Tainted presidency

Exactly one week from today, Donald Trump will take the oath of office to become the 45th president of the USA. Unlike the two previous ceremonies that marked each term of the Barack Obama administration, the podium will be held by a man who not only does not command any respect from nearly half of the American people, but who is now considered by many as an illegitimate president who owes his appointment thanks to the hacking that took place against prominent members of the Democratic Party, a conclusion now agreed upon by many.

It was bad enough to see a man known for his furious rantings and “tweets” claim to be the legitimate president elect of an entire nation despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million votes, but that’s the way the US democracy works (perhaps they should start calling it something else instead of a democracy). However, the nearly total agreement between US intel government agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, blaming Russian interference in the US presidential elections to the point at which such foreign meddling in US internal political affairs may have actually influenced the outcome in favor of Donald Trump, casts serious doubt over the validity of the triumph claimed by Donald Trump, to the point that some are already calling it a rigged election, rigged for the first time in US history by a foreign power using sophisticated malware in order to make just enough voters sway towards Trump giving him the presidency. This is deadly serious stuff built on a swell of evidence. And a growing number of Americans are becoming convinced that it is more than obvious that the target of cyber attacks was Hillary Clinton, the end purpose was to make her lose the US presidential election. Some as US Senator John McCain have gone so far as to call the Russian cyberintrusions an act of war that most certainly will go unpunished unless Barack Obama in the few days remaining in office wants to start a nuclear war with a country armed to the teeth with sophisticated nuclear missiles and capable of turning the USA into radioactive rubble.

Was the meddling of a foreign superpower inside the US presidential election enough to influence the outcome of the result and thus undermine forever and for good American democracy as we all used to know it? Perhaps. Would Donald Trump have lost without the help of a foreign country, a helping hand which by the way he asked for it in public with his own words? Perhaps. Unfortunately, these are things that cannot be quantified precisely. Putting some numbers to provide some solid answers would require a sophisticated Gallup-style statistical polling to determine how many voters changed their minds at the last minute because of all the materials leaked after previously being obtained as a result of the hacking, and even if this indeed happened it will not deprive Donald Trump of his claim to the presidency, however illegitimate it may be. At the very least, the results of the US presidential election held on November 2016 should have been declared null and void by the US Congress, with an interim US president appointed by Congress while new presidential elections are carried out once the facts of the hacking become better known to the general public. But this will not happen, the US democracy never had any provision to deal with these types of contingencies. That’s the way the US democracy works.

In the horse racetracks, if a winning horse is found to have been doped with performance enhancing drugs in order to make that horse win as was the case back in 2013 with the Godolphin doping scandal (one of the most powerful teams in horse racing was involved in a huge doping scandal involving 11 champion horses, whereby Team Godolphin, under the instructions of their head trainer, had being injected their horses with banned anabolic steroids for at least ten year), the horse is stripped of its crown, the championship title is given to the horse next in line, and the owner of the horse is headed to jail. But in the US presidential election, even if the election is found to have been rigged or if something illegal changed the outcome, the crooked winner still gets the US presidency in spite of the manner in which he gets it. And the power of the nuclear launch codes that goes along with it.

If indeed the 2016 United States election interference by Russia won Donald Trump his presidency, if he were a gentleman he would refuse to accept the presidency under these conditions and instead of showing up on January 20th for his inauguration he would ask Congress to appoint a temporary president until such time as new elections can be held in the USA. But if there is one thing that Donald Trump has proven over and over is that he is no gentleman, as evident by his disparaging treatment of women, Mexicans, the news media and all those who do not support him entirely.

On a previous entry in this blog entitled A question of legitimacy published here January 3 2017, the issue was raised on the fact that, due to the unusual circumstances surrounding the sabotage of the Democratic Party by a deliberate and well planned cyber attack hacking their computers to dig out and spread around the USA whatever dirt or suspicious unethical things that could be found thanks to the illegal hacking precisely on the few previous days before the election, thereby changing the outcome of the USA presidential election, there was a growing number of Americans, including some who voted for Donald Trump, convinced that Trump will actually become an illegitimate president.

Today, precisely on this Friday 13th, well respected Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis for the first time in a headlines grabber pointed his finger directly at Donald Trump stating that he doesn't see Donald Trump as legitimate president, considering him in effect a phony, an usurper. The direct accusation laid out against Donald Trump by Congressman Lewis is clear: “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton”. And he is not the only one. There are many others, such as documentary filmmaker Michael Moore who since November 12th 2006 has also called Donald Trump an “illegitimate president” while making an unexpected appearance at Trump Tower ahead of a protest which took place in New York City. The list of those Americans who are becoming convinced that Donald Trump shouldn't take the oath of office because of the illegitimate way in which he "won" the election is growing by leaps and bounds. Even outside the USA, prominent politicians such as past Mexican president Vicente Fox have also stated without a doubt (November 16th) that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. Vicent Fox should know what he is talking about; he was the first Mexican who coming out of an opposition party overthrew the long ruling PRI party that had held the presidency in Mexico for seven decades resorting mostly to a long history of fraud in the ballot boxes and control of the election procedures until the Mexicans got fed up and by exercising for the very first time true democracy in Mexico pulled the PRI out of the presidency. Commentator Paul Abrams of the Huffington Post has also made a roundup of several reasons of why Donald Trump is not only unfit to become the next president of the USA, he shouldn't be taking the oath of office to begin with, due to his illegitimacy.

