A little unseemly gloat ...

 

The lizard Oz finally acknowledged there'd been a trial of the century (so far) and had to clear the front digital page for the news, and the pond felt the need to note it for the reptile record ... while indulging in a little gloat ...

Killer was there, and questions were asked, and for a nanosecond those noting that the centrepiece was by "the Editorial Board" might have thought that the lizard Oz editorialist had finally spoken.

No need. Such is the strength of the hive mind that the WSJ could speak for the lizard Oz, and the pond felt so generous it allowed the illustrations to stand ...

Henry Fonda? What about Gregory Peck? Oh that's right, he hectored his lawyers into monstrous nonsense, telling porkies about him not porking a porn star when he had at the time boasted to his fellow golfers that it made him drive 20 yards further ... and so they became the very essence of a SLOAT.

What fun, and everybody was out and about with illustrations as part of the celebrations ...

Back with the crybabies at the WSJ ...speaking because the locals weren't up to the job, and never were, because they tried to avoid the trial of the century (thus far) whenever they could ...

Actually, the problem was that  the mango Mussolini was a grifter, a penny pincher, a tightwad, a scrooge, a cheapskate, a piker, a churl, a skinflint, a moneygrubber and a cheese-parer, a stiff who likes to stiff, and he could have avoided all of it easily if he'd wanted to ...

The best read on this came in Jose Pagliery's  How Trump’s Cheapness Over Stormy and Cohen Came to Cost So Much ... (paywall)

...Although the case originated in Trump’s alleged hotel rendezvous with Daniels during a Lake Tahoe golf tournament in July 2006—which he still denies—Trump’s first relevant act of greed can be traced back to an episode in January 2014, when Trump was laying the groundwork for his presidential run.

Trump had his consigliere, Michael Cohen, hire a tech firm called Red Finch to rig a CNBC poll about the nation’s top business leaders—only to stiff the vendor, refusing to pay its $50,000 bill when Trump was disappointed with the results. A year later, Cohen pulled $20,000 from his own bank account and handed the firm a paper bag filled with cash. He would admit pocketing the other $30,000 when Trump eventually repaid him but nonetheless, Trump had started to run a tab on his own lawyer. It would come back to haunt him

Fast forward to summer 2016, when former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal had Beverly Hills lawyer Keith Davidson start shopping her story about an affair with Trump, which he also denies.

It started with a June 7, 2016 text Davidson sent to National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard saying, “I have a blockbuster trump story.” By the end of the month, Howard had met McDougal and determined her story was worthy of a catch-and-kill operation. His boss, American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker, approved a $150,000 deal that would give McDougal a fake writing gig at the supermarket tabloid. And Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, had taken a call from Pecker that he patched through the speaker on his desk at Trump Tower, allowing Cohen to recall his boss promising, “No problem. I will take care of it.”

But he didn’t. Pecker grew increasingly impatient as it dawned on him there was no way he’d get away with such a suspicious corporate expense on the company books. As Cohen would testify, the shared anxiety reached a breaking point that compelled Cohen to secretly record a conversation with Trump about the overdue bill—a tape Cohen supposedly planned to share with Pecker to ease his concerns.

By the time Davidson reached out to Howard for a second payday, this time to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels, the tabloid would not carry Trump’s water. Instead, Howard passed Davidson to Cohen.

Faced with what sounded like a bald-faced extortion racket in the closing weeks of a struggling campaign, Trump played games once again. He tasked Cohen with taking care of the problem but together they came up with a plan to drag it out, past the election if they could. With a month to go, Cohen struck a deal to pay Daniels $130,000 but came up with all kinds of excuses for not wiring the money. The career shyster feigned being too busy, disappeared for a time, blamed a Jewish holiday, and repeatedly claimed he’d lost bank account details.

When Daniels’ lawyer threatened to call the deal off, Trump was nowhere to be found—forcing Cohen to draw the money from his home equity line of credit and set up a shell corporation.

The lies kept stacking up. But they hadn’t yet reached the point of criminality.

The tale reached its second act after the 2016 election. As president-elect, Trump was jubilant. The business tycoon who leveraged his fame to launch a TV reality show and fuel a meteoric rise in national politics had become a parody of the American Dream. But he had a dirty little secret, and his loyal bagman was owed a pretty chunk of change.

It’s all the more confounding, then, that one of Trump’s final acts as head of the Trump Organization was to stiff Cohen of his annual bonus.

Every year, near Christmas, the boss would flee Manhattan for his Florida estate. As he did so, his employees opened envelopes to discover their reward for remaining loyal. When Cohen got his, he did a double take. His usual $102,000 had been cut by two-thirds. He stormed into Allen Weisselberg’s office, giving the chief financial officer a piece of his mind.

“I was truly insulted. Personally hurt. Didn't understand it. Made no sense,” Cohen recalled on the witness stand, angry still, all these years later.

The guy who’d scour news articles to make sure the boss wouldn’t get maligned, the guy who’d phone reporters and threaten to sue and make their lives a living hell, the guy who stuck his neck out time and again to defend the honor of a fundamentally dishonorable man, was starting to realize this was a fool’s game. But not quite yet.

“Allen said, ‘Take it easy. We’re gonna do right by you. We’re gonna make sure you’re taken care of. Relax. We'll make this right.’”

But instead of immediately reimbursing Cohen the $130,000, Trump and Weisselberg approved a drip-drip approach – paying Cohen much more, $420,000, but stretching payments across 2017, under the guise of legal work and with Cohen described as “personal attorney to the president of the United States.”

In the end, the payments produced 11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—34 documents in all, ultimately the subject of 34 charges and determined by a jury of New Yorkers to be false business filings as defined by Penal Law §175.10.

Had it been a single fake invoice, Trump would have faced three felony counts—if the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had bothered to take up the case.

Instead, Trump has shelled out tens of millions of dollars, paying lawyers Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles, and Emil Bove to defend him in a one-year case and a historic seven-week trial, redirecting political donations that could have supported his 2024 campaign but were instead burned in a futile effort to stop him becoming the first American president turned convicted criminal.

“I believe in spending what you have to,” Trump – or his ghost – wrote in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. “But I also believe in not spending more than you should. I never threw money around.”

If only he'd listened to a real Scrooge ...

If he hadn't stiffed his Pecker, if he hadn't Cruellad his Cohen ... but in the end he had to throw other people's money around like it was going out of style, and so he made it round, and it came back to bite him ...

D'uh ... it's simple, dudes, don't overthink it. He's always been a hustler, a con artist, a confidence man, a snake oil seller, a fraudster, a quack, a charlatan, a mountebank, a cheat, a swindler, a phoney, a sham, and a flim flammer ... don't trust the pond, just ask a few of the students who paid a fortune to attend Trump University ...

Sadly the fantasy elements live on in that New Yorker front page and in the Luckovich of the day ...

Sadly ... because this isn't the sort of white collar crime that would see the mango Mussolini do time in the slammer ... though we can at least all look forward to the United States electing a convicted felon to be their president ...

It couldn't get richer than that ... and remembering Adolf's time in the clink, it would uphold a proud tradition for coup lovers.

As David Remnick noted in The New Yorker coverage, Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge (paywall).

...Following the devastating judgment against Trump in Manhattan Criminal Court, voters will now decide to what extent they care. The question is whether any who remain undecided—particularly in the most critical precincts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona—will be convinced that a felony conviction disqualifies Trump from a second term as Commander-in-Chief, or whether this most recent badge of dishonor is, in the end, of no greater concern than his well-documented history as a bigot, a fabulist, and an authoritarian intent on pursuing a second term inflamed by a spirit of vengeance.

The vast majority of the electorate is, to one degree or another, quite aware of his many characteristics. He has been around a long time. He is aggressively transparent, supremely frank about his furies and his prejudices. He appears to be devoid of shame. Rather than betray regret about a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly enjoyed a brief interlude, or even issue denials under oath, Trump, in his many press conferences outside the courtroom at 100 Centre Street, exploited the trial as a means of illustrating the ongoing narrative of his persecution at the hands of the Biden Administration and the Deep State. His victimhood, he has told his supporters, is your victimhood. I am you. My retribution will be your retribution. As the trial wore on, he managed to monetize this tall tale. His fund-raising increased, particularly among smaller donors. Such is his talent for self-pity and demagoguery. His continuing legal jeopardy, according to Politico, “may be the most effective tool he has going.”

The picture is no different among Trump’s former Republican rivals. Early critics, such as Senators Marco Rubio, of Florida, and J. D. Vance, of Ohio, are now puppy-eager supporters vying for the Vice-Presidency or a Cabinet position; more persistent naysayers, such as Governor Chris Sununu, of New Hampshire, have also fallen into line. Trump’s last real opponent in the Republican primary, his former envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, spent months attacking his character (“Every single thing Donald Trump has said or put on TV has been a lie”) and his mental stability (“He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was”). She blamed him for the Party’s losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and declared that she, at least, was brave enough to say so: “Of course, many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him. They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truths out loud.” And yet, as the trial entered its last days, Haley, predictably, crumbled, saying out loud that she would cast her vote for Trump and, implicitly, her integrity to the four winds. In return, Trump tossed Haley a crumb, suggesting vaguely that she might yet gain a place on his team “in some form.”

Some of the titans of Wall Street are showing similar degrees of moral flexibility. Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire financier who abandoned Trump not because of the insurrection, in 2021, but after the G.O.P.’s poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, has now returned meekly to the fold. His reasons, he said obscurely, include a variety of policy concerns and “the dramatic rise of antisemitism.” (Trump, who has a long history of antisemitic statements, said earlier this year that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”) The hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin has similarly overcome his doubts. He once called Trump a “three-time loser”; now he is back on board.

Like so many authoritarians of the past—and, more recently, like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro—Trump deploys a blood-and-soil rhetoric in which his supporters and the existing order are under dire threat. The United States is a “failing nation” hurtling toward catastrophe. The government and the media may say (accurately) that inflation has trended downward and that the unemployment rate is below four per cent, but Trump darkly forecasts a nightmare world of Chinese dominance and a “1929-type Depression.” Moreover, if Joe Biden is reëlected, the country will continue to become “a Third World hellhole ruled by censors, perverts, criminals, and thugs.” The 2024 election is “the final battle,” and only he can redeem us from a “Mad Max” dystopia—or, as he put it at a conference in Maryland last March, a “lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.”

Or as Eric Lach joked at the end of his coverage of the actual verdict for TNY, When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open (paywall)

...In the hallway outside the courtroom, Trump found his voice again. “I’m a very innocent man,” he said, calling the verdict a “disgrace.” America, he said, has “gone to hell.” “We’re a nation in decline, serious decline,” he went on. “Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists. And they’re taking over our country.” Criminals taking over the country? Sounds bad.

Meanwhile, that editorial board was still shedding tears ... and living in hope that a convicted criminal might yet take over the country ... sounds good ...

Yes, you read it there, the WSJ is happy to have a cad in the White House. 

If the pond's Roget serves it right, that's a bounder, a rascal, a rogue, a reprobate, a good for nothing, a charlatan, an SOB, a rat, a louse, a hound, a skunk, a heel, a snake in the grass, a bad egg, a rat fink rotter, a wastrel, a dastardly knave ...

Oh brave land of the bold and the free.

But the pond must insist on one point of order in relation to that last line.

You cackling geese, it was the mango Mussolini and Faux Noise and the like, coup lovers all of them, laura norder lovers who love breaking the law, treason haters who love a bit of treason when it's done by the right sort of authoritarian wanting to horde state secrets (and maybe trade in them, who knows, a deviant, caddish Scrooge would) that opened a new destabilising era in American politics, and even now no one can say how it will end ... except that if the mango Mussolini gets back in, then the world will see what an angry, vengeful charlatan with dementia looks like as a President ...

Meanwhile, those with a memory will recall that the pond labelled certain Supreme Court judges as being pussy whipped, a concept and a term designed to cause offence unless you happen to be in the SM crowd, but it turns out that Luckovich agreed with the pond. 

They do wear frocks and the women do wear the pants ...

Why the poor hen-pecked, hard done by, deballsed learned judges, take pity on them ... and don't forget the spittle ...