of 2023, Coke’s revenues had grown 8% to $12 billion. Earnings per share grew by 9%. Meat products, whose prices are up as much as 30% since 2020, are raking in similar profits. Like the soda industry which is controlled largely by just two companies, the meat industry is led by 4 companies who control 80% of the market. Those companies saw about a 300% increase in profits since the beginning of the pandemic. Those 4 companies represent the meat-packing industry, not ranchers who have not fared well despite the explosive profit growth. In total, company shareholders across 22 industries grew $1.5 trillion richer from the beginning of the pandemic to now, while workers averaged a 2% increase in net income (which does not count inflation, meaning most workers suffered a net loss). Put another way, the top 6 million wealth earners in the US averaged a net gain (after inflation) of $140,000 per household, while workers averaged less than a $1 per hour increase before inflation. The lowest income households suffered the most. Nonetheless, experts believe the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, the former passed under the Trump administration and the latter passed by the Biden administration, kept the poverty level from soaring even higher.

To its credit, the Biden administration is suing (or has sued and won) numerous companies for monopolistic, price gouging, or price-fixing activities. These suits target(ed) Agri Stats (meat industry), Amazon, Jet Blue, Google, Illumina Inc. (cancer technology), Penguin Random House, Sanofi (Pompe disease treatment), United Health Group, and dozens more. This is at last double the number of lawsuits of this kind launched by the federal government in any of the previous 20 years. In March, the administration requested an additional $100 million to fund the anti-trust division, presumably to ramp up these investigations and lawsuits. My issue with this, however, is that the administration has not taken a strong enough stance to push more severe legislation to prevent price gouging, given the large number of relative monopolies that already exist. Moreover, the DOJ could pursue breaking apart more of these behemoths that already exist, using the abundance of evidence of price gouging, price fixing, and market manipulation as evidence of violations of anti-trust laws.

The Inflation Reduction Act included a minimum 15% corporate tax, but this has not curtailed corporate tax avoidance—another malfeasance the US government has not mitigated in any meaningful way. Corporate tax avoidance exploded after the passing of an extraordinary corporate and wealthy tax cut under Trump in 2017, and has inched back from that only slightly. Corporations and the rich alike still enjoy an abundance of avoidance schemes, which has kept their rates quite low despite frequently record-breaking profits. Higher tax rates (and actual payments) are a good thing. This administration has not gone far enough pursuing them. Taxing luxury items and other rich-people-specific products and services contributes to reducing inflation. So, too, do investments in development, jobs, and social services. The Biden Administration has made a lot of progress on many of these, but to fully curtail inflation it needs to address the principal cause—corporate gouging.

One area the administration should be pushing for more stringent regulation is cutting off the methods by which the wealthiest people use to avoid paying taxes. On this, I wrote previously:

What wealthy people do is tie their capital assets to loans—which provides the cash they use day-to-day—that have no taxable value just like our mortgages are not taxed as income. The difference is we pay our mortgages from our income, while the super-rich pay off these loans through dividends from their huge capital gains or other assets, which further reduces their taxable burden.

Artificial Intelligence Regulation

Artificial Intelligence, the technology often touted as the next global savior, is rife with problems. To be sure, it has extraordinary potential, deft as it is at consuming vast amounts of data and outputting human-readable, useful information. But it is also misleading or even harmful in many of its manifestations. ChatGPT, Bing AI, Google Bard, and others like them are unadulterated garbage. They regurgitate human-developed work without any attribution or compensation, they hallucinate, they are eminently insecure, and some of their own designers begged their companies not to release them. Companies and governments use AI to make life-altering decisions despite widely documented biases and flaws in the programs. Serial fraudsters trick the general public into buying their inferior products, often sticking the letters “AI” somewhere in the brand or product name to bump the valuation, even though their product exhibits no intelligence whatsoever. Misinformation exponentially proliferates year-upon-year through AI.

Experts across the globe have been pleading for regulation, but no governments have made substantial progress. The Biden administration has at least made some efforts to fill the void left by this most ineffective US Congress in history. The administration has released an aspirational policy toward mitigating AI-generated harms called the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” It introduces five principles guiding the design of AI programs and their requisite safety barriers. An executive order issued a few months later directed federal agencies to “promote equity in science and root out bias in the design and use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence.” Still, neither provided specific regulations nor concrete directives. In May 2023, the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a request for information seeking stakeholders, researchers, and others to offer insights into mitigating potential harm caused by AI, and to protect individual rights related to it. Following that, executive order 14110 issued the most direct orders yet for how federal agencies must undertake efforts to address the harms and rights violations resultant from AI use. While these illustrate a growing concern and focus on reducing the negatives that come with AI implementation, they do not carry the broader force of law. More needs to be done, but this is the strongest attempt at managing the AI problem in the US of any administration (or Congress) so far.

The Bad

Fossil Fuels

In an era where the damage to the environment and the extraordinary negative consequences it is causing are undeniable, the continued coddling of fossil fuel industries will inevitably be among the gravest of moral stains on all politicians currently living. Despite campaigning on promises to end oil drilling on federal land, Biden has proven quite amenable to the continuation of the process. Analysts estimate that the US has increased oil production by about 1.6 million barrels per day under this administration. The administration approved 9,779 drilling permits since January 2021. The total volume per day of oil produced in the United States is currently higher than at any point during the Trump administration, even though Biden ran on climate concerns while Trump shouted then and does now, “drill, drill, drill.” In January 2024, Biden announced a pause on new permits and a reduction of exports, which some believe will slow down production. Others, however, state this is not enough. I agree. If the administration was serious about climate issues, it would reduce the billions in subsidies to fossil fuel companies and divert that money into cleaner energies (and the jobs that R&D and construction in those fields would produce). In 2022, for example the US gave out $757 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel companies—$3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit subsidies, which are costs like negative health impacts and environmental degradation that are borne by society rather than producers. Even just the $3 billion in explicit subsidies create a net loss to the government while fossil fuel companies rake in massive profits. Time is running out to confront the environmental problems seriously, and this administration has not shown itself to be up to the task.

Immigration

This is an extremely complex problem. To be unequivocally clear, I do not think immigration is the ‘crisis’ many on both sides have made it out to be, at least not in the way they characterize it. The country has seen inflows of immigrants in larger amounts than have occurred lately, but even at their highest peaks, these numbers did not lead to any provable crisis. **Note that no one defines the crisis itself. The tragedy is the way that politicians of both parties have treated migrants, and how one side in particular has quite brazenly demonized human beings, leading the worst of Americans to cheerily glob on to this wickedness.

Nearly half a million of identified Border Patrol “encounters” of attempts at illegal crossings involve unaccompanied children each year, hardly a threat there. And no, seeing a handful of “migrants” being arrested for violent crimes does not constitute a crisis. In 2023, 15,267 “illegal immigrants” were convicted of criminal activity, both misdemeanor and felony. Of those, over half were convicted of crimes related to illegally crossing the border, nothing else. If you remove that category of offense, only 6,477 were convicted of other crimes. This is well below the rate of both native-born citizens and legal immigrants.

“Border encounters” from October 2019 to June 2023. Note, the word “encounters” does not mean the person actually entered the country. Thus, the actual number of entrants is much lower.

Where the Biden administration has failed on immigration policy is the fact that it has really not had one. First, people here without legal authority (I will not continue to use “illegal immigrants” because it is a deplorable way to refer to human beings) do not qualify for government benefits in most cases. There are some exceptions, such as emergency medical care, and food assistance for women and children. This is despite the fact that these people pay billions in federal, state, and local taxes each year. At the federal level alone, studies estimate that the amount of taxes paid by ‘undocumented’ people amounts to around $250 billion. Another study determined the amount of state and local taxes paid reaches over $11.7 billion. Both constitute rates far higher than most wealthy American citizens pay. It is a patently unfair system.

Second, our system practically forbids people immigrating here from doing so legally. It is legal under US and International Law for migrants to seek asylum. To legally apply for asylum, a migrant must do so at one of the United States’ 328 legal points of entry OR from within the United States. Migrants can apply for asylum if they are “apprehended for lacking valid documentation” from within the United States, even if they are charged with a crime related to that. In other words, even if arrested for illegally entering the USA, a migrant is entitled under US law and International Treaty to apply for asylum. Illegally entering absent another crime is only a civil penalty or misdemeanor, though few pay any fine because these are people who have nothing to begin with.