An illegitimate president is no different from a crook who enters into a house by night and takes away what does not belong to him. He is no different from a weasel who commits fraud against naive people who were unaware of his intentions and methods, he is no different from a Latin American dictator who believes he has a right to seize power by whatever means because he is better than everybody else and is used to consider everybody else as pygmies and his obedient servants.

Even with an illegitimate presidency, if the usurper had been someone like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at least he would have been tolerable considering all his efforts are directed towards the well being of his fellow citizens. But Donald Trump is quite the opposite, he is no Abraham Lincoln nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not by a long shot.

It should be a cause of grave concern even to those who voted for Donald Trump and still support him the recent claim that besides the hacking that took place against the Democrats, directed at derailing the hopes of Hillary Clinton to become president, there may have also been a sophisticated hacking directed at the Republicans and specifically against Trump himself. If the Russian cyber hackers were smart enough to penetrate the computers used by the Democrats and even Hillary Clinton herself, why should they not do exactly the same thing against Trump himself? Surely by his continuous use of Twitter, Trump has exposed himself by a huge amount of time to be spied upon by the master hackers of the planet, not to derail his presidential candidacy but to collect data on him which could be used as extortion material against him forcing him to comply or else all the dirty stuff they could now have in their hands would be used this time against him, threatening to expose him in a series of major scandals if President Trump refuses to comply with the wishes or commands of those who possess incriminating or scandalous materials against him.

Recently, the chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies presented President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump. The two-page summary, first reported by CNN, was presented as an appendix to the intelligence agencies’ report on Russian hacking efforts during the election, the officials said. Intelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and informed that the agencies were actively investigating it. Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Mr. Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly. The author of the memos is thought to be Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with MI-6, who once served in Moscow. After Mr. Steele retired in 2009, he founded a private firm called Orbis Business Intelligence in London. Former C.I.A. officials described him as an expert on Russia who is well respected in the spy world. All this has been dismissed, but no one in the intelligence communities is saying that besides Hillary Clinton and her team, Donald Trump and his team was not also a target of the same clever hackers.

Just recently, Miss Hungary, model Kata Sarka, 30, claims married Donald Trump invited her to his Moscow hotel suite after the 2013 Miss Universe pageant where a “dodgy dossier” claims he frolicked with prostitutes. She also claims that the two met after the Miss Universe pageant in the Russian capital, that she kept Trump’s business card and showed it to a Hungarian tabloid, and that during Trump’s stay it is alleged that he watched as prostitutes urinated on one another while on the bed in a ‘golden showers’ routine, all this as part of a dossier alleging that Trump’s lewd sexual behaviour in Russia was recorded by the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies and held as ‘kompromat’, or damaging information which it has used or will be used to blackmail Trump when all that information on him becomes handy. If these and even more dirty things happened in the personal private life of Donald Trump, and through his constant use of a smartphone or laptop computer he was dumb enough to share this info with some of his friends, then it is almost a sure bet that the hackers have all the details. Which would mean that the same hackers who cost Hillary Clinton her presidency may also have Trump himself by the throat, which means that the Russian government could have the president of the USA at its mercy, ready to do their biding or else! And on top of this, if Donald Trump is considered by many to be an illegitimate president, this makes it even more disgusting that the highest man in office may be the subject of one extortion after another based upon facts of his private life which would make the worldwide headlines.

In spite of what Donald Trump has stated against Mexicans considering them as rapists, drug traffickers and criminals, Mexico has many distinguished world class intellectuals and academicians. Well known Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, quoting from a famous phrase used after Hitler's invasion of Poland that exhibited the futility of the failed policies of appeasement (especially as was the case with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Munich agreement) has stated that “Tyrants are not be appeased, they must be confronted directly”. And well known Mexican analyst and commentator Enrique Sarmiento has concluded, after analyzing and studying the things that went on in the first news conference of Donald Trump held on Wednesday January 11 2017, that Donald Trump is mentally unstable, and has stated so in his column entitled “Jaque Mate” under the article “Precio administrado”. If these Mexican intellectuals are right even just a little bit, Americans should have cause for concern for they will be giving next Friday January 20th the nuclear codes to a deranged man who will have at his fingertips the awesome power to unleash World War Three, which may very well be the last world war that will be waged by mankind before it falters into oblivion.