The Cliffs of Mueller

Trump before a rambling 2-hour speech at CPAC

Remember back in 2014 and 2015 when Donald Trump was still flirting with a presidential campaign simply as a gimmick to increase his leverage as a reality TV star with NBC and possibly launch his own media network?

Back when he was still fanning the flames of discredited, racist "birther" theories about President Obama on Fox News and demanding that the former constitutional law professor produce academic transcripts from Columbia to prove that he'd graduated.

This of course was well before Michael Cohen revealed publicly under oath that Trump had ordered his attorneys to send letters to the University of Pennsylvania, the College Board (SAT's) and other schools he attended threatening them with legal action if they released his own academic transcripts to the media. 

Such mind-boggling hypocrisy hardly mattered to then-candidate Trump, who never actually expected, or wanted to win the 2016 presidential race - despite his ceaseless stream of hot-air TV soundbites, juvenile insults and crackpot, pseudo-political rhetoric.

He was in the race simply because he thought it was a cool way to line his pockets.

As journalist Michael Wolff noted in an excerpt of his 2018 book 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House' published in the January 8, 2018 issue of New York magazine:

"As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself  was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all had never been to win. 'I can be the most famous man in the world.' he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities."

Stunned Hillary Clinton supporters on 11/8/16 

No need to rehash that surreal November 8, 2016 election night, we all know what happened and it seems like we've been waking up to the aftermath everyday since.

According to Wolff, Melania Trump cried when she heard the news that her husband won, not because she was happy either.

Don Jr. allegedly later told a close friend that his father "looked as if had seen a ghost." 

The rest, as they say is history.

Two years after Trump's inauguration was overshadowed by the largest nationwide protests in American history, the fallout from the conclusion of Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation has landed in Washington, D.C. with a thud.

For millions of Americans, the release of the widely-anticipated special counsel report was like an excruciating end to a seemingly endless two-year wait.

Because, in part, we now know it could still be weeks before a heavily-redacted version of the report is released to the public so politicians and people alike can read it for themselves and form their own conclusions about its contents.

Instead of having to endure the current Attorney General Bob Barr trying to substitute his own, edited 4-page summary of the Mueller report for the real thing.

Which, Barr insists, absolves Trump of any wrongdoing.

The Navy patrol boat reaches the scorched
ruins of Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now

Which isn't all that surprising of course, and not just because Barr is a longtime Republican.

He's the former AG under George HW Bush who, well before he was nominated to replace Jeff Sessions, famously sent a memo to the Department of Justice detailing his belief that a sitting president cannot be indicted while in office due in part to his sweeping executive powers.

There are times when it seems as if Trump's emergence onto the national political scene was like the beginning of a long, ominous trip up a dark, unknown river.

And I've begun to feel like one of the doomed crew members on the battered U.S. Navy PBR patrol boat making its way up the Nung river towards the Cambodian border in director Francis Ford Coppola's epic 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now.



Only instead of the delusional and dangerous former U.S. Army Colonel Kurtz waiting in his creepy jungle fortress at the end of the journey, he's been inside the boat the whole time.

I suppose I wasn't the only one who secretly hoped the Mueller report would somehow derail Trump's train wreck presidency - who knows, there may be more inside the report than we know.

Mueller is nothing if not painstakingly thorough, and the actual contents of the allegedly 300-puls page report are still unknown.

But in the meantime like many Americans, I'll just have to be patient and endure Trump's smug preening and inaccurate claims that he's been "totally exonerated" by a report no one in the White House or in Congress has even read yet.

Hopefully the Mueller report gets released sooner rather than later so the court of public opinion's ruling can be decided by the public instead of Bob Barr.

He can keep his partisan Cliff Notes - I want to read it for myself.

Costco Confession

Ex-Trump fixer / attorney Michael Cohen testifies in
front of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday

This past Wednesday I left work early to make a 4pm appointment to get the oil changed in my SUV over at Midas.

The manager there is a young guy named Rob who's really cool, knows his stuff and is always honest and upfront about pricing and service needs - so I like to bring my business there.

My trusty Honda SUV is nine years-old and coming up on 66,000 miles and it's in good shape.