What has plagued the United States for decades is that its immigration policy is confusing, unrealistic, slow, disorganized, and underfunded. The conservative Cato Institute in 2018 outlined some of the myriad problems. I have highlighted some of the most important ones:

1. A far too restrictive system overall. – You get a lot of illegal immigration if your system is unwelcoming.
2. Static immigration quotas.
3. Quotas on nationalities—the law micromanages immigrant demographics. – There is no logical basis for this.
4. Immigrants wait in line for decades.
5. Immigrant workers are counted against multiple quotas.
6. There’s a limit for immigrants with “extraordinary ability”.
7. Workers without college degrees only get 5,000 green cards.
8. The president can end the refugee program unilaterally.
9. No immigration category for entrepreneurs.
10. No way to create new immigration categories without congressional action.
11. Immigrants generally cannot apply for permanent residency on their own. – Most need lawyers to do this, which is why such small numbers do. The process is complex and expensive.
12. Spouses and minor children of new immigrants count against the quotas.
13. There’s a quota on new spouses and minor children of current permanent residents.
14. Children of temporary workers grow up here, wait in line with their parents for permanent residency, and get kicked out of line on their 21st birthday. – This is a moral travesty.
15. Immigrants can live here for decades without receiving permanent residency.
16. Illegal immigrants cannot leave and reapply to return legally.
17. Spouses and children of temporary workers are banned from working.
18. The law requires immigrants to pretend that they don’t want to immigrate.
19. Forcing employers to advertise positions that are already filled.
20. Temporary workers cannot easily change jobs.
21. No temporary visas at all for year‐​round workers without college degrees.
22. Noncitizens can access federal welfare programs after five years. – This is not the case for most.
23. The president can ban any immigrants that he doesn’t like.
24. No opportunity to appeal visa denials. – This is technically not true, but as a practical matter it is.
25. The burden of proof is on immigrants and their sponsors, not the government.
26. America has closed borders with a few holes. – The border is more closed now than it was when Cato produced this in 2018, yet today we have a “crisis.”

The Biden administration is as complacent on immigration as so many of the previous ones. The few proposals that have come from the White House address further border enforcement with only some added funding for courts and other administrative arms. Even when it does propose solutions, however, the Republican party refuses to proceed. Just this past week, a bipartisan Senate group—meaning both political parties—crafted legislation that largely conceded the major points demanded by Republicans. When it became clear that passing the bill would take away one of the last talking points for Trump’s campaign, his allies immediately resisted it, despite admitting they had not even read it. Nancy Mace (R-SC), for example, provided this genius insight to Fox news, whose host did not even seem to buy it:

Mace: This bill keeps the border wide open. There are so many loopholes in this bill, it will make your head spin.

Fox Host: I think we are all trying to figure out this bill. Have you read all 370 pages of this bill?

Mace: We are working through it.

Right. The administration has not come out forcefully on policy, however, choosing instead to use the issue as a political cudgel against Republicans who have shown inconceivable incompetence throughout the debate. Moreover, the Republican position on immigration roots itself in abuse, engaging in political stunts like fooling unwitting migrants to get in planes or buses and shipping them around the country for publicity. This, in some sense, has drawn the Biden administration into engaging in some of its own abusive tactics.

Such villainy is directly related to my second complaint with this administration on immigration. It has been far too soft on state representatives, like the odious Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, both of whom have engaged in arguably criminal acts against migrants. Their program of transporting these people around the country almost certainly violates some laws, civil and criminal. Demanding people who “look like” migrants to show their documentation, a practice being conducted in Texas, is so morally abhorrent that the White House should be opposing it with the full force of the federal government, not in meek press conferences. Again, these are fucking human beings. Instead, federal authorities have kept largely tight-lipped about Abbott’s and DeSantis’s criminality. Furthermore, the federal government has treated Texas authorities, specifically, with kid gloves in what the media is quaintly calling a “border standoff” instead of what it is—rebellion.

Weakness

This brings me to what I perceive as the greatest flaw in this administration—its failure to address the very public, very obvious continued attempt to overthrow the United States government. In an effort to maintain the image of neutrality, the Biden administration has all but allowed this coup attempt to persist. Dangerous times call for extreme action, and it is apparent this President and his Attorney General are not up to the task. The DOJ under Biden has not charged any of the provocateurs of the rebellion except Trump himself, and only just barely. Biden himself has stated relatively little about it out of fear that some would view him as engaging in “election interference,” which is merely a projectionist fantasy of his opponent. Some might argue Biden is starting to come around, however slightly. On the anniversary of January 6, Biden said this in 2022:

And here is the truth: The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution…

He has done what no president in American history – the history of this country – has ever, ever done: He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the American people.

Note that he did not say what Trump really attempted to do—to steal the office by fraud or by force. In 2024, Biden followed the same general trajectory of comments. To be fair, he rightfully called Trump a “fucking asshole,” but only behind closed doors. Special Counsel Robert Hur, who recently exonerated President Biden of any criminality related to his purported mishandling of classified materials, wrote this about both Biden and Trump:

It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump's case and Mr. Biden's are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.

Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.

Biden had this to say on the report:

I was so determined to get the special counsel what they needed, I went forward with a five-hour in-person interview over the two days of October 9th… the 8th and the 9th last year, even though Israel had just been attacked by Hamas on the 7th. I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.

Biden went on to quote the passage above about the contrast the Special Counsel made between his conduct and Trump’s. I will discuss Trump and his devilry further below. Notably, this Special Counsel is a Republican United States Attorney appointed by Trump. Hur also led the investigation against National Security Agency contractor Harold Martin who ultimately pled guilty to stealing “huge amounts” of classified information and received nine years in prison.

But as it relates to the rest of the coup, there are plenty of conspirators who should be called out publicly. For instance, why has Biden said almost nothing about the fake elector cases in Michigan and Nevada? Or on the plea deals of close Trump associates Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis?

More perniciously, many politicians have been outright calling for violence, peaking with Greg Abbott in Texas who is defying a Supreme Court order so his goon squad can keep killing migrants through their criminal negligence. Abbott’s parading has incited an admittedly small convoy of lunatics to travel to the Texas-Mexico border to call for Civil War… and fight with each other. They only barely managed to scrap amongst themselves because they almost did not even make it there. This parade of idiots “lost” some of its members along the way, saw repeated breakdowns of their lawn-block trucks, and woke up to slashed tires on a few occasions. Maybe Biden has not acknowledged them because the whole charade is pathetically stupid, but Biden has also not shown any particular backbone against the inciters of these fools. To date, the big stride against the utter lawlessness in Texas has been to file lawsuits. The administration has whined that Abbott is “dehumanizing immigrants” and “making it harder for federal Border Patrol agents to do their jobs.” Yet, Biden is the head of the Federal Executive Branch. He has the power to declare the entire Operation Lone Star illegal, and he can mobilize the nation’s National Guard to put down this paltry rebellion. I am not advocating violence, but if Biden were simply to put the National Guard on notice that he intends to call them, I suspect Abbott and other petulant rabble rousers like Kristi Noem (governor of South Dakota, which is nowhere near the southern border), would fold like the paper tigers they are. If they act on their threats of civil war of the kind that Noem has leveled, issue a warrant for their arrest for seditious conspiracy and let the marshals pick them up. They can have their day in court, and then prison.

A lot of cheap talk has floated amongst political circles these days about violence and civil war, but it is always by soft-handed, silver-spooned imbeciles who would never put their worthless hides in harm’s way knowing they have a cadre of neuron-misfiring extremists to do it for them. Kowtowing to these carnival barkers only emboldens them. Issuing a few arrest warrants, calling up the National Guard, and imposing whatever other myriad sanctions the Executive branch has at its disposal would start putting this insurgency to bed. The cowards-posing-as-tough-guys like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk, and other second-generation Völkischer content-creators would bemoan this as “oppression” or “persecution,” but who cares? When their dear leaders face real consequences for their civil war saber-rattling, these homunculi will tone it down or simply fade into the irrelevance they deserve. There is no person more powerful than the President of the United States to stamp out this insolence before it festers into a stage-four cancerous tumor. Biden needs to consult with some historians to see where this road leads if he continues to soft-step his way through it.

Gaza and Ukraine

I am not a war or foreign policy expert. Between the various projects I am involved in, I have also not kept up much with these events, egregious as they seem to be. The reason these two topics are here is because while they do not really influence my vote one way or the other, for some it appears they do. And probably rightfully so. War is never good for an incumbent President, whether we are actively involved in it or not. But I suspect that our role in this is not good, given our history of involvement in other ones. I will certainly look more closely at this at another time, and maybe it will be persuasive in my decision-making, but chiming in now would consist of exactly the opinion-before-information type of behavior of which too much of the American electorate is guilty these days.

Donald Trump

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to Donald Trump. The focus lately, of course, is his stunning level of criminality—a topic that I explore in detail below. But many like to proclaim that the astonishing array of charges against him constitute little more than a political persecution—an entirely asinine viewpoint—so first I want to discuss why he has repeatedly proven to be a catastrophic failure as a leader, and whether any good can be attributed to his term as President. To keep this fair and balanced (a once-used trope of bygone days), I will start out with the good and migrate from there.

