Reflections on Donald J. Trump

Originally posted on 10/13/2019

Because of my revelation of Deep State matters, revelations I hope are going to be verified and carried further by legitimate federal authorities someday soon, there are those asking me what my attitude is towards President Donald J. Trump. I have publicly revealed that I did not vote for him. However, my attitude towards him and how it plays into recent actions I took are fair and legitimate questions. I will give the Bottom Line Up Front of my analysis:

BLUF: Nowhere does my copy of the Constitution say, “…unless Trump.” There are a lot of people these days whose copies of the Constitution apparently do say, “… unless Trump.” But mine does not. I promise, I checked. I went all through it and did not find the phrase “… unless Trump” anywhere in it. That’s my full and thorough analysis of the moment. That is why I came forward.

While that is my analysis, there is still a legitimate question of what my attitude is towards Donald Trump. The main thing to know about my attitude towards President Trump is that it precisely 0 to do with my actions in recent months. That said, it is indeed a fair question, and one to which I will respond.

Before the 2016 election, when I was asked about Donald Trump, my general response began this way: Because I intended to say some critical things, I will start by saying two nice things. I would like to start the same way now, saying two nice things, before I go further.

1) In 1985 my father left GEICO for a new job, one that would keep him in New York. About 10 days after he did so, I was diagnosed with advanced cancer (I had presented when my organs began shutting down), and would go on to spend 21 of the following 30 months in-patient in hospitals. To be near my parents we chose for primary treatment a wonderful hospital in Manhattan that saved my life: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. My parents moved around among corporate apartments in New York those several years, so that I would be near my primary care-giver (my Mom). For ≈5 of those months (perhaps December 1986 – Spring 1986?), they stayed in a two-bedroom corporate apartment in Trump Tower, which had opened only a couple of years previously. When for a few days or a week I was furloughed from the hospital, I would stay with them in Trump Tower, going in and out of the residence entrance in a wheelchair, sometimes just being wheeled out a few yards to get a breath of fresh air.

During those days from time to time I became vaguely aware of a lad whom I saw coming in and out through the same entrance, backpack over one shoulder. My mother whispered to me was Donald Trump’s son. I remember him as being ≈ 10-14 years younger than I (perhaps 10-13?). The doormen were two large Black gentlemen in heavy overcoats. I observed that the lad was always exceedingly polite and well-mannered, not only to whomever was in the lobby (including myself), but especially, to the two gentlemen at the door. He always greeted them by name, “Mr. _____” and “Mr. ______”. They asked him about school, he asked them about sports and their families and such. He seemed to have a sincere and deferential attitude towards them, and they, an avuncular and genuine attitude towards him. He had none of the brattiness or “to-the-manor-born” attitude that one might have expected in the child of a man who was on the cover of magazines and whose skyscraper bore his name.

One time, after the lad had passed through the lobby and gone up the elevator, the doormen and I caught eyes. I raised an eyebrow with respect. One of them nodded gently and quietly said to my mother and me, “Oh yes, he’s a fine young man.” I remember thinking that it said that there might be more to the lad’s father than I was gathering from the tabloids, because raising a child properly in that milieu might is not so easy I think (in any case, rarely do the kids turn out like that). My mom and I spoke of this several times over the years. Since Trump’s political ascendancy I have deliberately avoided googling his family and figuring out which of his children it was.

2) In 2005 I began to understand how the oligarchy was looting the savings of America via the settlement system. I tried to expose it, and discovered that the institutions that should have been interested were either disinterested or adversarial. Exploring that subject gave birth to Deep Capture. Readers of this website will remember the stories from back then, how yellow was the journalism, how “NPC” was the babble through which I had to cut, so it does not bear repeating. There were but two exceptions.

One exception came from Bloomberg News. In 2006-2007, a producer there named “Gary Matsumoto” developed a half-hour documentary about me and my claims, called “Phantom Shares”. For months after its completion it faced opposition from within the Bloomberg News hierarchy, which refused to run it. A few months into that stall, I bumped into Mayor Bloomberg in a Washington, DC cocktail reception, and brought the subject up. To his great credit Mayor Bloomberg whipped a note-card and pen out of his pocket and took some notes on what I told him. Weeks later it ran on Bloomberg. It was nominated for but did not win an Emmy. Gary told me once that his great regret was he had complied with a request to cut the opening seconds, a clip of the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up to narration that pointed out that the failure of the large system had been brought about by the failure of one innocuous component in it, and that a man in Utah (me) was claiming that the same thing was going to happen in the US financial system due to the arcane process of “settlement” (precisely as in October, 2008 Dr. Greenspan would confirm had happened).

