Fat Man and Little Boy: The Return of Chris Christie and The End of Donald Trump
For what it’s worth I’ve more or less concluded that it’s over for Donald Trump just as it its seemingly just beginning for Chris Christie.
No political life goes on for forever. “In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times,” said one great Briton. But eventually Enoch Powell is right. “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” (I myself am particularly partial to Abraham Lincoln’s “this too shall pass.”)
Still, with Trump, his end seems particularly drawn out — almost as if his fall is portending a restructuring of our entire macroeconomic reality. Trump marked seventy-seven years on this Earth this past week. That’s a long time to be around and I’m frankly more than a little shocked he made it that long with his diet of McDonald’s and Diet Cokes. (His father, Fred Trump, made it to 93 but his paternal grandfather went out at 49. ) Give the Donald his due. He lived a life and he did it his way, albeit bootstrapped (and at times, even deluged) with foreign cash.
You’ve also got to appreciate the irony that for a man who hated beards being laid low by the impressively bearded Jack Smith. If the Smith takedown of Trump seems cinematic consider that Smith is married to a filmmaker.
Here’s how this likely went down.
Trump showed off “his boxes” to spies visitors who came to visit him at Mar-A-Lago. He had sixty-four boxes. Which is a lot. Do you own sixty four of anything dear reader?
That information contained within those boxes we don’t precisely know but we do know it in the broadest of strokes — something about the plans to attack Iran, a list of our confidential assets, all that good stuff.
The obvious first derivative of who benefited from this sort of thing is the Saudis (and their Netanyahu-friendly counterparts who love talk of war with Iran without actually going to war with Iran).
Yes, we’ve seen this one before. Take your pick. A war for oil. A war for Israel. Or a war for oil for Israel. All this “despite” Iran oil sloshing about. Who, dear reader, do you suppose was running the black market?
We can see the sudden turn against Trump from Haaretz as indicative of the deep state Israelis coming home. So too the Israeli support for Chris Christie who, while never shy of the necessity of jailing Netanyahu asset Charles Kushner, managed not only to tease out distinctions within Israeli assets but even divisions even within la famille Kushner who seemingly have little patience for father Charles and his son Jared.
Will Christie get his man? Who knows! But it’ll make for compelling watching.
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The Saudis needed golf courses and Trump needed the Saudis. He was only too happy to oblige the Saudis. Trump correctly intuited that the Saudis could wind up doing a kind of hostile takeover of PGA Tour. That is, before the new anti-trust moment that is seeing the Department of Justice step up to take down the merger.
“The war in Ukraine has precipitated a massive wealth transfer, hundreds of billions of dollars, from consumers in democratic countries to oil-producing states, especially Saudi Arabia,” said former congressman and State Department official Tom Malinowski. “Do they plan to use any of this windfall to help us support and reconstruct Ukraine, or will they waste all of it on vanity cities in the desert and political influence operations in the United States? This should matter greatly to us.”
It’s hard to overstate how much money the Saudis have made. “Saudi state oil company Aramco made a record $161.1 billion in profit last year, up 47 percent from 2021,” writes Josh Rogan in the Washington Post.
What, or more precisely who, did they buy? They bought the President of the United States. Or at least rented him. And for what? For golf? Really? Really.
Now I’m not a hater of the Saudis. Frankly I think we could cut a deal with them that would make both our countries a lot stronger. I still hold out hope for such an arrangement and have written about it.
Within the Republican Party there are those who can see that Trump is done and there are those who can’t (or won’t). My sense is that those who are most unable to see clearly are those who live in heavily Trump congressional districts.
The U. S. deep state wants to have a horse in every primary so that they have options lest the 80 year old Biden fail to make it. (Oh you thought Cornel West was sincere did you?)
My guess is that that person in the Republican Party will be Chris Christie who will give the GOP a fighting chance in the suburbs where most of the talented mobsters (or at least their children) have made good.
For while Trump may have had the Art of the Deal ghostwritten Christie was its practitioner. The decision of a prosecutor is to decide who to prosecute, and who not to prosecute. Christie himself talks about how they worked at the Department of Justice, not the Department of Prosecutions. Keep that in mind when you see America’s oligarchs donating to Chris Christie. Are they donating? Or paying him tribute? Maybe they ought to pay him tribute. After all, a prosecutor can help you get out of a jam even if you get “on the right side of the v.”
Now Charles, haven’t you argued that Donald Trump won’t go to jail? Yes, I’ve argued that very thing and I suspect Trump’s fate will be that of Nicolas Sarkozy — house arrest. Mar-A-Lago’s not quite Elba but it’ll do in a pinch.
Why he’ll even get to golf. Did you know that Trump made $82.5 million from his properties in Ireland and Scotland during his presidency?
How he was allowed to do that gives us a sense of another Nicola — Nicola Sturgeon. Sturgeon blocked an Unexplained Wealth Order ordered by the Scottish Green Party. Now she’s arrested by the British deep state.
A friend of mine told me that the secret to owning a golf course was a bit like horses or vineyards. Start with a lot of money first. It’s even better if that money belongs to other countries.
My guess?
Taking down Trump will reset our relationship with Saudi Arabia. It’s long overdue.