The Good

The Corporate Transparency Act

In 2020, with support of the Trump administration, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), which imposes new requirements on businesses to reveal beneficial owners and report them to a national registry. This law significantly reduces the ability of entities to launder money or evade taxes through the use of shell companies. Up until the passing of this law, the Tax Justice Network ranked the United States as the second most secretive jurisdiction for finances behind only the Cayman Islands. In addition, the law includes enhanced protections for whistleblowers, and strengthens oversight on money laundering and virtual currencies. Overall, the Act will help law enforcement pierce the corporate veil of tax cheats or those moving illicit funds. Its effectiveness remains to be seen.

Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act

Under this bipartisan act, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) now requires phone companies to verify that the caller ID information transmitted with a call matches the caller’s real phone number. This law led to a reduction in spam or otherwise unwanted calls in 2020. In January 2024, Democratic lawmakers proposed additional laws to strengthen the 2019 Act, one of which increases the penalties (both civil and criminal) for anyone caught using artificial intelligence to commit fraud, harm, or any other illegal act. Another proposes mandated disclosures for any telemarketer using AI, even in a legal capacity.

The First Step Act

This bipartisan law went into effect in 2018, and purports to “reduce the size of the federal prison population while also creating mechanisms to maintain public safety.” A key provision allows federal judges to hand down sentences below the minimum in some cases. Shortened sentences can also be issued retroactively under the law, leading many judges to reduce those related to possession of crack. Crack laws were long considered to target African Americans specifically, and the numbers bear that out. The First Step Act led to a reduction in federal prisoners by almost 5,000 in 2021—a number that has risen to 30,000 at year-end of 2023.

The law also requires the Bureau of Prisons to conduct “evidence-based recidivism reduction programs and productive activities.” While there has been some improvement in this area, the program remains underfunded. Nevertheless, recidivism among First-Step participants is vastly lower than inmates from general populations. Its obvious success has made the program quite popular. As of the end of 2023, over 28,500 people sit on the waiting list to join the literacy program. Two other related laws remain in committee. These are meant to bridge some of the gaps in the First Step Act.

The Medium

The USMCA

Trump campaigned upon ending the previous trade agreement among Canada, the US, and Mexico, known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In July 2020, his new deal went into effect. Called the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), the deal superseded what Trump called the “worst trade deal ever made,” referring to NAFTA. According to economists, NAFTA dramatically increased trade in North America, from $290 billion in 1993 to $1.1 trillion in 2016. There is considerable debate over its effect on jobs, however, with many companies having moved production to Mexico where labor is cheaper. One study found a net loss of about 15,000 jobs per year for the US, but a net gain of $450,000 per job lost through higher productivity and lower costs of consumer goods. Another found that the trade imbalance with China had more to do with job losses than NAFTA. In any case, experts across the board agree that NAFTA did achieve some of its proposed milestones, but also created other issues that the agreement itself could not address.

Since the USMCA’s takeover, however, little question remains that the agreement did not benefit the United States much. In 2017, at the time of its signing, the US trade deficit with Canada and Mexico was $85 billion. Five years after the USMCA went into effect, the deficit hit $220 billion. The largest sector contributing to the deficit is automobile production, an industry Trump explicitly stated would benefit from the agreement. Moreover, tax cuts passed in the same year as the USMCA “cut U.S. savings and boosted U.S. spending, pulling in more imports from abroad,” according to Ed Gresser, an economist and former trade official in both Democratic and Republican administrations. These dynamics greatly benefitted Canada and Mexico, both of whom saw a 27% increase in trade with the US over this period. I put this in the ‘medium’ category because increased trade with Canada and Mexico is good, even if the net benefit to the US is marginal or non-existent. Future legislation could turn this around while maintaining the overall level of trade amongst the three countries.

The Bad

2017 Tax Cuts

In 2017, the Trump administration along with support of the Republican party, passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Some have called this law the “biggest tax code overhaul in 30 years.” Among the changes, the law raised the standard deduction leading many people to lose other popular deductions such as moving expenses and alimony, while also reducing deductions for mortgage interest. To fool people into thinking this law benefitted them, the law reduced the necessary withholdings from paychecks, inflating the size of employees’ payroll checks, but causing many people to owe taxes at the end of the year rather than receiving the refund to which they were accustomed. Another pernicious feature of the law is its sliding tax increases. Each year since its passage, one tax bracket received an increased tax rate starting with the higher brackets and trickling down to the lower ones. Tax year 2023 is when it hit the lowest tax bracket, meaning that the lowest income earners will see decreased refunds or possibly even owe taxes when they file this spring.

The group that enjoyed a veritable windfall from the law is the highest earners, including many Republicans themselves. Samantha Jacoby, Senior Tax Legal Analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, testified before the Senate Budget Committee that the tax cuts in the 2017 law and the 2001 and 2003 laws passed under George W. Bush (also a Republican) have cost “significant federal revenue, add[ed] to the federal debt and limit[ed] our ability to invest in policies that broaden opportunity and contribute to shared prosperity.” Under the 2017 law, the highest household incomes received a reduction of 2.9% to their tax burden, which is about three times the reduction received by the lowest income earners. Moreover, it lowered the corporate tax from 35% to an astonishing 21%, all while these companies continue to gouge American consumers under the guise of inflation. The University of California, Berkeley, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), in a joint study, found that none of those corporate earnings went to the bottom 90% of the American earning population. When people say this law was a windfall for the rich, they were not only not exaggerating, they were perhaps severely understating it.

The law also provided a 20% pass-through income tax reduction. This benefitted companies organized as partnerships, LLCs, and S-corps, over half of which are owned by households with $1 million or more in annual income. Economists at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve found “no evidence that the deduction provided any boost in economic activity in the two years following the deduction’s enactment—no additional investment, jobs, or higher wages for employees of pass-through businesses.”

Extending the tax cuts in this wildly biased law will cost the US around $300 billion per year. And it almost exclusively benefits those who already fail to pay any fair amount of taxes to begin with. Like the lawsuits against the negotiation of medicine prices, the actions of corporations facing the sunsetting of the law reveal how much of a giveaway it has been for them. For example, the trade group National Association of Manufacturers recently ran an ad claiming that without extending these giveaways, “we risk losing it all.” The “all” here purports to be the billions corporations claim to be investing in the economy. Sarah Christopherson of Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) responded:

It’s the classic, ‘We want to have our cake and eat it too.’ Corporations are saying: ‘We want to keep every last one of those corporate tax cuts that we got [in 2017]. And also, we want you to double down and give us $600bn more.’

When we go to the grocery store or other outlets, we are seeing firsthand what the insatiable greed of these corporations is doing to our bottom line. These companies are openly admitting that they “deserve” to make more money off the backs of the population, without giving anything into the societal fund. And most egregiously, they are not even afraid to come out and say how much they detest any hint of protest over their greed and mistreatment.

Corrupting the Judiciary

Trump appointed 3 justices to the Supreme Court. What has resulted has been a shocking level of corruption, ignoring of precedent, and other behaviors unfitting of the supposedly neutral branch of government. I have written before on the corruption of the Court that was going on well before Trump further stained the bench. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were and are abjectly corrupt, both appointed in previous administrations. Scalia crafted a great many opinions that destroyed voting rights—handing democracy to the rich—and gun restrictions, among others. Many ascribed superior intelligence to him not for his legal acumen, but for his smug prose and his unabashed dismissal of constitutional principles couched in his bullshit originalist or textualist philosophies (he was neither except when it suited him). Thankfully, Scalia is no longer on the court, but sadly Clarence Thomas is.

Although Trump did not appoint Thomas, that justice nonetheless has gone to great lengths to protect him. Of course, he has had mixed motives. After all, his wife (Ginni Thomas) is quite likely a seditious traitor, and she was not bright enough to keep her subversion from appearing in various accessible documents. Thomas used his position to try to prevent those documents from going public. He failed. Now, as the Court considers whether states can remove Trump from their ballots for his own sedition, guess who sits on the court asking questions? Yes traitorous Ginni’s husband, Clarence. Why media is not reporting on the level of scandal involved here remains speculation (to some, at least). Most simply treat it like Democrat caterwauling rather than the true corruption it is.

Like Thomas, other appointees have done the bidding either of Trump or their Federalist Society overlords. On that contemptible organization I wrote:

Leonard Leo is the FedSoc’s vice-president. His relationship with one SCOTUS Justice, Clarence Thomas, has fallen beneath watchful eyes for conduct that looks suspiciously close to bribery. The DC Attorney General currently has him under investigation for undisclosed alleged crimes likely related to that. In the speculation among some, the FedSoc “launders” money put forth to promote the anointing of its chosen Supreme Court candidates, ostensibly to prevent revealing the endorser of the check.