The other exception was Trump Magazine, which ran a story at roughly the same time (I think it was in those doldrums of several months between Matsumoto finishing “Phantom Shares” and Bloomberg News running it). Trump Magazine’s story about my claims regarding Wall Street was fair. It was not “favorable,” it did not say, “Byrne is right,” but it reported my claims in an accurate and straightforward way. That is to say, Trump Magazine practiced what used to be known as, “journalism.” And it did so while the entirety of the mainstream financial press corps was spewing NPC nonsense and remained doing so up until the summer of 2008, when all the yuck-yucks went silent and several vindication stories appeared. I have no idea whatsoever whether Donald J. Trump played any hand in the publication of that story. But I know he has never been close to Wall Street, nor a fan of it. Now that I have come to see more of him, it strikes me as plausible, however, that he did have a role. Yet, I wish to emphasize, I really have no evidence of it beyond what I just shared.

I have always wondered about the coincidence. The two earliest honest publications of my claims, without Chewbacca Defense spin, was accomplished by two press outlets controlled by wealthy, powerful men beyond the kinds of pressures that could be brought on normal publications and reporters: Bloomberg News and Trump Magazine. Does that tell us anything?

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, when I asked my thoughts about Donald J. trump, I never failed to begin by saying those two positive things before moving on to critiquing him. I am not sure they ever appeared, but I know they are there, somewhere in the footages.

Now I shall move to a more critical appraisal.

Trump’s psychology – Trump is the son of a dominant alpha man. There is a way to understand much of Trump’s quirkiness when he speaks. His is the voice of a beleaguered 7 year old speaking to his father: “Dad, my buildings are the classiest, my glitz is the glitziest, my hands are the biggest, my marble is the most-iest…..” I wish someone who knows him would give him a hug and say, “It’s OK, it’s OK. You are beyond having to do that now.”

Aesthetics – Superficial though it be, the first thing I must mention is that I don’t share Mr. Trump’s taste. A few years after my recovery, I went back to Trump Tower to show it to an Oxford friend, wanting to see his reaction. When we entered the public side he burst out in peals of laughter, exclaiming, “This is a noveau riche nightmare!” In his posh English accent he continued in imitation, “I know, let’s throw some pink marble over there, and some chrome here, and splash some more pink marble around the walls!” He found it gaudy, and made all the more so by Mr. Trump’s public insistence on how “classy” it was. One might fairly interpret Donald Trump’s singular taste as an expression of my previous point about his psychology: it is imperative to him that it be the glitziest, the busiest, the most outrageous, as an expression of his need to impress. That said, there is something mildly charming about it, too, something quintessentially American of Trump not to know any better. I have not been in the place for decades now, and do not know if it has changed.

More recently, however, I have been in the Trump Hotel in DC for meals (there is a superb sushi restaurant there: Sushi Kakazawa). Whether Trump’s sensibilities have matured, or he has better décor advisers now, his hotel in DC expresses a far more tasteful aesthetic. His instincts have been classicized. It is still Trump-classical, it is still busier and glitzier than it should be, but the classical shows through.

I am acquainted with a couple people in Trump’s circle, and with one I drew attention to Trump’s aesthetic sense. Interestingly, he responded that Trump’s taste is the taste of how a poor person thinks the taste of rich person should be. I asked whether Trump did that on purpose, self-consciously, as a way of connecting to poor people. His response: “No, that really is just Trump. He really does think think that glitziness is classy.”

Trump’s Business Practices – There was a point (after Trump’s Atlantic City dealings) in which legitimate businessmen in the US refrained from doing business with him, and he turned to other sources of capital.

When I first occasionally started mentioning Organized Crime in America I had to get used to people rolling their eyes and acting like they thought I had watched too many movies. When that happens, it always tells me that I am dealing with a novice. Newsflash: every person who has ever developed real estate in Manhattan, or for that matter, run a restaurant there, has done business with the Mob. In addition, the real estate industry has lobbied Congress and gotten itself special protection from money-laundering laws: foreigners can show up with cash and buy property, hold it a length of time, sell it, and thereby clean their money. The real estate lobby has paid off Congress to get itself all kinds of special treatment like that: look into the tax advantages of getting oneself certified as an official real estate professional, which enables one to deduct pretty much deduct anything one wishes. For that reason it would not surprise me at all if the stories of Russians buying condos in Trump Tower and flipping them a year and a day later are true, and Trump Tower was a laundering machine for Russian money. Yet after all the investigations that have been done into Trump, and the betrayals by his own people (such as Cohen), I think if there was anything directly linking him to it, it would have turned up by now.

