Nothing To Bragg About

When will we ever be rid of the scourge of Donald J. Trump?

Just when his star was finally fading and the prospect of an alternative GOP candidate for the 2024 presidential race was gaining steam (i.e. Gov. Ron DeSantis) the lunatic who George Soros put in the Manhattan DA’s office comes up with this absolute joke of an indictment.

The “34 counts” consist of three misdemeanors, where the statute of limitations has already expired. These putative offenses are then each cut and pasted 11 times to match the monthly reimbursement checks to Michael Cohen for the hush payments he made to the Donald’s lady friends with respect to dalliances two decades earlier.

These three repetitive “books and records” violations include Cohen’s invoice for reimbursement (X11), its entry into the Trump Organization’s general ledger (X12) and the latter’s receipt of a check from the Donald to cover the payments (X11).

In turn, this no-count minutia is transformed into a felony aimed to bring down a former president for the first time in American history and the leading GOP candidate for 2024 by pure legal legerdemain. That is, the boosting of these stale misdemeanors into felonies owing to an alleged bad intent to hide something actually jail-worthy. And in this case, repeated 34 times for good measure.

…..with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.

What the additional crime was, the indictment does not say. Bragg just assured that we would find out by the time of the trial, which is not likely to occur until after the GOP presidential primaries are over!

Of course, the unnamed crime is not hard to guess. It is failure to report these perfectly legal hush money payments as campaign expenditures. That is, offenses like the $113,000 civil fine Hillary paid when the ample money her campaign supplied to Christopher Steele to concoct the RussiaGate dossier was falsely reported as an expense for “legal services”.

As far as we can tell, Alvin Bragg may well be as stupid as his indictment. But that doesn’t excuse the whole of the Democratic Party and a good part of official Washington and the mainstream media for tolerating this hideous stunt. Bragg should have been shutdown long ago by a thundering chorus from Washington saying,

“….campaign promise or not, don’t you dare tamper with the very viability of democratic governance in this manner”.

Indeed, the whole escapade is so far off the wall as to make you want to don your tinfoil hat. That is to say, is the Donald secretly paying Bragg to undertake this madness?!

After all, if things go according to plan and a trial doesn’t happen until June 2024 at the earliest, it will literally be worth billions of campaign advertising in the run-up to the GOP convention. Indeed, given the backdrop of soaring crime in the Big Apple on Bragg’s watch, the sheer triviality, hypocrisy and persecutorial bad faith of the DA’s case will surely hand Trump the nomination by acclaim.

So to repeat: How is it that the Dems, media and Washington establishment, including the RINO poseur who passes for the GOP’s Senate leader (i.e. Mitch McConnell), have not called foul?

Unfortunately, the explanation lies in the nether reaches of human behavior. The fact is, the Donald is so toxic, such an unhinged narcissistic braggart, and so endlessly bombastic, insulting and thuggish that the other kids in the political sandbox simply refuse to play nicely with him; and, in fact, never stop looking for ways to kick-him off the playground entirely. In that sense, this is just one more iteration of the impeachment charade.

Of course, it is not considered kosher or seemly to go after a political opponent hammer-and-tong because you think he/she/they have an obnoxious personality or even a condemnable character. And that’s especially the case when you stretch the boundaries of the constitution and basic political decorum to the limit in order to do so.

So the establishment has concocted an alleged substantive case to camouflage the sheer hate that lies at the center of the prosecution. To wit, it is alleged that the Donald is a dangerous dog-whistling racist and a stooge of Vladimir Putin who endangers America’s very national security.

In effect, these bogus policy arguments have become thoroughly entwined in the personality-driven Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and that’s where the true evil of this entire anti-Trump campaign lies.

That is to say, what needs to be addressed in Washington is—

  • The hideous yet unnecessary proxy war with Russia that threatens to escalate to a nuclear confrontation;
  • The $900 billion runaway defense budget that is enabling Deep State apparatchiks to supersede the rule of constitutional democracy by literally buying their way to control with taxpayer money;
  • A level of overall fiscal incontinence that puts to shame the big spenders of times of yore including LBJ and FDR; and
  • A rogue central bank that has enabled the above and has impregnated the US economy with bubbles, booby-traps and distortions that threaten to end capitalist prosperity as we have known it.