All the so-called conservatives currently on the SCOTUS are members. And all resort to twisted legal reasoning (if you deign to give it even that much credit) to reach their pre-ordained conclusions. A prime example is the Dobbs case on abortion. Whatever one might think of abortion, there is no escaping the sheer illogic and misogyny of the majority opinion. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had this to say about it:

Prior to Dobbs, the right to abortion articulated in Roe protected women from unduly burdensome interference with the freedom to make their own decisions… Now that this federal floor has been demolished, states have a fresh opportunity to resolve with renewed vigor claims of equality and reproductive autonomy that are untethered to any possible limitations imposed by the federal constitution… Although federal jurisprudence has done little to recognize reproductive autonomy as an issue of equality, it is apparent that equality is illusory without the ability to control one’s body, including one’s reproductive decisions.

In his concurrence, Pennsylvania Justice David Wecht judicially demolished the Dobbs decision with even more ferocity:

Whatever one thinks about the role of history and tradition in affording rights to women under the United States Constitution, the Pennsylvania Constitution’s ERA did away with the antiquated and misogynistic notion that a woman has no say over what happens to her own body [emphasis added].

As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain, Wecht overtly “condemned Alito’s error-ridden analysis.” In essence, the majority of that state court called the SCOTUS opinion a lesson in misogyny and tortured historical analysis to reach an otherwise untenable ‘legal’ conclusion. Trump has repeatedly taken credit for “terminating” abortion protections.

The current SCOTUS justices’ legal feebleness was evident again just a day or so before writing this. During oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude Trump from the ballot because he committed insurrection, the Justices exhibited cowardly and incurious behavior. As a note, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the evidence supported a finding that Trump committed an insurrection as a matter of law. Returning to the feckless Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts offered this deeply intellectual query, “We will be deciding whether there was an insurrection when one president did something, as opposed to when somebody else did something else. So what do we do?” Trump-appointed Brett Kavanaugh tried to claim that no state had removed someone from the ballot for 155 years, suggesting the law was settled that only Congress could do so. Regardless that Kavanaugh did not see the irony in his role in unsettling abortion law of 50 years, the Solicitor General shut him up on the unmerited point, “No, Justice Kavanaugh. The reason why it’s been dormant is because by 1876, essentially all the confederates had received amnesty. And we haven’t seen anything like an insurrection since then.” Alito tried to insert his own nugget of wisdom in response to that. “I don’t know how much we can infer from the fact that we haven’t seen anything like this before, and therefore conclude that we’re not going to see something in the future.” Whatever the hell that means.

These justices neither seem to understand the laws over which they rule, or those which are supposed to rule over them. The entire ‘right-wing’ side of the Court is beset with corruption allegations, illegitimate court rulings, and other embarrassing behavior. Trump’s addition to this now entirely illegitimate enterprise has only worsened it by spades. And his appointments to the appellate division below the SCOTUS have not behaved much better in far too many cases, including one who is overseeing Trump’s own criminal case in Florida—a corruption scandal of epic proportions.

Aileen Cannon

Aileen Cannon is a federal judge in the Central District of Florida who happens to be presiding over the case in which the government has credibly accused Trump of stealing national secrets and engaging in a conspiracy to avoid returning them. Trump nominated her to the position in November of 2020. A generous view of her handling of the case so far would characterize it as incompetent. The more realistic view, however, is that her behavior is corrupt. For example, early in the case, Cannon ordered a special master to review materials seized by the FBI for potential attorney-client and executive privilege in the case. For the ‘two-tiered’ justice people, this order comprised exactly that. No court anywhere would issue such a ruling as it imposed an order in direct contrast with law and precedent. And the 11^th Circuit minced no words in pointing that out. Employing classic judicial eloquence, the court brutally slapped Cannon down:

Plaintiff [Trump] does not and could not assert that he owns or has any possessory interest in classified records; that he has any right to have those government records returned to him; or that he can advance any plausible claims of attorney-client privilege as to such records that would bar the government from reviewing or using them…

[Cannon’s] rationale is categorically inapplicable to the classified records at issue in this motion, which are easily identifiable by their markings, are already segregated from the other seized records, and do not include personal records or potentially privileged communications with his personal attorneys.

[Cannon’s reasoning] is categorically inapplicable to classified records because Plaintiff has no legal right to have those records returned to him. Such records clearly belong in government custody and, as a matter of national security, must be fully accessible to the Executive Branch.

Since then, Cannon has issued numerous orders or other directives that legal experts state do not comport with any law or precedential practice. Most recently, for example, Cannon granted a request from Trump’s lawyers asking to reveal the identity of certain witnesses in the classified documents case. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team responded, noting that the court applied the wrong legal standard, leading to a “clear error” and that “reconsideration is warranted to ‘prevent manifest injustice.’” Many believe that this latest misstep represents just another piece of evidence indicating Cannon only seeks to protect Trump. Whether corrupt or amateurish, Cannon clearly is unfit for the role; get rid of her from the bench, not just the case. As this latest order objectively puts witnesses at risk of physical harm, should Cannon fail to reconsider, many believe this will prompt Smith to make a motion for her removal.

Sabotaging the United States Postal Service

As part of his plan to unlawfully win the 2020 election Donald Trump engaged in a campaign to sabotage the United States Postal Service to prevent absentee and mail-in votes. He already possessed considerable leverage to do so because when he became President, he inherited a USPS with no board of governors—the body slated with overseeing the service. This was unprecedented, and caused by a Republican party infuriated over Bernie Sanders’ decision to block two Obama appointees who were decidedly anti-union; in retaliation the party blocked the remaining appointees. In any case, Trump’s motivations for ‘reforming’ the USPS became clear with a tweet on April 8, 2020, when he wrote “state wide mail-in voting… [leads to] tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” This is a part of the repeated “Big Lie” that has been so widely debunked that it remains mindboggling that anyone is foolish enough to still believe it. Furthermore, there is no evidence that mail-in voting benefits one party over the other. Over the next few weeks, Trump refused to sign any bill that granted any additional funding to the USPS that did not come in the form of a loan. In the midst of the rising chaos, David C. Williams resigned from the board of governors. Williams had held the seat as a holdover since 2019 because many seats remained unfilled. Many were shocked by his departure as not only was he appointed by Trump, but he also served as the USPS Inspector General from 2006 to 2013, and was among the most experience board members at that time.

In May of 2020, the Trump-appointed board chose Louis DeJoy as the next Postmaster General. DeJoy had no experience working for the USPS, but, curiously, he was a major GOP donor. Meanwhile, Trump continued tweeting and otherwise claiming that mail-in voting will lead to fraud. As the tumult continued, numerous conflicts of interest came to light regarding DeJoy. Senate Democrats asked the USPS Inspector General to investigate. They wrote:

[T]he mail system is being undercut in ways set in motion by Mr. Trump. Fueled by animus for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and surrounded by advisers who have long called for privatizing the post office, Mr. Trump and his appointees have begun taking cost-cutting steps that appear to have led to slower and less reliable delivery.

Among his conflicts, DeJoy held $30 million in stock in a competitor of the USPS, and his wife held nearly $45 million of her own conflicting stock. Some of DeJoy’s actions were clearly designed to benefit USPS competitors and Trump or the Republican party. For example, he has raised the price of USPS products multiple times. He plans to consolidate multiple postal centers, which many believe will slow the delivery of the mail and will cost hundreds of jobs. Certain postal employees had reported that DeJoy also “urged” them to attend Republican campaign events, offering them “bonuses” in their USPS pay to compensate them.

Trump explicitly stated that he did not want the USPS to function properly because he felt he would likely lose the coming election from mail-in votes. He told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo:

They need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped.

In August of 2020, media reported that DeJoy wanted to decommission 20% of the sorting capacity of the USPS. Many viewed this as an effort to thwart mail-in voting. As a result of the blowback from this announcement, DeJoy walked it back: “To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded.” Nevertheless, Democrats did not believe this sufficiently reversed actions DeJoy already had taken. As the election approached, some postal workers were slandered by provocateurs such as James O’Keefe, the former head of Project Veritas, a sham organization that spread a litany of lies and conspiracies about the 2020 election. Slowdowns that did happen during the time around the election occurred, under no coincidence, almost exclusively in swing states.

After all of this chaos, DeJoy remains in the position of Postmaster General because federal law prohibits Biden from firing him. And DeJoy continues his campaign of damaging the USPS. As the Pennsylvania Postal Workers Union president Mike Stephenson characterized DeJoy’s activities, “It’s one more process in the 10-year plan that DeJoy put in when Trump appointed him to destroy the postal service.” Tragically, the current board of governors have not yet removed this corrupt stooge.