That said, America elected a New York real estate developer. They knew what they were getting. If you don’t think that is how the laws governing real estate should work, talk to Congress. Until something emerges linking Trump to involvement in such crimes, all I see is a New York real estate developer doing what New York real estate developers do.

My deeper objection to Trump’s business practice is that by all accounts he made shafting contractors a regular feature of it. There is being a sharp operator, and there is doing what Trump did as a real estate developer to his electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, and other tradesmen. Sometimes people get stuck in business, but one should not build it into one’s operating model.

Trump shifted his business model to simple monetization of his name. The properties around the world that bear his name pay him a royalty to do so, creating the impression of a vast real estate empire without requiring the capital or headaches involved in actually owning a vast real estate empire. He also had a wildly successful TV show (I may be the only person in America who never saw it). These two business fed and supported each other. Those are good business instincts.

Candidacy – When Donald J. Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower and said things about “Mexico sending us their rapists” and followed it up shortly thereafter with diminution of John McCain’s war record on the grounds that he had been shot down and was thus not a hero, I took everything named “Trump” off the Overstock website. There were only a dozen or so products, but I had them removed.

I did so, I wish to note, even though I sympathize with his concerns about illegal immigration. An old friend of mine lives in San Diego in a “Weeds”-type suburbia, and over two decades I have seen her neighborhood turn from a typical American suburbia into one where one has to be cognizant of the true local power structure rather than such abstractions as, “the law”. As we strolled through it a few years ago she pointed out a couple homes that belong to people who are “connected” to the cartels and to whom neighbors pay deference in as simple a matter as where they park their cars, just as one has to do in Third World neighborhoods lacking in rule-of-law.

Liberalism is about “consent of the governed,” and the last I checked in the USA, “the governed” had not consented to abandoning-without-evidence the Westphalian nation-state system which has served the world well for a few centuries. I am from New Hampshire, and as a poet there once said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

In addition, I sympathize with Trump’s dislike of John McCain. Senator McCain and I once met and had an interesting conversation, but I was never a supporter. For one thing, McCain was the lone Republican among “the Keating Five”. Charles Keating ran and looted an S&L in Arizona, and whenever he needed to keep federal regulators at bay there were five US Senators he could call upon to run interference because he greased their palms with political donations: four were Democrats, but the Republican was John McCain. In addition, Senator McCain sponsored McCain-Feingold, a change in campaign financing laws that permitted unions to make unlimited political donations. Someone close to McCain told me that he did this by way of apology to the Left in the hope of keeping alive his vaunted aspiration to run for president someday, and that he never expected it to be upheld by the Supreme Court. Their decision to do so not only surprised him, it locked them into the Citizens United decision later so as to avoid a perverse outcome which said that unions could move unlimited cash into politics but corporations were prevented from doing so. For these two reasons I think McCain career as a Senator had a pernicious impact on the United States.

So if I sympathize with Mr. Trump’s concerns about controlling our own border, and for his attitude towards John McCain, why would I take anything named “Trump” off the Overstock website in the first few weeks of his campaign for president? The answer seems obvious, but in today’s age one should not take anything principled as “obvious”. The reasons are: one should not disparage the military service of a man who spent 6+ years as a POW nor disparage him for having been “shot down” (especially when one received deferments to avoid military service). And one should bend over backwards to avoid tickling latent racist sentiments while discussing legislation, even over matters of legitimate concern. I am just old enough to remember the fight for civil rights of the 1960’s, and the social consensus that was reached by 1970 on that score was that politicians should never, ever seek get votes by tickling racial sentiments, even slightly. There are legitimate ways to raise one’s concern over illegal immigration without speaking like that.

There is one last point I will make about the 2016 election. Historically I have made it a habit to be publicly charitable towards both parties’ candidates during presidential elections. For example, here is a clip of me on Fox’s Greta van Susteren show a few weeks before the election of 2012: when she asked me whether I supported Obama or Romney, I surprised her by being even-handed about both, but saying I would write in Ron Paul. I had two reasons for doing that: one is I am a small “l” libertarian and a small “r” republican, and Ron Paul understands and embodies the principles of our Constitution better than either candidate. But I confess at last, part of my public persona as a libertarian has been to avoid publicly taking sides with either party’s presidential candidate, because on rare occasion it has been my honor to have been asked to provide some tiny modicum of help in some federal matter (as I have recently publicly disclosed), and I have felt that I should follow the same rules that govern a military officer, who would never come out with public support for one major party candidate or the other.

