Mini-Reviews of Books #54: Five critiques of modern politics…
Untouchable. Elie Honig, author (2023). This book could be considered a sequel to Hatchet Man, although superficially that was about DJT’s AG William Barr. (Will there be another to make a trilogy?) I make this connection because both books compare DJT to mob figures whom the author has prosecuted during his career. But Barr only figures as a secondary character because he was only one of the many tools DJT has used to avoid prosecution of his mob family: Too many layers of nefarious scumbags, all Trump’s “hit men,” sheltered him (and continue to do so). It’s quite difficult to peel back the rotten onion to get to the rotten core at the center of it all, DJT.
Most of what’s included here will be familiar to any reader who’s been following the public peccadillos of Trump, but the author makes two new revelations that I heartily agree with: One, the 1/6 committee showed DoJ how to find hard evidence against Trump. (But see Michael Cohen’s book below that documents their failure.) Two, Garland’s time at the helm of DoJ has showed how to stonewall so that DJT will never be prosecuted. Garland has done everything in his power, like Barr before him, to give DJT multiple free get-out-of-jail cards if you consider the list of possible charges. He has made DoJ so apolitical that it’s impossible to prosecute any crooked politician, DJT being the worst.
As hinted, there is a nice list at the end of nine counts that should be brought against DJT to help any reader understand some of the cases going on right now. (That excludes most of Trump’s MAGA maniacs, of course, because, like their fuehrer, they don’t read much, especially anything that speaks truth to power.)
Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. Robert Draper, author (2022). How time flies! This book ends with candidates especially chosen by DJT winning primaries over more serious GOP candidates that included Liz Cheney. (Other GOP members like Kinzinger and Upton, thinking that their party had lost its mind, had already decided to leave Congress, turning the adage “rats leaving the sinking ship” upside-down because the rats stayed behind.) In other words, Mr. Draper has nothing to say about how the 2022 midterm elections demonstrated that DJT was again the Big Loser, a fact which might have give him a bit more hope for the future. (He lost the popular vote in 2016, the entire election in 2020, and nearly destroyed his party’s chance for a majority in 2022.)
Although this book is now dated (hence my opening sentence in this short review), it still is a good study pf the psychotic sociopaths (Trump included, as determined by dozens of mental-health pros) who have destroyed the GOP. Marjorie Taylor Greene is featured, but many others are also studied here, including the current House Speaker, a conniving, professional politician with no scruples and drugged out on hypocrisy pills.
Unfortunately, while the details included in the book added to my knowledge about how low some GOP members have sunk, these details won’t resonate with the MAGA maniacs out to destroy their party and democracy. This nightmarish battle will continue in 2024. Stay tuned.
Revenge. Michael Cohen author (2022). The great revelation here (as if any more against DJT were needed!) is that there’s a bifurcation in America’s justice system between how it treats the worker bees of the unscrupulous and those monsters who employ them. After reviewing Cohen’s references, it’s clear that all the charges to which Cohen pleaded guilty in the case brought by the SDNY lawyers, only the Stormy Daniels case’s were true, and Trump, who engineered that against his ex-fixer, got off free while Cohen went to jail!
Ex-SDNY attorney Elie Honig’s two books, Hatchet Man and Untouchable (see above), all too often lauds the work of the SDNY, almost an independent entity of DoJ in its actions. After reading this Cohen book, though, I’ve lost some of my respect for the SDNY and, using guilt by association, Mr. Honig. (His lucrative contract now as a CNN consult didn’t improve my opinion.) In particular, the SDNY went after Cohen big time, even threatening his wife with the tax evasion charges levied against Cohen, and declined to go after DJT for the Stormy Daniels hush-money payment. (Their use of the Steele Dossier, shown to be BS, was over the top!)
Cohen’s stay in the Otisville Prison was an unjust punishment and example of SDNY and DoJ’s overreach: A KGB-style three-year sentence for the trumped-up charges cooked up at SDNY (nasty pun intended because DJT was out for revenge, so they wanted maximal punishment against Cohen). Not even the Oath Keepers’ leader, who conspired to overthrow the US government at DJT’s request, received a sentence that long. Moreover, in his failed attempt to stop Cohen’s publishing of Disloyal (which he wrote in prison), Barr and other Trump evil and fascist minions conspired to put him back in jail after it had been agreed that he could go home with an ankle monitor because of the Covid-19 epidemic rampant in the Bureau of Prisons’ jails at that time. (Cohen had pre-existing conditions because he’d suffered some pulmonary embolisms when the was thirty-nine.) In other words, the government wanted to kill Cohen so DJT could have his revenge! (The title is about Trump’s revenge more than Cohen’s!) The new judge ruling on this, not the original and collaborating Nazi judge in the SDNY’s trumped-up case, ordered Cohen to be released again. To this day, DJT hasn’t done time for any of his many crimes, including the campaign-finance violations corresponding to the Stormy Daniels case, the only charge against Cohen of nearly a dozen invented by the SDNY that made any sense. But again, why charge the man who made the hush-money payment and let the jerk who ordered it off? (By the way, Cohen was never involved directly in Trump’s 2026 campaign. He’d also never been to Prague to meet with Russians about Trump’s proposed Moscow tower, even though that went on after the 2026 elections!)
Cohen’s sad tale can serve as background for the current Manhattan DA’s case, but it is more a historically accurate and negative critique of the DoJ and SDNY that contradicts Honig’s laudatory comments. Maybe that’s not surprising, but I’m guessing the American public will never know which one of these lawyers speaks the truth. This book reads nearly as well as the author’s Disloyal (a bestseller!), although it’s more poorly edited. Nevertheless, it’s a worthy complement to the other four books mentioned here and provides a different background for past events and ones still in progress (e.g., for the current case against DJT in Manhattan).
Finally, to end this review (hardly mini, but it’s here because it fits in well with the first two), let just add Cohen’s very appropriate final words: “…as some wiser than me once said, there’s nothing wrong with the United States that can’t be fixed by what’s right with it. We must recognize that Trumpism is fascism. We must destroy it and erase it from our body politic.” That’s true of all fascism, Putin’s, Xi’s, or Trump’s.
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The “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy. The new copper at a Bristol PD substation (he’s introduced in The Klimt Connection, #8 in the “Esther Brookstone” series) and his team have murders to solve. In Legacy of Evil, they discover a conspiracy organized by an MP and a Russian oligarch. In Cult of Evil, a David Koresh and Charles Manson-style doctor exploits lonely women and must be stopped, but a terrorist also complicates Morgan’s life. In Fear the Asian Evil, a local conspiracy that has been organized by Chinese agents is discovered as Morgan and his team try to find out who shot a reporter related to Morgan’s sergeant. (The first and third novels in this trilogy contain themes similar to the ones in the above non-fiction books.) Available wherever quality ebooks are solid (just not on Amazon).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