The Corruption of the Agriculture Department

In 2017, Trump appointed Sonny Purdue to Secretary of Agriculture. Purdue served as governor of Georgia from 2003 to 2011 where he regularly fought climate-related regulations, and responded to environmental disasters with useless prayer vigils. He also received 13 ethics complaints while governor, two of which led to findings that he had improperly taken campaign contributions. Perhaps poetically, the irredeemably corrupt Clarence Thomas swore Purdue in as Secretary. Purdue displayed his corrupt colors weeks after his appointment, hiring 22 former Trump campaign workers to the Department of Agriculture who had no credentials for the jobs whatsoever.

Purdue sought to suppress scientific research coming from the Department. To initiate that plan, he moved the two primary research arms from Washington DC to Kansas City. As Ben Guarino wrote in the Washington Post, the move heralded “the Brain Drain we all feared.” His words were spot-on: 151 of 224 scientific employees left the agency rather than move across the country. Some of the staff lost were experts on school meals, SNAP, and food security. Susan Offutt, a former ERS administrator and former chief economist of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, stated that the move “dismisses all the other people in the country who look to ERS for research that's not directly on farmers and farm welfare, and that includes food assistance.” Rebecca Boehm, a food and environment economist with the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Pacific Standard that the relocation seemed intended to “suppress findings that don't align with the Trump administration's own attack on public benefit programs.”

Following the usual trend of corruption during Trump’s failed administration, it was learned years after his appointment that Purdue’s company purchased millions of dollars’ worth of property from Archer-Daniels-Midland, a company regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Purdue’s company paid just $250,000. Of course, Purdue never disclosed the deal, leading some to call for his resignation. In the usual fashion of corrupt Trump officials, Purdue petulantly responded, “Wilbur Ross got caught using bookkeeping chicanery to 'lose' more than $2 billion in assets. Questions were prompted by all of this, and yet, Mnuchin and Ross and the rest of them were all confirmed. So the prompted questions were just so much afternoon breeze. We continue.” In other words, fuck off.

The Railroad Safety Exemption

I discussed this in a previous article:

The Association of American Railroads reports the train accident rate in the United States as down by 31% since 2000. Nonetheless, there were 1,573 rail-related accidents in 2022 alone (this number reflects all types of accidents, not specifically derailments). The total amount of hazardous materials shipped by rail in 2017 (the most recent official figure I could find) was 90.4 million tons. Undoubtedly, that number increases year-to-year, particularly as plastics production is exploding due to its use in the fossil fuel industry. Many of the raw materials used to produce plastic are hazardous, including vinyl chloride. At the same time as the production and transport of hazardous materials grows, rail organizations continue to lobby the federal government to reduce hazard classifications and regulations. The accident train in [East Palestine] Ohio is one such example of a dangerous cargo that was exempted from “high-hazard” classification resultant from this lobbying. Not only did the government exempt many hazardous chemicals from heightened classification, but in 2018 the US Department of Transportation rolled back regulations on enhanced brake systems used by trains hauling certain “hazardous flammable commodities.” According to the Lever, the accident train in Ohio was not equipped with enhanced braking systems. The braking systems on trains without enhanced braking have been described as “Civil War era” technology. Security footage of the incident strongly suggests that a mechanical issue in the under carriage of at least one car may have caused the incident. The footage was taken 20 miles before the incident. Railcars are equipped with systems to alert operators that a problem exists, but here it is unclear if an alert triggered at all, and if it did what the operators did in response.

In 2024, Trump visited East Palestine, ground zero of a massive, poisonous railroad disaster. He pledged to donate bottled water. Oddly, he would not answer questions about the rollback of regulations on the railroad industry that occurred during his administration claiming he had “nothing to do with it.” While there remains some argument about whether the rollback contributed to the East Palestine incident specifically, the number of disasters that can directly be correlated to the rollback are undeniable. Regarding Trump’s denial of involvement, now-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg made a salient point:

I heard him say he had ‘nothing to do with it’ even though it was in his administration. So, if he had nothing to do with it and they did it in his administration against his will, maybe he could come out and say that he supports us moving in a different direction.

A report from the Department of Transportation (DOT) under Trump made the argument that the rule on enhanced breaking for trains “was not economically justified.” Yet, that same report left out $117 million in damages from derailments that rescinding the rule was expected to cause. The DOT later acknowledged that figure and called its omission a “mistake.” The AP further noted:

Under Obama, the Transportation Department determined the brakes would cost up to $664 million over 20 years and save between $470 million and $1.1 billion from accidents that would be avoided.

The Trump administration reduced the range of benefits to between $131 million and $374 million.

Transportation Department economists said in their analysis that the change was prompted in part by a reduction in oil train traffic in recent years. Even as ethanol shipments on U.S. railroads have continued to grow, reaching about 500,000 carloads annually, crude shipments peaked in 2014 and fell to about 200,000 carloads last year.

But in making their cost-benefit calculations, government economists left out the most common type of derailments in which spilled and burning fuel causes property damage but no mass casualties, the AP found. Equipping fuel trains with electronic brakes would reduce damages from those derailments by an estimated $48 million to $117 million, according to Department of Transportation estimates that were left out of the administration’s final tally.

The people of East Palestine and the many other communities suffering ecological disasters probably do not care to quibble over whether the enhanced brake requirement costs the industry a few dozen or even a few hundred million in extra costs. Even if this raised the cost of goods, the net result would be a public benefit because the railroad companies involved in incidents do everything in their power to avoid liability or damages—and the law is largely on their side.

Obstructing Relief for defrauded students

Among the seemingly endless list of corrupt appointments in the Trump administration was Betsy DeVos. Trump appointed her as Secretary of Education in 2017. DeVos was a billionaire who opposed limits on campaign contributions and readily admitted why—she likes bribing politicians. She wrote:

My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right… We expect a return on our investment. [emphasis added]

It seems unnecessary to even talk about this bribing shill any further. Her words speak for who she is. Nevertheless, her bribery paid off. Despite being completely unqualified, she was confirmed. During her confirmation hearings, she provided some insight into her quizzical apprehension. For instance, she said that in Wyoming, guns should be allowed in schools to “protect [children] from potential grizzlies.” She also would not answer whether her office would cutoff funding to schools that discriminate (cutting off funding is required by law if no remediation takes place).

DeVos immediately began leveraging the Department of Education toward business interests, screwing the people the Department is supposed to protect. One of her first moves involved obliterating the team that investigated fraud by for-profit colleges established under the Obama administration. For-profit colleges accounted for 98% of all fraud during the time leading up to and during DeVos’s tenure. Furthermore, she suspended two federal regulations that provide protections for students duped into taking loans to pay for what ended up being worthless degrees. Trump himself paid $25 million in a settlement for running just this kind of scam ‘university.’ Indeed, fraudulent colleges saw an opportunity—fraud claims rose by 29% after DeVos gutted these programs and investigations. When questioned about why she rescinded efforts to curtail this kind of fraud, DeVos dismissively answered that “students should go into higher education with their eyes wide open.”

DeVos engaged in other activities that have no place in a federal government department. She tried to fund religious education institutions with public money, she tried to eliminate funding for after-school programs, sought to end the Special Olympics, and a court held her in contempt for forcing the Department of Education to continue to collect money from students that a court already ruled had been defrauded. This woman resigned supposedly because of Trump’s incitement on January 6. Stanley Litow, professor of public policy, stated the real answer was probably DeVos’ disastrous handling of education during COVID. Dustin Hornbeck, postdoctoral research fellow of educational leadership and policy, University of Texas at Arlington, pointed to her rollback of policies meant to protect and help students who became victims of sexual assault. DeVos faced withering criticism for doing so. Whichever was the real reason, her departure was a welcome change to students across the US.

Trump’s presidency was beset by corruption and grifting. The above provides just a few examples, but if I were to continue on the subject, this article could be turned into a book. In any case, for more on the corruption of Cabinet and other officials during that disgraceful tenure, see here for a detailed breakdown of all the turnover, which was the highest since at least the Reagan era. See here for the legacy of corruption that still plagues many of those departments. See here for how many of them have faced criminal charges. Trump hired the antitheses of the “best people.”

The Ugly

COVID

Many like to argue that no one could have navigated the COVID pandemic well. They may be right. Nonetheless, one can easily tell when the handling of it went all wrong. Trump set his administration up to fail before the pandemic even started when he destroyed the executive branch team chartered with coordinating a response to a pandemic. Months before the pandemic broke out, in July 2019, a disease expert from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) left her position. Her job was to train Chinese epidemiologists in detecting and containing disease outbreaks. She left because the Trump administration planned to cut off funding for the position in September of that year. When she left, the administration never filled the role. Already to that point, the administration had reduced staff there by more than two-thirds. The CDC trainer was the last remaining employee. One expert later told Reuters, “You have to consider the possibility that our drawdown made this catastrophe more likely or more difficult to respond to.”