I tried to do that in 2016, but failed. That is because I knew some things that I could not stomach, and when I blurted out on national TV something along the lines of, “Hillary Clinton belongs in an orange jumpsuit,” I was not just being colorful. I could not have lived with myself if I had given her any sort of mild endorsement, as I gave both Obama and Romney in 2012. And having done so with Hillary, I felt obliged to trash Candidate Trump and his business history a bit more harshly than I would have otherwise done.

Trump as President –The mainstream press forgets that it created President Trump. They wanted to set up a straw man whom Hillary could destroy on her path to the presidency, which they considered so right, natural, and just that it may as well have been a coronation. In the year leading up to the nomination they gave Donald Trump, the candidate they thought most beatable by Hillary, several billion dollars in free publicity. In the process they created a movement that got away from them (of this no one is more guilty than CNN). The embarrassing degree to which the mainstream press and the DNC were absolutely in the bag for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Saunders, and then the press was in the bag for her against Donald Trump, is a series of events that remains barely discussed since the Trump election. It has been flushed down the Orwellian memory hole that they created a movement that rolled over them.

In answer to criticisms such I have made above, Trump has pointed rightly point out such things as the fact that 1/3 of the women in migrant caravans to our southern border get raped (United Nations University puts its estimate at 60% – 80%). To a small degree makes me rethink the statement he made while announcing his candidacy for President: he had a point, but he made it offensively (and it was the deliberateness of the offensive that makes one suspect he is tickling sentiments he should not tickle). Senator McCain’s involvement in the piss-dossier revealed him to be precisely the unprincipled political actor at whom Trump was scoffing (in his typical blustery way). Most of all, Trump could answer many allegations of racism by pointing out that 36% of Black America now support him, and how good he has been for them economically, and because the Black community is starting to wake up to ways in which the Democratic Party has failed them all the way back to the days of slavery, and perhaps have grown weary of the Left’s tired narrative (“The world is comprised of fools and knaves, and our job is to protect the fools from the knaves,” as Dr. Sowell summarized).

Since he became President, Donald Trump has grown in my estimation in several ways. The executive in me responds well to things like his State of the Union addresses. Every State of the Union address of my adult lifetime has been filled with such banalities as, “I call on Congress to pass a law that doubles exports in five years! I call on Congress to pass a law that makes our children the best educated children in the world!” Aspirations (not plans) expressed to the accompaniment of House members of the same party jumping up and applauding with fervor. Instead, President Trump has delivered three excellent, business-like State of the Union addresses that reflect his background as a CEO.

I still have deep reservations about aspects of Trump’s management and decision-making. His current job is one that requires a temperament unlike what he displayed before becoming President. But he seems like a more sober and thoughtful man than he was when he started.

I think that Trump is set up to be the Herbert Hoover of the 21st century. Let me say now that when the systemic failure comes, it is not going to be Trump’s fault. Nor is it going to have been Obama’s fault. Nor Bush’s nor Bill Clinton’s. It will be the result of the fact that in the 20th century until about 1980 we discovered various political methods to loot each other’s pockets, but eventually found ways to block each other from continuing to do so. We got through the impasse when we found a group whose pockets could be looted and who could not object: the group of future humans. Alas, the future eventually has a way of showing up, and it has done so. We have put off the reckoning via the magic of a debt-based, fractionally-reserved, Keynesian-multiplied magic money tree financial system, and it will die the ignominious and deserving death of all magic-based systems. I think it will happen on Trump’s watch.

There is hope in that regard, incidentally. The US tax avoidance rate is 16%. We may be able to avoid a collapse by switching to blockchain-based Central Bank -issued digital currencies, which would make tax compliance largely perfect. As a classical liberal I am not crazy about providing government a way to collect more tax: on the other hand, I am a rule-of-law kind of fellow, and what’s good for illegal immigration should also apply to tax collection. If the laws say that the government should be collecting $X in taxes but it is only collecting 84% of $X in practice, a blockchain-based monetary system could fix that, and provide the revenue our government needs to get through without a collapse.

Otherwise, I hope Trump has people in the Treasury researching dual-sovereign-currency alternatives. We will need it when the deal goes down.

