The 98-page Georgia indictment against Donald Trump and his eighteen co-conspirators—no less worth the read than the 45-page January 6^th indictment brought by federal prosecutor Jack Smith—contains 41 counts, of which Trump is accused of the following 13:

• Violation of the Georgia RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations)
• Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer (3 counts)
• Conspiracy to Commit Impersonating a Public Officer
• Conspiracy to Commit Forgery in the First Degree (2 counts)
• Conspiracy to Commit False Statements and Writings (2 counts)
• Conspiracy to Commit Filing False Documents
• Filing False Documents
• False Statements and Writings (2 counts)

If you’re like this humble spirit, you’re not sure whether to be incredulous that a former President of the United States could ever be accused of such crimes or numb to the overwhelming evidence that such criminal activity represents a normal day in the life of a low-life grifter like Donald Trump.

Many of Trump’s ridiculous tweets made between the November 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection (all considered “overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy”) have previously made the news and circulated on the Internet, but reading them afresh in one sitting reveals Trump as the nasty, incompetent, blithering fool that he is. They amount to nothing more than an exercise in throwing sh*t against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

12/3/20: “Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were force to leave the counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State.”

12/3/20: “People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in ‘voting’ machines. Great job @BrianKempGA!”

12/6/20: “Gee, what a surprise. Has anyone informed the so-called (says he has no power to do anything!) Governor @BrianKempGA & his puppet Lt. Governor @GeoffDuncanGA, that they could easily solve this mess & WIN. Signature verification & call a Special Session. So easy!”

12/14/20: “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is. Could have been so easy, but now we have to do it the hard way.  Demand this clown call a Special Session and pen up signature verification, NOW.  Otherwise could be a bad day for to GREAT Senators on January 5^th.”

12/30/20: “@BrianKempGA should resign from office. He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG!  Also won the swing states.”

12/30/20: “We now have far more votes than needed to flip Georgia in the Presidential race. Massive VOTER FRAUD took place . . .”

1/3/21: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter Fraud in Georgia.  He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state voters, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

In typical Trump fashion, he says whatever he wants to say whenever he feels like saying it, without regard to the truth or even the consistency of his lies.

“Just Say the Election was Corrupt and Leave the Rest to Me and the Republican Congressmen.”

-Trump speaking to his Acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen

With no evidence to back up their claims, in early December one of Trump’s co-conspirators threw more sh*t against the wall:

• 2,506 felons voted illegally in Georgia.
• 66,248 underage people registered to vote before their 17^th birthday.
• 2,423 people who voted were not registered to vote.
• 1,043 people voted who were registered at an address that was a post office box.
• 10,315 or more dead people voted.

Without any attempt to match those previous claims, in early January, just several days before the Capitol insurrection, Trump made the following false statements and representations to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia state officials:

• Anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls in Georgia.
• Thousands of people attempted to vote and were told they could not because a ballot had already been cast in their name.
• 4,502 people voted who were not on the voter registration list.
• 904 people voted who were registered at an address that was a post office box.
• Ruby Freeman was a professional vote scammer and a known political operative.
• Ruby Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots to Joe Biden.
• Ruby Freeman stuffed the ballot boxes.
• Close to 5,000 dead people voted.
• Hundreds of thousands of ballots and been “dumped” into Fulton County and an adjacent county.
• He won the election in Georgia by 400,000 votes.

This list reads as if he made the numbers up on the spot or he was reading from a page of notes someone put down on his desk while he was on the phone.  Did it occur to the man that if his fictitious numbers constantly changed he’d lose any shred of credibility? (It remains unclear as to why, among all the Black female election workers in Georgia, Trump and his co-conspirators picked on Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss.)

It Seems More than a Coincidence that Trump’s MAGA Followers Smeared Human Excrement All Over the Capitol Walls on January 6^th.