Trump’s preference for favoring business over society resulted in more than 2.3 million people losing their health insurance between 2016 and 2019. His gutting of pandemic watchers and responders, and his destruction of public health tools created the perfect storm for a catastrophe when COVID hit. His public dismissals of the dangerousness of the pandemic in the early days fostered an environment already suited for disaster. Trump’s treatment of the people best equipped to minimize the negative effects of a pandemic only worsened everything.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that Trump grew angry at her on February 25, 2020, when she made a public statement warning people about the impending danger wrought by the coronavirus. Numerous other officials complained that the administration repeatedly forbade them from advising the public to take precautionary measures. Rick Bright, who headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed a lawsuit against his bosses for demoting him when he pointed out “misguided” decisions made by political appointees that contradicted responsible public health measures. Nicole Lurie, who oversaw BARDA during the Obama administration, said that Bright “was one of the very early people to tell the American people what was going on.”

The Lancet Commission, comprised of doctors and researchers specializing in virology and other disease-related fields, published a report in 2021 that indicated that 40% of US COVID-related deaths could have been avoided with better government policy and handling. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer for the Boston Children's Hospital and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Medical School, who did not participate in the production of the report, said of its conclusions, “If the country acted appropriately and had a health care system that was fair and equal, no doubt that we would have been in a better position.” On Trump specifically, the report stated “Instead of galvanizing the U.S. populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat [despite privately acknowledging it], discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation.”

To cover up this bungling, Trump political appointees with no medical expertise whatsoever ordered staff to destroy evidence of their interference with CDC operations. Some of this evidence included emails in which communications officials sought to change the CDC’s weekly COVID reports to downplay the effects. Other officials testified that they were told to stop producing reports altogether, suggesting that the reports would “make Trump look bad.” This was in spite of the fact that Trump knew the virus was “deadly stuff,” something he said to reporter Bob Woodward, on tape. Trump’s public commentary sounded quite different:

February 10, 2020 - I think the virus is going to be—it’s going to be fine.

February 24, 2020 - The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… the Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

February 26, 2020 - The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.

March 4, 2020 - Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it's very mild.

March 11, 2020 - The vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low.

April 7, 2020 - So, you know, things are happening. It's a -- it's -- I haven't seen bad. I've not seen bad.

April 23, 2020 - I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.

April 29, 2020 - It’s gonna go away, this is going to go away.

May 8, 2020 - This is going to go away without a vaccine. It is going to go away.  We are not going to see it again.

May 19, 2020 - When we have a lot of cases, I don't look at that as a bad thing, I look at that as, in a certain respect, as being a good thing...Because it means our testing is much better. I view it as a badge of honor, really, it's a badge of honor.

June 17, 2020 - It’s fading away. It’s going to fade away.

You get the point. The death toll is currently at 1,196,479. At least 424,401 of those deaths occurred during the Trump administration. But Trump’s idiocy continues to kill people well after his losing the 2020 election. During the middle of the pandemic, Trump had continued to rail against routine measures to stop the spread of disease, such as masking. His party persisted in spreading vaccine misinformation and lies. Trump touted the efficacy of the vaccines on more than one occasion, but also railed against mandates. As a result of his decidedly mixed messages and the anti-vax stance of his party, from March 2020 to December 2021, registered Republicans suffered a 76% higher death rate than Democrats in Ohio and Florida. Some are inclined to say, good. But these are also human fucking beings; however foolish. Another study noted that counties that Trump won in 2020 also saw greatly elevated death rates than the rest of the population. The political divide and its resultant death rates widened further as the vaccines became more readily available. Republicans paid for their tribal party allegiance with their lives.

On televised Trump rallies, they are still advertising bullshit like Ivermectin. This aired on 2/15/24. Source: David Pakman Show.

The Environment

Trump once said:

From day one, my administration has made it a top priority to ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet. We want the cleanest air, we want crystal clean water, and that’s what we’re doing and what we’re working on so hard.

As so often occurs with Trump, what he says in no way reflects reality. After a continuous decline of CO₂ emissions during the Obama administration, in 2018 the rates quickly accelerated. From 2017 to 2019, bad air quality days across the US increased by 15%. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, stated “Donald Trump is the worst president in U.S. history for protecting the air and our climate.” The Brookings Institute found 74 actions taken by the Trump administration that weakened environmental protection. Key among these was his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The Biden administration has reversed nearly all of these. Here is how Brookings summarized it:

The Trump administration replaced the [Obama era] Clean Power Plan with a weaker regulation and is in the process of eliminating other regulations that limit GHG emissions. Since CO₂ is considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, the Trump administration had to provide a replacement for the Clean Power Plan. The Affordable Clean Energy Rule in place today, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, will only result in a 1% reduction in GHG emissions from power plants, compared to no policy at all. Fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks have also taken a hit; transportation is the largest source of U.S. GHG emissions. For model years 2021 through 2026, fuel economy must increase by 1.5% a year, a change from the previous rule that mandated improvements of 5% per year. The change also took away California’s ability to set its own fuel economy rules, an ability it has had since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970. Finally, the Trump administration has weakened rules limiting venting or flaring of methane from oil and gas production on public lands and requiring reporting of methane emissions from most oil and gas production. Methane is a greenhouse gas more potent than CO₂, although it has a shorter lifespan in the environment.

The evidence suggests if he is reelected, Trump will make it worse. For instance, he has called for dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). His allies and campaign have stated Trump wants to:

• scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions;

• compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants;

• symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty.

Trump has called renewable energies a scam. Of course, that is complete hogwash. The following countries produce this percentage of their national energy from renewable resources: Sweden 60%; Italy 32%; Spain more than 43%; the UK 40%; Japan approaching 38%; Brazil 83%; Germany 57.7%; China 49.9%. The United States: 13.

Trump wants to open the Arctic for drilling. I have written in detail about the catastrophic effect climate change is imposing upon the Arctic, again and again. The motivation to open drilling there is financial; American oil production already exceeds any point during the Trump administration, and that is in spite of the fact that Biden has ended drilling there during his term. Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, described Trump’s plan as “horrific.” He added further, “It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything.”

In short, Trump harbors zero concern over the environment. He spews a lot of bullshit about it, but he acted and proposes to act in direct contrast to his statements, and to exacerbate an already dangerous situation.

The Unforgiveable

For the moment, anyway, it appears that Trump will be the Republican candidate. Among the electorate, a not-small-enough contingent seems happy with this. Frankly, it is a distasteful testament to the morality of the American people. Trump is not just a bad candidate or terrible former President; he is also a criminal. He is the kind of person that ten or fifteen years ago Americans would have universally despised. The evidence of his criminality thoroughly quashes any arguments supporting the idea that this is all a ‘political persecution’ against him.

Criminality

Trump’s very long history of criminality makes outlining it a unique challenge. To organize it, let’s begin with his current criminal charges. From there, we will move to his numerous other offenses that would have landed any regular (i.e. not-rich) person in prison.

The New York State Indictment

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has charged Trump with 34 criminal counts. These all charge him with falsifying business records, each a felony. “A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” The indictment accuses Trump of falsifying 34 different records to conceal “damaging information” to win the 2016 presidential election. Through a scheme with David Pecker, then-chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., which owns the National Enquirer, Trump made various payments to “catch and kill” stories about him purportedly having a child out of wedlock, having sex with a porn star, and having sex with a Playboy model while married. To hide the payments, Trump or his associates set up a shell company to secretly move money to pay various potential whistleblowers to keep quiet.

When attorneys for Pecker advised against this plan, Trump turned to his former lawyer and now-convicted felon Michael Cohen to arrange the payments. Cohen then opened his own shell company and an associated bank account, transferred money from his own home equity account, and then sent that money to a lawyer of one of Trump’s accusers. For one of the other accusers, it is unclear when that person was paid, but the accuser did sign a nondisclosure agreement with Pecker’s company AMI. The company released the witness from the agreement as soon as Trump won the election, which tends to prove the whole scheme was to further Trump’s election chances. Also after the election, Trump advised another now-felon Allen Weisselberg to compensate Cohen. Cohen then received $420,000 over 12 months. During those 12 months, Cohen sent monthly invoices to the Trump Organization for “legal services rendered.” Payments to him came from Trump’s trust and his personal account.