Some component of my improved appraisal of Trump comes from seeing what he has done with, by, and to the press. When I look back at what I and a band of fellow-travelling pajamahadeen went through in 2005-2008, one thing I of which I was always confident was that we would never see anything again like that in my lifetime. I was frequently told there would never be anyone who would subject himself to it. But I confess what Trump has gone through from the Newspeak press has exceeded anything I saw in our mitzvah against Wall Street. I can only stand back in admiration for a 72 year old man who has stood up to the distortion and vilification which I have seen thrown at President Trump in the last three years.

Racism – Perhaps my deepest reservations about Donald J. Trump concern matters of race. This is central, in my view, to evaluating any politician, for I believe we live in an age that is racist (or “racialist”, to borrow an AliG-ism) and growing increasingly so. To explore this topic I must distinguish among “Klan-racism,” “Archie-Bunker-racism,” and “Lefty-racism”.

When I consider all the times in my lifetime I have heard a White say in private something, “Klan-racist,” I can count them on one hand. A guy at a pool in Ocean City, Maryland in 1981. Another man in a bike shop trueing the wheels on my Cannondale as I bicycled through Indiana in 1991 or so, who turned out to have a copy of “American Eagle” (the Klan’s magazine) on his workbench. About five years ago, in a reception I was attending in Indiana, an affluent White woman crumby things about Hispanics, Catholics, and gays. In sum, Klan-racism just does not happen much in my experience. I grew up in New England, but I have lived all over the country, including the South. I understand that behind closed doors in the South such sentiments are expressed, but I am a Yankee, and perhaps when I am in the South people keep it in check around me. I understand that my lifetime experience may be skewed in such ways. Yet whatever the reason, encountering Klan-racism has been as rare as a comet in my life’s experience. When I have, it has also been interesting has been to learn (on the two occasions I had opportunity to explore it with its holder), is that the hatred was tied up with much more complicated feelings about the object of the hatred.

What about “Archie-Bunker-racism”? Sadly, that is not so rare. There are people who trade in stereotypes, who pre-judge others based on their ethnicity or background, and such prejudice expresses itself in their thought and speech. I am thinking of a man I once knew who spent his life’s savings over two years’ of preparation for a criminal trial, but when he arrived in court the case was thrown out in an hour: he told me later, “I should have just gotten me one of them New York Jew lawyers from the beginning.” It was unseemly, and based on that and another similar remark I broke off all contact with him, and have not communicated for 30 years. But I am not sure that qualifies as hatred: if anything, it seemed to express a vague admiration (as Archie Bunker often did in those old shows, while still displaying his predilection for viewing the world through stereotypes). In any case, it seems categorically different to me than Klan-racism, in that it is more ignorant than hateful. And as I say, I do think there is a lot of various forms of prejudice floating around: what is sadder yet is how selective is the outrage in public discourse about such prejudice.

The third kind of racism, Lefty-racism, is not only prevalent in our culture, it passes without comment. I remember watching one of Hollywood’s Lethal Weapon movies in a theater with a Black friend, and an hour into the movie he jumped up and pulled me out, pointing out that while the Mel Gibson character had all kinds of depth, development, and history, the Danny Glover character had been running around for the whole movie shouting, “Riggs! Riggs! You crazy bastard, Riggs!” About a decade ago I stopped watching Saturday Night Live, wondering, “Does anyone else notice that there is never a Black character who is just, ‘a character’? There is the Black transvestite spaceman, there is the outrageous Black TV host, there is the Black crackhead discussing politics…. But why is there never just a normal Black person, even in skits with roles for people who are simply normal? What does this say about how New Yorkers see Black people?”

Lefty-racism goes hand-in-hand with what I see as the most common, toxic, and pernicious form of racism today in our society, that named in an insightful phrase uttered by George W. Bush (and which would be better remembered had it been uttered by anyone else): “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. I have sat in academic environments and heard things said that shocked me to my toes, uttered by well-intentioned but bigoted Lefties, unaware of and uncritical towards the background assumptions which must be held to make sense of the sentiments they express.

Unfortunately, a proper understanding of racism is gummed up in a discourse that holds without argument such canards as, “Only White people can be racist because racism = prejudice + power.” A moment’s reflection will show that discrimination = prejudice + power, and that racism and prejudice are largely synonymous. Thus, discrimination = racism + power. Therefore, whether or not they have power, of course it is possible for non-White people to be racist. Such elemental truths are lost on youth who have enjoyed years of indoctrination in our universities.

Given my view of racism…. what about Trump?

Clearly he is not Lefty-racist.

