From “Russia, if you’re listening” in 2016 to “the election was a fraud” in 2020, Donald Trump has incessantly lied to the American people, aligned with its enemies and abused the powers the framers gave to the US president. And we have permitted all this to go on, as if it were all fine and dandy, I suppose because “He’s the president and we’re not”. 

How Do We End The Cyber Civil War?

Fellow Americans on both sides of whatever divide you think exists: the cyber civil war we have been engaged in for forty years cannot continue if this country is to survive as a democracy.

We have permitted the letter of our laws to violate the spirit and proper functions of our laws and institutions. This is exactly what Russia and other foes of democracy want. Listen to what Putin said at Sochi to a CBS reporter. He was gloating and smirking as he revealed the way he ended democracy in Russia. It was clear Putin was listening in on our processes and rooting for Trump to use his same system which involves employing the rules of a democracy to defeat it. Putin’s revealing Sochi interview with CBS (YouTube).

Goebbels said the same thing: The biggest joke of democracy is that it lets its enemies gain access to the power needed to destroy it. This is not new . This is what Putin spoke of in that interview – “using our laws to defeat us”.  These are the real enemies of democracy – not the liberal left or the MAGA right – not any regular American people. The divide was created by democracies enemies, foreign and domestic.

Big business and despotic autocrats both want democracy to fail for their own separate reasons. Big business doesn’t want their workers to be able to be paid too well. They want to keep them needy. Sad, but true! Autocracies want their people to think no one does better anywhere in the world. So they certainly don’t want Americans focused and prepared to take on the challenges of modern life, as their people will see that and want the same.

In 2016, those two anti-democratic forces -big business and foreign autocrats – discovered they had similar goals and aligned behind candidate Trump at the GOP convention. The union of a known enemy like Putin’s Russia and an American political party must be viewed by the new administration both as an act of cyber war by Russia and an act of treason by the GOP players involved, including Donald Trump. The GOP could have stopped all this at “Russia, if you’re listening” but indeed they were in the game. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

Our Constitution and the laws of business and civil engagement recognize that criminal acts that masquerade as legal acts, are still crimes. A contract to commit a crime is not even valid. It must be this way or we lose the rule of law that supports all democracies. This is poli-sci 101. It’s not complicated.

Pardons granted for silence, favors or money are all forms of bribery are also crimes. Such pardons therefore cannot be valid. It is crucial to highlight that money is not the only way to pay for a bribe. Lying under oath to protect the pardoner is a form of payment and therefore a bribe. Both the briber and the bribee are guilty.

If we allow these crimes to go unpunished, lightly punished or forgiven the enemies of democracy will have no reason to stay away next election cycle. They only need to succeed once to end democracy. And Trump won’t even wait 24 hours to start campaigning and dividing us again. 

Trump has already allowed the Russians to hack our defenses and pay bounties to kill our sons. A majority of Americans now believe Trump has been working against American interests. And even if it is just his own ego that’s driving him, his ego is our enemy because it does not actually revere the oath of office a POTUS takes to faithfully uphold and execute the laws and Constitution of the United States.

If it were not for the cover of his title, Donald Trump would not only be Individual #1 , he would be Public Enemy #1. Trump’s uncaring incompetence has already killed 1000x more Americans than Bin Laden’s airplane bombs.

You don’t beat a cancer by getting rid of most of it. Right now, there are reasons to lay low about what we will do to investigate and charge Donald Trump and others for crimes vs our commonwealth, at least until the Democrats and Joe Biden ascend to power on Jan 20th. The USA is a tinderbox and needs a cooling off period. It’s fortunate the transfer of power occurs in the dead of winter.

But I hope right now our new administrators recognize the real and pressing need to see to it that criminals no longer view the US government as fertile ground for profiting from power and then hiding their financial crimes.  And I hope they are secretly and quietly planning how they will exact justice for the criminals that occupy the Washington DC swamp. More than anything single task, we need to get the crooks our of government.

One thing we can start talking about right now is up-to-date federal presidential candidate vetting requirements, which should include mandated financial disclosures to qualify to even campaign for POTUS.  It was the campaigning and MAGA rallies that were the root source of Trump’s power.  Trump will not willingly show his taxes. Had we demanded his taxes in 2016, he never would have run. We have paid a high price for our collective stupidity. We cannot afford to be stupid anymore.

The GOP should be okay with mandated tax disclosures. They are looking for the easy way to say no to Donald Trump. They do not have to say a thing except “show your taxes and we are with you”. He will not or he would have long ago.

We need to make New Year’s resolutions for our government. Democracy’s enemies are counting on us letting them exploit the gaps in the letter of our laws. These are four 2021 resolutions I would like to see our government make and keep.

1. Financial disclosures mandated for all candidates for federal office. 2. Outlaw Gerrymandering. It runs counter to the democratic principles of equal representation and one person, one vote. 3. Electoral college reform. Some sort of population-driven compromise between the electoral college system and simply counting every vote to choose our POTUS should be agreed upon. If it can’t be agreed upon, do away with the electoral college. It was rooted in racism anyway. 4. Court reform to unpack or rebalance the judicial branch to be more representative of the attitudes and wishes of the majority of Americans.

The list could be much longer. But if we start by simply focusing on getting rid of the crooks and cracks in our government, better days will follow soon after.

Relevant prior posts: https://englishcode.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/why-trump-fired-esper/

Joseph Aronesty

classmate to Donny, 1967 Wharton

worked in his orbit – AC NJ 86 to 99