Also, given I was a child during the Mexican American War, I can’t help commenting on the President’s proudly touting “the Alamo” as representing the best of America, as a way to conjure up American pride and patriotism. Back in the 1830s, what are now the states of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico were all thinly populated provinces of Mexico. The trouble started when white Americans—mostly Southern cotton planters who brought their slaves with them—were attracted to Texas by generous land grants. Although slavery was already illegal in Mexico, it was tolerated in Texas until 1835, when President Santa Anna proclaimed a unified national constitution that ended Texan’s local rights, i.e., slavery. That’s why Texas seceded from Mexico, and Santa Anna invaded, besieging a San Antonio fortress called the Alamo and killing all 200 of its defenders. The Mexicans certainly didn’t have to slaughter every last Texan in the fort, including those they took prisoner, but when we remember the Alamo, we should acknowledge that the defenders weren’t innocent American, but defenders of slavery (and that includes ol’ Davy Crockett).

After the Mexicans rode further into Texas and were crushed by Sam Houston’s army shouting “Remember the Alamo!” the Texans demanded the American government either grant them statehood or recognize Texas as a separate slave-holding republic. Based on Northern opposition to slavery, however, the “Lone Star Republic” wasn’t recognized until 1837, and statehood wasn’t offered until 1846, after Southern slave-holding interests won the majority in both houses of congress. This, of course, led to the Mexican-American War, which was rightly seen by many, including then-congressman from Illinois Abraham Lincoln, and even my former boss in the confederate Army, Robert E. Lee himself, as nothing but a land-grab, not only for Texas, but what is now most of the American west. I’m sorry for racing through this period of American history this way, but the point is that Texas was colonized by white slaveholders from the Cotton Kingdom, Americans defended “the Alamo” on behalf of slavery, and the Mexican-American War was fought so that a huge slave-holding state could join the union.

So when our embarrassingly ignorant President boasts about “the Alamo,” it’s really one more painful reminder of our nation’s original sin. In truth the Alamo is no more a legitimate source of pride than the Confederate flag.

As I’ve made clear numerous times, I consider Trump to be a scoundrel (there’s a good 19th century word, if ever there was one!) and a fraud, who for all practical purposes hi-jacked the Republican party on behalf of a small cabal of true elites—not the so-called “elites” Trump’s “base” enjoys hating, such as the media and academics, but the real powers that be, the big banks and Wall Street. Let’s not forget mentioning the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries among others. They are, of course, the real owners of today’s plantations, the interests who benefit most from Trump’s supposedly America-first policies, and who pull their ridiculous president’s puppet strings accordingly.

Make America Great Again? Yeah, sure. America for who?

No matter who it is who’s pulling the strings, watching the events of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate this past week has forced me to delve into partisan politics in a way I’ve previously avoided. Is there any question that fear of the “base”—those people who handed Trump the election in 2016 and hold the power to “primary” any Republican who doesn’t support the President—is so strong that most Republican senators would sell their grandmother’s grave in order to stay on its good side? The result this week is what can only be dubbed “Profiles in Schmuckness” (to borrow from the title of President Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book about eight U.S. senators exhibiting exceptional courage and integrity throughout our history). Honestly, have you ever witnessed a more pitiful display of weakness?

The Republicans’ arguments against Trump’s impeachment are so feeble that I hardly know where to begin. Of all of them, however, none is more of an insult to our intelligence than blaming the House Democrats for not obtaining documents and calling witnesses,most notably former National Security Advisor, John Bolton. We all know that the President and his legal team have done everything in their power to prevent it. Even going as far as to invoke executive privilege! This is chutzpah on steroids! The Democrats could have gone through the courts, but it would have taken months. Everyone knows this, and it was clearly the White House lawyers’ strategy to stonewall and delay, just as it has been on dozens of issues that have arisen during the Trump presidency.

Most notable amongst these issues is the President’s refusing to turn over his taxes, hoping to delay what they reveal until he leaves office. The reason for his refusal is most likely based on fear. They may reveal his dealings with Putin and the Russian oligarchs (can you say money laundering?), which is of course not unrelated to his withholding aid to Ukraine, something I don’t think the Democrats have said nearly enough about. I’ll save that for another time.