Is he Klan-racist? Some allege this, and find proof in such events as Klan-racists showing up at his inauguration weekend. But the last I checked, a president cannot decide who rents hotel ballrooms in Washington, DC. In any case, I recall reading that the 150 or so Klan-types who showed up were outnumbered by the members of the press who wanted to cover and amplify it.

There were Mr. Trump’s left-footed comments on the Charlottesville incident: no, there were not good people on both sides. There were people who want to bring down hateful symbols of treasonous slave-promoting thugs but who do not understand (due to a weak education in the principles of liberalism provided by our government school system) that the answer to hateful speech is more and better speech. On the other side, there were people who wanted to protect and safeguard symbols of homage to treasonous defenders of slavery, symbols erected not at the conclusion of the Civil War, but erected at height of the Progressive Movement when Klan-resurgence reached its apogee under the nation’s racist-in-chief Woodrow Wilson (the patron saint of Progressivism). Too few of our government-school-indoctrinated youth understand that the Democratic Party was the party of Indian-killing, the party of slavery, and that the Klan was the militant wing of the Democratic Party. Therefore these protests against Southern statues amount to Democrats wanting to rip down statues of Democrats: that is a fight in which I, for one, do not have a dog. Still, I winced when I heard Trump’s statement about there being good people on both sides of that debate, and wondered if it was another moment of react-speak-think, or a dog-whistle, as some claim.

I am aware of claims that this is was a distortion of what President Trump said, but I lack the bandwidth (both energetic and literal) to research it properly at this moment. Since I published a draft of this essay, I have been flooded with requests that I study this transcript, or see various videos on the subject. If I do so, they claim, I will see that Mr. Trump was actually trying to be generous and peace-making. I will do so when I do not have to walk 20 minutes to a dusty village to reach a 1998-style Internet hookup, will find the original video clip, and give my thoughts.

Is our president Archie-Bunker-racist? If I am not mistaken, they are both from Queens. They seem to share a certain cultural indifference towards appearing racist which may be a function of growing up in Queens in the time and place that he did. One wonders if that indifference is a calculated signal, and if so, to whom the signal is intended.

Maybe it is intended as a signal to closet racists everywhere. Maybe.

Or maybe it is a signal to people who are not racist, but who feel that the “racist” charge now gets thrown around like a Frisbee by those whose arguments do not otherwise hold water, and in doing so are turning a serious charge into just another technique of control-freaks. If Trump is sending a signal that he will not be cowed by such PC nonsense…. then I am sure there are many Americans, tired of PC bullying, who welcome it.

In conclusion on this point, I think President Trump should be quite a bit more careful about his speech whenever it touches on matters of racial sensitivity. One does not have to kowtow to the control-freaks of political correctness to understand that by showing care one displays a sensitivity to our nation’s checkered history on these matters, and a concern for those who are not White, and this does not make one weak.

In fact, if there is one thing I could ask of Donald Trump, it would be to prepare a serious talk on racism and racial disparities in American history, and the respective roles that have been played in our history by the Republican and Democratic parties, and delivering it in front of a sympathetic Black audience who is already beyond the tired orthodoxy that has kept Black people down. Who knows, it may give Trump an opportunity to provide the leadership on that score that has been missing for decades.

Conclusion – I have laid out all my thoughts about Trump’s psychology, his style, his business history, his candidacy, his presidency, and his racial attitudes. I now again emphasize that it all has precisely 0 to do with my coming forward as I did to the authorities and on national television. I came forward because I (practically alone among Americans) knew the abject falseness of the entire Russian Collusion narrative, and beyond that, the degree to which (as I said on television in August) our national security apparatus has been hijacked to deliver political ends.

I wish the fellow did not have such an infinitely high appraisal of himself as to foreclose deliberation over this, or such a tin ear when it came to discussing that… But what has been going on for three years has been wildly anti-Constitutional, so I came forward. It’s that simple. I would have done it for President Barack Obama if I had seen happening to him what happened to Trump, and the truth is, I would likely have done it more quickly. I bent over backwards so as to avoid any accusation of partisanship, and the rest of my life I will wonder if I bent over too far, and delayed too long in coming forward, and cost our nation months or years of unnecessary anguish. I do hope I did not wait too long, or else I am going to be backpacking around Asia for a long time.

But I somehow think we are going to see our way through this. I think the Department of Justice is going to save the republic just as our War Department did in the 1940’s. As Bismarck said, “God has a special Providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” That may even extend to Donald J. Trump.

So in conclusion: My copy of the Constitution does not say, “…unless Trump.” That’s my full and thorough analysis of the moment.