"Guilty!"

America lurches toward banana republicanism...

(Photo: Getty Images)

Joel Bowman, surveying the scene from Sanur, Indonesia...

Welcome to another Sunday Sesh, dear reader, that time of the week when we gather at the virtual watering hole and set the world to rights...or at least watch in awe and wonder as it is turned on its head. 

The big story out of the “Land of the Free” this week was the conviction of Orange Man Bad in the Empire State. It would seem the “Rule of Law” has morphed into “Rule by Law.” Here’s establishment bullhorn, Politico, beating up the news:

NEW YORK — Donald Trump was found guilty Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, making him the first former president to become a convicted felon.

The unanimous verdict from the 12-person jury ends a six-week trial in which prosecutors accused Trump of orchestrating an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election.

On the surface, the story has all the juicy ingredients of a daytime telenovela...sex, lies, political scandal, Stormy mushrooms, etc. And just like in a lurid soap opera, all the relevant actors were ready to take their positions under the soft lights and recite their lines. 

Rule By Law

The popular presses, for their part, were on hand to fill in the narrative. Indeed, no sooner was Mr. Trump found guilty when anyone who could hold a pen (and many who demonstrably couldn’t) rushed to file their headline copy...

'This is a bad day for America' - voters split on Trump verdict ~ BBC

Trump and his allies braced for a guilty verdict. Then the bombshell arrived ~ CNN

Trump tries to move past his guilty verdict by attacking the criminal justice system ~ The AP

Yapping bobbleheads likewise took to the air to give their expert analysis and amateur opinions, jostling to lend a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise cheap and tawdry show trial. 

“I felt like America won,” declared #brave host of The View, Sunny Hostin. “I felt like New York won. I felt like the Manhattan DA's office won. I felt like I won.”

Less faux serious was co-host Joy Behar, who admitted, “I got so excited, I started leaking a little bit.” (Apologies to dear readers for that imagery.) 

Even the president himself weighed in, proving that he still has a sense of humor...and irony. 

“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” declared Joe “The Big Guy” Biden, with a straight face. 

Readers will recall that it is Mr. Biden’s own “Justice” Department that is, as we type these words, attempting to imprison Mr. Trump on classified document charges... offenses that are remarkably similar to ones the very same Justice Department believes Mr. Biden himself committed. (Mr. Biden escaped charges after the special counsel reported that the current president is “too cognitively impaired” to prosecute. Hmm… does this count as above or below the law?)

And yet, even as his opponents leaked and salivated over Mr. Trump’s conviction, his supporters rallied to the former president’s aid. In the hours following the verdict, the republican candidate’s campaign announced they had received almost $35 million in small donations, ~$1 million per conviction, more than doubling the previous single day donation record. 

So the show goes on, with bread and circuses for all… 

Banana-fication

But beneath all the gasping headlines lurks a more insidious reality... the ongoing and accelerating “banana-fication” of a once great republic. Long a beacon of truth and freedom around the world (remember “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”?), parts of the United States of America increasingly resemble the very “sh!thole” nations the newly convicted ex-president referred to not so long ago. 

Little surprise, then, that a record low percentage of Americans are satisfied with the way democracy is “working” in the homeland. From Gallup:

(Source: Gallup)

Democracy Sausage

And they have every right to be suspicious, given the bucketload of snouts and sphincters that go into making the daily democracy sausage, of which this latest trial is but one gristly morsel. 

We have no doubt that Mr. Trump is guilty of many things...from moral failings to transgressions of taste, financial shenanigans and dodgy document dealings, high crimes and misdemeanors too. But surely it is what Mr. Trump did while in the Oval Office – like adding $7 trillion dollars to the national debt, the whole Coronavirus Taskforce debacle, including gifting billions in stimmie checks, plus increasing massively the size of the very swamp he promised to drain – that ought to disqualify him from the presidency... not some seedy business with a jilted pornstar from long before he ever held public office.

Between December 2016 and December 2020, Mr. Trump’s administration added 65,000 workers to the federal payroll. Overall spending under Trump’s presidency nearly doubled from the previous (already excessive) administration. Some of that came as a result of the panicked response to The Covid... but spending had already increased by $5.3 trillion before anyone had ever heard of Anthony “The Science” Fauci and his band of criminal Big Pharma insiders.

(Source: @StosselTV)

These and other public disgraces notwithstanding, to believe that last week’s verdict represented a swift carriage of justice would be a triumph of credulity over sanity. Once again, there is a deeper irony here...

Writing in the Washington Post before this week’s verdict, columnist Jason Willick noted:

The linchpin of prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’s closing argument for convicting Donald Trump was that he conspired “to manipulate and defraud the voters” by suppressing damaging allegations of extramarital liaisons. That suppression “could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Steinglass said.

In other words, Trump might not have stolen the office outright, but he gained it illicitly by deceiving the electorate. This soft form of election denial that New York prosecutors teased might be more corrosive than its unhinged bamboo-ballot manifestations because it allows even intelligent and informed people — especially intelligent and informed people — to reject political outcomes they don’t like.

Defraud and Manipulate

Did you get that, dear reader? “Manipulate and defraud voters...” And here, we thought that was the name of the game, the implied goal of pathological political candidates on both sides! 

Was the FBI’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story not designed to “manipulate and defraud voters”? What about the more than 50 former intelligence officials who asserted (wrongfully, as it turned out) that the laptop appeared to be a “Russian disinformation operation”? 

Voters apparently felt so. A survey by New Jersey based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics, revealed that...

• 47 percent of respondents said that had they known before the election that the laptop contents were real and not “disinformation” they would have changed their voting decision—including more than two-thirds (71 percent) of Democrats. 

• Almost 8 of 10 respondents said that a truthful interpretation of the laptop would have likely changed the election’s outcome more in favor of Trump. 

• More than half—51 percent—give the media failing grades (D or F) for their coverage of the topic of the laptop.

Or how about the fact that, in 2022, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign settled a claim with the Federal Election Commission regarding its failure to properly disclose expenses for opposition research that turned up false information about Trump’s Russia ties.

Might this be seen as an effort to “manipulate and defraud voters”?

Just while we’re on The Clintons, we seem to recall one William Jefferson Clinton paying a certain Paula Jones $850,000 to make her sexual harassment lawsuit “go away.” We don’t recall seeing Slick Willie in cuffs...

And yet, irony of ironies, the biggest fraud and manipulation of all is the idea proposed by modern democracy itself: that through the magic of government, we can all live at the expense of everybody else. One team mongers its unending wars abroad; the other peddles its welfare schemes and make-work scams at home. Both defraud and manipulate the voters as a matter of course. 

At the turn of the century, the national debt in the United States was a “mere” $5.7 trillion dollars, or about 35% of GDP. Today, thanks to the bipartisan efforts of Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike, it’s teetering on $35 trillion... or $102k per person... an amount equal to 100% of the nation’s entire annual gross domestic product. 

Of course, nothing lasts forever... no empire, currency or political ideal. For almost two-and-a-half centuries, the torch of American liberty burned bright. Alas, with every step closer to banana republicanism, she risks becoming many nations, easily divisible, with tyranny and injustice for all.

---

And now for this week’s Notes From the End of the World...

---

And what do you think, dear reader…?

Can the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave save itself from the fate of all empires? Will “Rule of Law” prevail over “Rule by Law”? Must the republic hit “rock bottom” before realizing the error of its ways… and if so, how far is that from now?

Give those like and share buttons some love and have your say in the comments section, below.

In the meantime, we’re off to our gate for the next leg of our Asia tour. See you from the “muddy confluence,” next time.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman