September 3, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

So, our president committed a felony yesterday, right out in the open, encouraging Republican voters in North Carolina to vote twice. That’s a felony, and encouraging people to commit a felony is a felony.

Typically he commits his crimes in somewhat less visible fashion, but this is a man clearly comfortable with committing crimes.

Trump has spent much of his life committing crimes.

He committed a massive tax fraud when he and his brother Robert stole their father‘s estate. He violated campaign finance laws by paying off the women he was having sex with. He tried to threaten and then bribe foreign officials to get election help. He has thousands of Americans small businesses who claim that he broke contracts, stole from them, and otherwise behaved like a criminal. He was even busted by the feds for being a racist, refusing to rent properties to African-Americans. E. Jean Carol and dozens of other women accused him of rape and other forms of sexual assault.

We have a mobster in the White House who has no respect for the rule of law.

The United States has never before had a criminal in the White House. We don’t know how to deal with it.

Not only is Donald Trump a criminal, but he’s also a liar. He has lied over 20,000 times just while he was president. He lied to become president. And now he’s telling lies and committing crimes to get reelected president.

The immune system of our democratic republic, when it comes to a criminal President, is impeachment. But Mitch McConnell is also a criminal. He conspires with foreign oligarchs to influence elections, covers up evidence of crimes and foreign collusion by Trump and his cronies, and he and his wife have engaged in shady financial dealings for decades.

At the moment, our only solution for these crimes, because Attorney General Bill Barr is willing to continue covering up for Trump’s crimes, is the election in November.

But after that election, Congress needs to consider the previously unthinkable. The Founders dealt with what would happen if a president was corrupt, but they didn’t consider what would happen if both the president and the Senate majority leader were corrupt.

After our long national nightmare of the Trump presidency is over, we have a lot of work to do to heal our democracy from the poison that Trump and his criminal buddies have poured all over it.

And, given how deeply embedded Trump’s criminal co-conspirators are at all levels of government now, it’s going to be a hell of a big job.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.