Later, when federal agents arrested Cohen, an unnamed lawyer offered to represent Cohen and maintain a “back channel” with Trump. That lawyer also emailed news clips to Cohen encouraging him not to cooperate with law enforcement. Cohen ignored him and later pled guilty to federal charges for his conduct related to the payoffs; he served nearly 3 years in prison. The federal criminal information against Cohen all but named Donald Trump as a co-conspirator (“Individual 1”). Cohen later publicly confirmed Individual 1 was indeed Trump. Pecker and Cohen testified before a state grand jury months later. Bob Costello, an attorney and friend of Trump, went all over national tv accusing Cohen of being a liar and cheater, which arguably constitutes witness intimidation. Yet, Costello also testified in front of the grand jury. On March 30, 2023, the grand jury handed down an indictment of Trump. On April 4, Trump pled not guilty. On April 12, someone sent a threatening letter with white powder in it to the prosecuting DA’s office. Over the next few months, Trump’s legal team submitted numerous motions to move or dismiss the case, all of which were denied having no legal merit.

Falsifying Business Records cases are usually pretty strong because everything is on paper. They are what we used to refer to when I was in law enforcement as “historical” paper cases. The hardest part of securing a conviction on these charges is proving the predicate, but uncharged, crime that necessarily attaches. Unfortunately for Trump, Michael Cohen pled guilty to one possible predicate crime—violating campaign finance laws. Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former Manhattan chief assistant D.A., wrote in the New York Times, “there's nothing novel or weak about this case.” She and her co-writer Norman Eisen added that these kinds of cases are charged all the time in New York courts.

Others have questioned the strength of charging this crime using a federal crime as a predicate. In People v. Sylvestre, the 2^nd Department Appellate Court in New York noted that Penal Law § 175.10 requires a “strict equivalency between the federal statute” and a New York crime to charge Falsifying Business Records in the 1^st degree. Another 2^nd Department decision further clarified that the predicate federal crime must “include all the essential elements equivalent to those of a New York felony.” In other words, there is nothing specifically preventing charging this based on the commission of a federal felony, so long as it aligns with a NY felony. No one has yet concretely identified the predicate crime on which the Manhattan DA will try his case, though some have speculated that it might be New York Election Law § 17-152 or § 17-168, or possibly a tax crime. We shall see.

The trial date is currently set for March 25. If convicted, Trump will be a first-time felon and will probably not receive any jail time for these offenses.

The State of Georgia Indictment

What is interesting about the case in Fulton County, Georgia, is that it is one of only two criminal cases directly accusing Trump of election subversion (the Manhattan DA’s case argues that election subversion was the motive, so maybe that counts). Among the charges, the key one is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which essentially claims that Trump engaged in a wider conspiracy to commit the other crimes in the indictment and illegally subvert the election in Georgia. Those other crimes include solicitation of oath by public officer, conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit false statements and writings, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, and filing false documents. Conviction on the RICO charge carries steep penalties in Georgia and is easier to prove than federal RICO charges, according to Kenneth White, a defense attorney familiar with the federal law. Fifteen defendants, Trump among them, face Rico and any number of the other charges. In Georgia, a conviction on the RICO charge carries a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20 years in jail.

Late last fall, several of these defendants began taking plea deals (there were 19 defendants before the pleas). Three of the notable deals involved Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis. All were given slaps on the wrist, suggesting they may testify against the former president (Chesebro seems to have already been called to testify in Michigan). Trump so far has shown an intent to fight to the very end. His lawyers, and some of the lawyers for the other defendants, have filed at least four motions to disqualify DA Fani Willis based on entirely specious claims. In response to these, the DA’s office wrote, “The motions [to disqualify] are based on guesswork and public relations strategy, not legal argument.”

The charges in the Georgia case are very strong, which is why Trump and company are trying so hard to win on technicalities. I laid out in detail what happened in the Michigan and Nevada cases, which consisted of similar conduct, so here I will only summarize Trump’s role. This case began with a nationally televised speech Trump gave on November 4, 2020, wherein he falsely declared victory in the presidential election. Immediately following, Trump and his cronies endeavored to establish false electors in multiple states. This included a phone call on November 20 with Trump, Giuliani, and Republicans from Michigan during which Trump and Giuliani tried to convince the reps to overturn the Michigan election results. The next day, Mark Meadows sent a text to US Representative Scott Perry in Pennsylvania telling him Trump wanted to speak with him. On November 22, Trump and Giuliani called Rusty Bowers of the Arizona House of Representatives requesting that he appoint separate electors there. Three days later, Giuliani and Jenna Ellis visited Pennsylvania to make the same request of Pennsylvania representatives. Trump joined that meeting by phone. After the meeting, Trump invited those legislators to the White House.

Over the next several weeks, Trump and his team made repeated calls or visits to state houses to round up participants in each of the swing states, Georgia among them. What they sought was for these people to meet and cast votes for Trump, irrespective of the public vote count, so that they could submit their “alternate slates” to the Vice President whose job it is to open and count presidential votes. In Georgia specifically, much of the conduct Trump and others engaged in by itself violated the law there. As the indictment states:

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.

Over 84 pages or so, the indictment details the myriad actors’ criminal conduct. These conspirators solicited state representatives and senators to commit crimes (which those people largely refused to do), they asked the governor and secretary of state to find enough votes to overturn the election result, and they repeatedly harassed or attempted to coerce several witnesses. One of those witnesses, Ruby Freeman, an election worker in Fulton County, sued and won a defamation case against Giuliani for which he now owes her $150 million. In addition, certain defendants stole and then illegally copied election machine data from Coffey County election offices. Much of this was done by or under the direction of Trump, and all of it toward unlawfully overturning the election. In a RICO case in Georgia, no individual participant needs to know all the activities of the others. This goes for Trump as well. As the Georgia Court of Appeals noted:

None of the provisions of the RICO Act… requires that each defendant in an enterprise have full knowledge of all facets and elements of the enterprise and all its members or actors. An "enterprise" is not a criminal act in itself; it is a description of the entities involved in the RICO violations, and may include entities involved in illicit as well as licit activities.

The Georgia Court further averred that it is the pattern of illicit activities that matter; conducting occasional lawful acts in between provides no defense but can offer further evidence of the illegal intent. Given the volume of publicly available evidence on this case, absent a victory on a technicality or some form of illicit abuse, Trump almost certainly will be convicted.

The Florida Federal Indictment

A federal grand jury returned an indictment on June 8, 2023, accusing Donald Trump and Waltine Nauta of willfully withholding national defense information, conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements—all felonies. In this case, the federal government claims that Trump took with him when he left office numerous classified documents for which he had no authority to possess or retain. When the federal government tried repeatedly to get Trump to return them and he refused, the Department of Justice issued a subpoena. Trump and Nauta then took steps to frustrate that subpoena by falsely representing that they did not have any documents responsive to the subpoena. He directed Nauta to hide certain classified documents in boxes to prevent Trump’s attorney from turning them over, and he caused his attorney to file a false certification that all responsive documents had in fact been turned over. Eventually, the FBI executed a search warrant and recovered 18 government documents marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential.

During the time Trump illegally maintained these documents at his home in Florida—Mar-a-Lago—thousands of guests and hundreds of workers passed through the premises. Many of the documents were stored in places easily accessible to any of these people. Security did not track the identities of most of these visitors. Spy agencies alerted the government of the presence of numerous foreign intelligence agents visiting the property. In some cases, Trump actively showed certain people content in some of the classified documents. For example, he had this exchange with an unnamed person:

Trump: Well, with [the Senior Military Official]—uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack [Country A]. Isn’t it amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this—this is off the record, but—they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.

Guest: Wow.

Trump and Nauta went to great lengths to keep the information secret and hidden from authorities. One time after receiving the subpoena Trump asked his attorney “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” The attorney advised him that this was not a good idea. Sometime after that, Trump told Nauta to remove 64 of the boxes of documents and put them in Trump’s personal residence. Later, when Trump’s attorney told him he was coming to review the boxes for responsive documents, Trump had Nauta move another 30 to a different location to conceal them.

A few weeks after handing down the first indictment, the grand jury issued a superseding indictment. This simply meant new charges for Trump and Nauta, as well as a new defendant—Carlos De Oliveira. Charges added there were for destroying or attempting to destroy evidence, namely CCTV footage at Mar-a-Lago that showed defendants’ efforts to hide the boxes of classified materials. Clearly, Trump did not want the government taking back the documents. At least 18 of the documents eventually recovered were rated as top secret, and contained information about enemy military and nuclear capabilities, military attacks, regional military activity of an unnamed country, and so forth. Not the kind of information one should leave in a very unsecured social club.