I would define Trump’s “base” as comprised of two primary groups, as well as a much smaller, but all-important, third.  First is the stereotype “Trumpy,” a white, rural or small-town voter from the “Heartland.” These people are hostile to the “elites,” mostly defined as educated professionals, especially “liberals” in the media and academia, whom they perceive as looking down on them and being their greatest enemies in the culture wars.  Some might call them the “God, Guns and Gays” crowd, but I strongly oppose the use of such unproductive stereotypes.  This is an issue I’ve addressed previously and intend to address again.  Many of these people used to vote Democratic, until they began to suspect the party not only opposed their social values, but didn’t have their economic interests at heart, an issue I’ll get to in a moment.  A good example of this is how West Virginia went from being one of the most Democratic states in the country to one of the most Republican.

Another group are the tattered remains of the traditional Republicans of yesteryear—people who at one time were able to use economic arguments to justify their opposition to big government, otherwise known, in simplest terms, as the Democratic Party’s interest in helping the poor and minorities—think the New Deal and the Great Society. That’s a stereotype that I don’t hesitate to invoke!

The third group of Trump supporters is, of course, the real elites: the people pulling their ridiculous puppet’s strings.  These are representatives of the big banks and Wall Street, not to mention the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries amongst others.  Does anyone really believe that President Trump cares about coal miners? I’m talking about people like Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, the billionaires who are both members of the President’s cabinet.  They are the real owners of today’s plantation. These are people whom traditional Republicans emulate, people whose success they aspire to, unattainable as it may be in such a rigged system. The greater mystery is why their existence is accepted as the unavoidable way of things by the “Trumpies,” who hold the elective power to relegate them to the dustbin of history, as was ultimately the fate of the Cotton Kingdom’s rulers.

As a boy growing up on my father’s antebellum cotton farm, nothing confounded me more than the way poor whites emulated the wealthy slave-holding class rather than opposing it.  Even though abolishing slavery and opening the plantation system (the good ol’ “Cotton Kingdom”) to free labor was clearly in their economic interest, they instead aspired to joining the ruling class by becoming slaveholders themselves.  Somehow they thought that if they owned at least one Negro (that’s what African Americas were called in those days), it made them equal men and part of the ruling elite. Somehow, the only thing that let the common man (that’s what poor whites were called in those days) feel like he was better than a Negro was the institution of slavery and the plantation system.  They were happy to go off and fight for it when the slaveholders finally declared their independence and the Civil War came. There was no question that the lords of the Cotton Kingdom ruled over a society rigged in their favor.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?  Doesn’t that sound all too much like today’s Trumpies who don’t know their friends from their enemies and are perfectly happy to watch their true enemies in the top 1% get richer at their expense?  Just give ‘em the smallest raise, those good ole “crumbs”, and they’re happy to let the real elites hang on to the plantation.

Back in my day it was the slaveholders of the Cotton Kingdom, but today it’s Wall Street and our largest corporations.  In particular, Trump is the fossil fuel industry’s stooge in its fight to discredit the reality of climate change.  But that’s only one of the President’s many distortions.

The President talks about building a great wall at our Southern border even though he isn’t.  He tells us we have wonderful healthcare when, in fact, it remains a disaster.  He claims North Korea’s nuclear program is on hold thanks to him, but has no evidence to support it.  He also claims he’s bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, even though our manufacturing base continues to decline.  And when it comes to his conversation with the President of Ukraine, he seems to think the American people can’t read the transcript that’s right before their eyes.

At what point do Trump’s lies and distortions become intolerable even for his base?  When will they realize that what they want to believe isn’t necessarily the truth?

The only reality that matters about Trump is this: Given that his many years of business failures and bankruptcies made him persona non grata with American banks, he turned to the Russian oligarchs for financing (in other words, he’s laundering their money!).  Why do you think he’s fought so hard to stop his tax returns from being released?  And now he’s in Putin’s pocket, bought and paid for.

Doesn’t it strike you as a little odd that Trump was threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine, the country that’s fighting a war with Russia?  Putin makes no secret that he wants to make Ukraine a satellite of Russia, just as it was during the Soviet Empire.  Does Trump care about corruption in Mexico, India, Brazil, or anyplace else in the world?  No, the most corrupt president we’ve ever had suddenly cares about Ukraine—what a coincidence!