Trump would attempt to overthrow government again

by Tom Maertens

Based on current polls, Donald Trump will likely be the GOP nominee for president. He would be the most corrupt and dangerous candidate ever.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump attempted to nullify the election and stay in power. He tried to overthrow the government by fomenting the Capitol insurrection, by replacing the real electors with fraudulent electors, by browbeating Georgia officials Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensburger into claiming the election was fraudulent and to “find” 11,000 votes.

He set up the Willard Hotel “war room,” led by Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Eastman, to coordinate the insurrection, and to encourage swing state officials to block some vote reports.

Over 1,000 people have been criminally charged for participating in that insurrection. Almost 500 have been convicted, including several far right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Canada labeled the Proud Boys a “terrorist entity” in 2021. The group replied in court that they were “Trump’s Army” and that he directed them to show up for Jan. 6.

The Jan. 6 committee recommended that the Justice department prosecute Trump on four charges: aiding an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to make a false statement.

As for false statements, the Washington Post database shows that Trump told 30,573 lies while in office. He piled many more lies on top of those at his recent town hall, including the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “rigged.”

He also has a long list of convictions against him: The Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million after conviction for 17 felonies, including tax fraud. Its former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was sentenced to five months in prison. Can there be any doubt that Trump was part of the fraud?

He was fined $25 million for his Trump University fraud, was fined $10 million for 106 violations of anti-money laundering rules at his Taj Mahal casino and fined $2 million for defrauding eight children’s charities.

Four government investigations — by Robert Mueller, by the U.S. intelligence community, by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the House Intelligence Committee — found that Russia aided Trump in the 2016 election.

Trump also attempted to blackmail the president of Ukraine by withholding U.S. assistance approved by Congress in order to frame Joe Biden.

Most ominous of all, the former head of Russian counterintelligence, KGB General Oleg Kalugin, now a U.S. resident, told Investigative journalist Craig Unger (“House of Trump,” “House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia”) that Trump was one of 300 assets and agents that Russia recruited in the United States. He told Unger that Trump was probably compromised during his 1987 and 1994 trips to Russia.

Unger got a second former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working with Trump for decades. Earlier this year, Trump repeated an earlier statement that he trusted Putin over his own director of national intelligence and used the occasion to describe members of the U.S. intelligence community as “lowlifes.”

Four former CIA directors have publicly asserted that they believe Trump is a Russian agent, and retired Admiral Bill McRaven, who led the raid on bin Laden, has written “our Republic is under attack from the president.”

Trump’s former national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster said that Trump was “aiding and abetting” Putin’s efforts to sow doubt about the American electoral system.

Trump is currently under indictment on 34 felony charges. He was just convicted of sexual abuse and defamation; he has been accused of sexual assault by 26 women, three of whom were 14 or 13 at the time.

This is credible: when the convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, the press reported that his address book had 14 phone numbers for Trump; in addition, we know that Trump and Epstein held a “private” party with 28 young girls at Mar-a-Lago.

Based on the public record, Trump is a pedophile and serial sex offender, a career criminal, a traitor and a seditionist. And that’s before Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis even announce charges.

He’s supported by the sedition party; 147 Republican legislators supported Trump’s efforts to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Six of them subsequently asked Trump for a pardon.

If he is elected, he will attempt to overthrow the government again, and the Republican Party will support him again.

Tom Maertens worked in the White House under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.