A Portrait of a President as a Thug
The fourth January 6th hearing
--
A thug is, very specifically, a criminal who engages in physical violence or violent threats to intimidate others into doing things they do not want to do.
In Trump’s case, he was not personally committing physical acts of violence against those who disagreed with him. However we are hearing repeated examples of threats of violence following political decisions that went counter to Trump’s false assertions about the 2020 Presidential elections.
Virtually every person who refused to do Trump’s bidding found themselves the victims of threats that extended to their families and homes. All of these events can only be traced back to one individual and his loyal followers.
If we took this out of the political world and applied it to other situations it sounds an awful lot like the modus operandi of organized crime. Threats, bribes, actual violence, blackmail, fraud, and other illegal intimidations are the tools of these criminals.
The fourth televised hearing of the Subcommittee on the Events of January 6th, 2020 in Washington DC, lays out, in chilling detail, the fraud requests made to multiple state officials that they violate their oaths of office to overturn the legitimate election of Joseph Biden as President.
I’d say this is shocking except that it is not. It is not because this has been the playbook of Donald Trump throughout his career as an alleged businessman and now as a politician. He has used lawsuits thousands of times to intimidate those he owed money to or those who otherwise have revealed his questionable actions and statements.
As a politician obsessed with not being labeled a loser, despite clearly losing the election, Trump went further. He singled out innocent election workers, by name, based on false interpretations of their actions on video. His attorney, Rudy Giuliani instigated these rumors and endangered the lives of those workers.
Their testimony was heartbreaking but it also highlighted Trump’s ruthless determination to overturn a legitimate election that he definitively lost.
The big question hanging over these hearings is whether the DOJ will indict the former president and Guiliani…