Yet none of these pressing matters are being even remotely addressed because Washington is submerged in TDS-incubated rancor. In the case of foreign policy, it can’t even see straight.

The sweeping Sanctions War is utterly failing, even as it is literally destroying the dollar-based international payments and trading system. Likewise, the military portion of the proxy war against Russia has turned Ukraine into an incineration chamber for the testing and discharge of tens of billions of dollars worth of NATO ammo and weapons.

Indeed, the death and destruction NATO has enabled in Ukraine is one of the sickest, most criminal undertakings by any nation during the past 75 years. Yet it could all be ended in a relative heartbeat if it conceded that there is nothing at stake there except a historic territorial dispute that has no bearing on America’s homeland security or any of Washington’s hypocritical pieties about the rule of law and sanctity of borders.

In fact, rational people would disavow any intention to put NATO on Russia’s doorstep, a mindless move that the Washington-empowered NATO general secretary advocated yet again this week. They would also accept a partition of the non-nation of Ukraine, which it voters have effectively embraced in numerous geographically polarized elections since the boot-heels of communism, which held it together after 1922, were lifted in 1991.

But the powers that be in the Biden Administration and on Capitol Hill are so mesmerized by the TDS that they cannot even see the obvious way forward. America’s disintegrating foreign policy is literally hostage to a loathing for Vladimir Putin that is little more than a second-hand hatred for Donald Trump.

In this context, the military/industrial/intelligence complex accumulates more power and resources than even President Eisenhower could have dreamed of when he made his prescient warning in his farewell address of 1961.

In the case of DA Bragg, you don’t even need a tinfoil hat to suspect that he is a tool of the Deep State. Or at least a useful idiot.

More than anything else, the Deep State fears that the Donald may have learned just enough during his first desultory sojourn in the Oval Office to actually threaten their rule should he pull a Grover Cleveland. So there is literally nothing they will not do to keep him out of the White House.

On the other end of the governance agenda, we have our rogue central bank—about which a WSJ story today tells you all you need to know. In order to peg and manipulate interest rates, when the free market would do just fine, these foolish people are now bringing coals to Newcastle.

That is, the Fed is borrowing via its O/N RRP facility more than $2.2 trillion night -in-and-night out from money market funds, and then paying them 4.8% interest for the privilege. Yet why the hell should the Federal Reserve—which has minted $8 trillion of fresh cash since 2000—be borrowing even a single dime?

Moreover, how is all that massive central bank borrowing at a respectable rate occurring when regular folks are getting an average of just 0.48% on their own bank deposits?

Well, there is actually no mystery. All of this random slinging of fiat cash is being done to enforce the Fed’s pointless “policy” targets.

That’s right. The dozen geniuses who control the most prol ific printing press in human history are each night borrowing more than $2.2 trillion of funds they absolutely do not need merely to prove they are in charge.

Fed O/N RRP Outstandings, 2018 to 2023


On the fiscal front, there is apparently no one in charge at all. For instance, Medicaid is supposed to be a assistance program for poor people, but enrollments have gone from 55 million on the eve of the pandemic to 101 million today. That’s nearly one-third of the entire US population.

In the process, Medicaid has become the nation’s #1 payer for nursing home care, mental health services and maternity coverage, where 2 out of every 5 children now born in the US are Medicaid patients from the get-go.

Is anyone doing anything about what will soon be the $1 trillion per year Medicaid program or what will be $8 trillion per year in total government transfer payments, or the $25 trillion of new deficits that are built into the current 10-year federal budget window?

Not at all. They are busy either trying to nominate Donald Trump for a job which he is utterly unqualified to hold or attempting to subvert the constitution in order to insure that he doesn’t.

For the nation, that is truly nothing to brag about. And DA Bragg ain’t the half of it.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.