Does R.I.C.O.* Apply to the White House?

*Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act

It may not bother Trump’s base or the 49% polled recently who gave Donald Trump a stamp of approval, but the last time we saw this much criminal activity in and around the White House was during the Nixon Administration, forced out of office by the burglary and subsequent cover-up from the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate building. President Richard Nixon was so quickly out of office that he did not get a chance to pardon the massive pile of felons, most of whom did serious prison time. Gerald Ford issued a gracious pardon to Nixon himself.

The staggering pattern of President Trump’s distortion of the rule of law that has governed this nation from inception, and the terrified and fearful lockstep endorsement of unambiguously unlawful actions by GOP Senators and political appointees to significant federal offices, just might be undoing of the entire system itself. I watch as constitutional professors from prestigious law schools speak of the robust resiliency of the American legal system, a system that will resume as a nation of laws applicable to all once Trump leaves office. Seriously?

First, the last time we had this level of out-and-out gridlocked political polarization in the country, we fought one of the bloodiest conflicts in our history, against ourselves! They didn’t even have the 15 million AR15 semi-automatic rifles or the 316 million guns that exist in our civilian population today.

Second, history – without contradiction – consistently shows that no governmental system rules forever. Whether it is by reason of complacency, economic collapse, pandemics, allowing rising embedded elites to sap a nation of most of its power and wealth, wars (from within and without), political fracturing or natural disasters, all governments come to an end. Inevitably. That the leadership was installed by a popular election does not mean that even under that circumstance democracy rules. Think Hitler, Putin, Erdogan, Maduro, Orban, etc. All elected. When the underlying fabric, the trust that enabled a country to sustain as a republic even for centuries, frays beyond repair, the risk of “the end” becomes more probable than a simple return to the rule of law required for a democracy to survive.

Third, history also teaches us that when an elected leader believes himself (so far no women) to be above the law or, worse, is in fact the law, if the system does not immediately contain those proclivities, the damage to the system either tears it apart or requires such a ground-up fix that what continues bears no resemblance to what once was.

With a virtually unamendable constitution – where the requisite supermajority of a supermajority of states is well nigh impossible in a severely polarized era – trying to work a fix from the inside just might not be a possibility in contemporary America. Indeed, even the Equal Rights Amendment, on the brink of securing that number after decades of effort, has long since passed the outside date for such an amendment to be ratified; it is likely to fail on that basis alone.

Trump has repeatedly stated, and his lawyers have pounded the point home is his recent Senate trial, that under Article 2 of the Constitution, the president can pretty much do as he pleases, is immune from indictment or criminal investigation and is not beholden to either of the other two branches of government. Senate Republicans obviously agreed with Trump and accordingly refused to hold him responsible. Trump has pardoned tyrannical bureaucrats, praised white supremacists, ordered assassinations without consulting the required government officials, executed executive orders that even he knew were unlawful and engaged foreign powers to support his domestic political ambitions and influence our elections.

He has repeatedly slapped a once immutable Trump-favoring military in the face. Pardoning a murderous Navy SEAL, whose own teammates found to be a horrific criminal, in defiance of a full-scale military process (the Secretary of the Navy and the Admiral who headed the SEALs quit), allowing his own soldiers to abandon Kurdish allies to a murderous government, soldiers who fought side-by-side with our soldiers and who implemented the ground component of our air attack on ISIS strongholds, labeling soldiers suffering severe brain injuries from a massive missile attack as suffering from mere “headaches,” and firing a decorated Army officer for telling truth when queried by congressional committees.

Shyster-Trump-crony, convicted felon Roger Stone, faced a US Attorney-recommended 7 to 9-year sentence after a federal conviction for seven felonies, including lying to a House committee, obstructing Congress and witness tampering. The rationale was carefully articulated in a 25-page detailed sentencing brief filed with the court. Attorney General William Barr, with or without direction from the White House (or just doing what he thought the President would like him to do by instinct), promptly overruled his own legal team, filing a very poorly-drafted 4-page withdrawal of that sentencing recommendation, substituting a vastly more lenient sentence request. Four assistant US Attorneys immediately withdrew from the case immediately, one of whom resigned from the Justice Department as well.

Trump almost immediately tweeted that whole Stone conviction was a “miscarriage of justice,” criticizing the prosecutors, the federal judge and even the forewoman of the jury, suggesting she “had significant bias.” Whether it was merely for show – to appear that the Department of Justice was still truly independent – or possibly even sincerely, Barr spoke on camera (ABC News) on February 14^th saying that President’s tweets and public statements on criminal cases were making his job “impossible.”

Trump, who so clearly believes that he is the law, tweeted back, saying Barr had not asked him to intervene in a criminal case. “This doesn’t mean,” Trump added, “that I do not have, as president, the legal right to do so. I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” The “lock her up!” Trump rally cry resonates; the belief that whistleblowers, protected under federal statute, should be prosecuted for treason for denouncing Trump and a belief that all government lawyers are directly accountable to the president and his directives sit at the heart of it all.

That Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, along with his indicted partners Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were generating “new information” on the Bidens from a clearly-acknowledged fount-of-corruption, a disgraced and dismissed former Ukrainian prosecutor, is evidence of Trump’s apparently now justified belief that he and his immediate and acknowledged personal lawyer can act with impunity, in disregard of the law and proper diplomatic policies and channels to pursue Trump’s personal political goals using threats. Watching how Joe Biden has slid down the polls, the hounding has apparently worked.

As the Senate has now confirmed, Donald J Trump is now much more than a mere president. He now stands above both of the other formerly equal branches of government: the judicial and legislative arms. But what is even worse is the Donald J Trump is truly a “don,” the head of a substantial and now uncontained criminal enterprise with a whole lot of convicted felons to show for it. The Mafia would be proud! A godfather with orange hair. But lest the right rejoice in this triumph, they have sown the seeds of their own demise… and perhaps even the demise of the United States itself. They may get their way… over that portion of a fractured “formerly United” States that they might rule without blue states to get in the way.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and apparently, we no longer live in a country where keeping the nation as a whole together is remotely relevant anymore.