This case remains in limbo as the Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, appears intent on corruptly sabotaging the proceedings. Former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, and longtime Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe believe that Cannon is “laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial—until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election.” They noted further, “it’s difficult to imagine that anything that deserves to be called justice will emerge from a criminal proceeding over which Cannon presides in which the fate of her benefactor, and thus her own career, is at stake.” They make a salient point; the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals has already overturned two of her previous rulings on the case. In a scathing ruling in September of 2022, the Court first exhibited shock that Trump’s team would argue that Trump possessed “an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings.” Then it went on to excoriate Cannon for even entertaining any of Trump’s ridiculous arguments, laying out one-by-one the patent flaws in her reasoning. As Mitchell Epner wrote of the overturning of Cannon’s court:

In my more than 25 years of practice as a criminal and civil litigator (including three years as an assistant U.S. Attorney), I do not believe that I have read an appellate decision that was more dismissive of the lower court. The 11th Circuit sent a clear message to Judge Cannon and Trump: stop doing this.

Despite this and another instance in which Cannon was overturned, she seems intent on staying her corrupt course. As Ben Meiselas recently put it:

Judge Cannon was, unfortunately, randomly assigned the criminal case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the district court in Florida where Cannon sits, which is in the Southern District of Florida where Mar-A-Lago, the scene of the crime, is located. Already, Cannon has erroneously struck multiple under seal (confidential) filings lodged by Special Counsel Jack Smith, which were correctly filed under seal because the information involves grand jury secrecy in a case involving the theft of classified information.

Also, one day after a segment aired on Fox baselessly criticizing the continued use of a grand jury in Washington DC by Jack Smith following charges being filed in Florida against Trump, Judge Cannon asked the parties to brief the ‘propriety’ of the DC grand jury and seemingly adopting the ex parte arguments of Fox.

Most recently, Judge Cannon scheduled a hearing on a protective order for classified documents in her courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida for August 25. There was only one problem. A glaring one. Under the Classified Information Protections Act (CIPA), that hearing has to take place under seal. Yup, “under seal” like the documents Jack Smith keeps filing that she keeps striking. Judge Cannon scheduled the CIPA hearing as public hearing. She messed up.

Rather than admit her mistake, on Thursday, Judge Aileen Cannon issued a minute order for a revised scheduling of the protective order hearing, arrogantly pretending that was her intent all along when it’s obvious she screwed up and had to learn what CIPA is and what it requires.

Meiselas thinks all of this misconduct or incompetence will eventually lead to a successful recusal motion, but it will take a long time to get to that point. Absent further corruption of the proceedings, Trump and his co-defendants will almost certainly be convicted.

The Washington DC Federal Indictment

In August of 2023, a grand jury in Washington DC handed down an indictment for his attempt to defraud the United States by attempting to steal the 2020 election. In 45 pages, it lays out the vast conspiracy Trump engaged in to try and install false electors and other conduct very similar to that articulated in the Georgia indictment. In addition, he is charged here with conspiracy to obstruct the vote count on January 6, and conspiracy against rights.

Much of what the DC indictment asserts is covered above, but this last charge is interesting because many legal experts found it rather surprising. According to the Department of Justice, the law prohibits a conspiracy to “injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory, or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or the laws of the US.” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor told Business Insider that this count is rarely charged in that it mostly targeted Civil War-era “folks in the South trying to disenfranchise Black voters.” Nevertheless, the Supreme Court made clear in 1966, that the statute contains broad language proscribing any of the above activities meant to inhibit the free exercise of any “rights and privileges secured to citizens by all of the Constitution and all of the laws of the United States.”

Aunna Dennis, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause succinctly described the essence of the DC indictment:

Even if you are in the highest seat in the country, that does not mean you can trample or mislead or manipulate the voices of voters and the voices of communities. We are not a fascist society. We are not an authoritarian society here. That’s not how our democracy works.

The punishment for this single charge is up to 10 years in prison. The evidence in this case is also extremely strong; Trump will almost certainly be convicted.

Uncharged Criminality

The above represents only the conduct for which Trump has been criminally charged, but his pattern of criminality extends far into the past. In a previous article, I listed some of that history:

The list of [uncharged criminal] acts is exhausting—if not exhaustive…. Trump’s Chief Financial Officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to a 15-years-long tax scheme, seemingly facilitated or outright engineered by Trump’s company. That plea related to criminal convictions of Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation for 17 different crimes related to tax fraud and others. The Trump Corporation is also accused in a civil suit of falsifying records and manipulating assets to unlawfully obtain loans and other benefits. The Trump Foundation, a self-proclaimed charity, was shut down for fraud and fined $2 million. Trump also settled with the Federal government over housing discrimination against African Americans, paid $25 million in compensation to students scammed by his “university,” paid $10 million for failing to follow regulations meant to deter money laundering, among many others. While it is generally inadmissible in court to use prior bad acts as evidence in a current case, there are exceptions when such acts help to prove “motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.

Since writing that, a court has found Trump liable for rape. A jury awarded the victim E. Jean Carroll $5 million for damages related to the assault and Trump’s subsequent defamation. The latter issue arose from Trump’s repeated public statements that he did not know Carroll, that she invented the story, is “crazy,” and many other things. In his usual style, Trump lashed out again and again after the verdict, accusing the court and Carroll of engaging in a “witch hunt” against him. Carroll has already sued Trump twice—and won both times—for his continuous defamation, and has threatened to do so again if he does not stop. For his second round of defamation, a federal jury ordered him to pay her $83.3 million, $65 million of which encompassed punitive damages—or punishment for his bad behavior.

At the time of this writing, Trump also awaits a decision on his punishment for engaging in an at least decade-long pattern of fraud. The question is not whether Trump committed fraud—the court already found that he did—rather it is what penalty he will suffer for doing so. The New York Attorney General’s Office, my former employer—though I had nothing to do with the investigation or litigation—is asking for a $370 million penalty to recover Trump’s ill-gotten gains. There seems to be a good chance that the judge will hand down this penalty, and may even prevent Trump from ever again doing business in New York—a lethal strike to Trump’s business should that happen. In addition to Trump facing a lifetime ban on doing business in New York, his sons Don Jr. and Eric also face a potential 5-year ban. Trump may also have to disgorge various properties including Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.

Update 2/17/24: The judge in Trump’s civil fraud trial has imposed a penalty of nearly $364 million in total, with about $355 of that Trump’s individual punishment. With interest, the total will rise to near $450 million. The judge wrote, “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.” He added, “Their [Trump and other supporting witnesses] complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.” The order also imposes a three-year ban on Trump running any business in New York, though Trump evaded the most severe penalty—once again. The verdict does not require disgorgement of Trump properties or to surrender operating licenses. Still, while he will certainly appeal, that will cost upwards of $100 million in fees and added interest to the existing penalties while the appeal works its way through the process. Attorney General Tish James stated, “While he may have authored the 'Art of the Deal,' our case revealed that his business was based on the art of the steal.”

Conclusion

Regardless of what one might think about Joe Biden, the comparative record is glaringly clear. Biden’s tenure has seen extraordinary economic growth, taken measures to protect the environment, and passed the first major gun legislation in decades. And all of this was done without any real scandal. The Trump administration, on the other hand, was an unmitigated disaster, and I only covered a small portion of it. Trump now faces 91 criminal charges, some of which involve his attempt to overthrow the United States government and stealing national secrets that has led to some of our informants getting killed, and putting many of our agents at serious risk. Anyone denying that is not being objective about the facts and situation. Even if Trump were not the disdainful twat of a person that he is, and even if he did not commit the litany of crimes that the evidence strongly suggests he did, as a politician he was a clear and present failure. He appointed corrupt fools, who gutted numerous institutions meant to help or protect everyday Americans. Only fragments of legislation to come out of his tenure benefitted regular people. Virtually everything he did helped the wealthy, though. The UMSCA ultimately proved to be inadequate at best, or damaging at worst. That mistake occurred out of Trump’s rigorous attempt to look like the ‘brilliant businessman’ he desperately claims to be, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Vote for who you like. But if the contest comes down to Biden v. Trump, the evidence incontrovertibly points to which candidate will better serve the majority of the American people.

Click below for more detail on the Trump scam to steal the election.

I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history. I spent 10 years working in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice as Senior Analyst and Investigator. Today, I teach Cybersecurity, Ethical Hacking, and Digital Forensics at Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce in Nepal. In addition, I offer training on Financial Crime Prevention and Investigation. I am also Vice President of Digi Technology in Nepal, for which I have also created its sister company in the USA, Digi Technology America, LLC. We provide technology solutions for businesses or individuals, including cybersecurity, all across the globe. I was a firefighter before I joined law enforcement and now I currently run the EALS Global Foundation non-profit that uses mobile applications and other technologies to create Early Alert Systems for natural disasters for people living in remote or poor areas.