Like most Hondas it's been reliable, reasonable on gas and the only reasons it's ever in the shop is for oil changes, tire rotations, or the occasional new battery or windshield wiper blades.

A couple headlight bulbs have petered out now and then, but I learned how to change those myself (amazing what you can learn on YouTube) and they're pretty cheap at an AutoZone or on Amazon.

The oil change itself went pretty quick, I watched highlights of Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony (pictured above) in the waiting area while the mechanic was doing his thing - and he took me back in the garage area to show me a screw that was embedded in my rear passenger-side tire.

Fortunately I purchased the tires at Costco, so they came with a pretty generous warranty that covers the tires up to 70,000 miles with some restrictions depending on the wear and depth on the tire tread - basically if a tire gets damaged from a road hazard, they'll replace it for free.*

(* Note: I don't make any money from this blog, nor do I accept ads, so just to be clear, that's not some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign for Costco, it's just my experience. And they make a damned good rotisserie chicken in case you've never had one. Plump, juicy and $5.32 with tax.)

So I left work early again on Friday to roll over to Costco in Lawrenceville, NJ to get the tire replaced.

How I spent my late Friday afternoon

Being that I was a walk-in, the guy at the tire counter told me it would be about a 90-minute wait, which was fine as I wanted to go pick up a roasted rotisserie chicken to have for the weekend and also cash in my 2018 rewards for my Costco Visa card.

Not being in a hurry, I took my time and people-watched for a bit before finding a checkout line with a short wait with a cashier who seemed pretty efficient.

She was a white American woman with glasses who looked like she was in her late 60's or early 70's.

She was very nice with kind of a mischievous look in her eye, and as I handed her my Costco card she asked me how I was doing and I smiled and said I was doing pretty good as it was a Friday.

When I asked her how she was doing, she paused for a moment and gave me a rather serious look as she ran the plastic container holding my delicious-smelling rotisserie chicken over the scanner and said, "I'm not happy about my taxes."

"Uh, oh." I said raising my eyebrows with a sympathetic frown.

As you may recall the last blog I wrote in February was partly about Americans facing the unpleasant realities about the Republican Tax Con - including the fact that millions of middle and working class Americans are actually seeing significant tax increases and lower tax returns compared to 2018.

My Costco cashier was one of those people.

With a trace of wistful sadness, she told me she was a single widow living on her own and looked down at the register in thought  - as if for a moment the image of her deceased husband and the life they'd once shared had suddenly materialized in her mind.

I couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards her.

Based on my years of experience screening hundreds of prospective renters for apartments, it's a good bet that she lives on Social Security and some kind of modest pension, and is working at Costco part-time to make ends meet.

Parts of the Republican Tax Cut that Republican
politicians don't like to talk about publicly

If she's a homeowner, she may also have lost out on the Republican's decision to cap the mortgage interest deduction at $10,000 on state and local taxes in states with high property taxes.

Blue-leaning states like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and California - states which coincidentally (or not) voted for Hillary in 2016.

During my leisurely stroll of Costco's gargantuan warehouse-like interior, I noticed something interesting.

The vast majority of the employees I saw out on the polished concrete floor wearing red Costco vests were clearly seniors 60-years-old or older - including African-American, white and Hispanic folks.

Personally I think that says something about the "booming economy" Herr Trump likes to brag about.

As I asked the cashier if her tax bill was a big increase from 2018, she rang up my rotisserie chicken and thought for a moment, then shook her head with an open flash of resentment, glanced at me and admitted in a clipped voice, "I was NOT expecting this."

Now in that momentary glance, listening to the sudden acid tone of her voice, I recognized that she had voted for Trump in 2016 - I can't tell you how I knew, the way she was dressed, the way she looked, I just knew it.

There was something about the expression on her face and the way she looked me in the eye, along with a palpable sense of betrayal in her voice - like she'd seen something for the first time.

When Trump supporters like this see their tax bills
or refunds, how are they going to vote in 2020? 

And somehow, and I'm completely speculating here folks, I got the sense that she was kind of confessing that to me, an African-American, in particular.

Just for a second it seemed like she wanted to say more.

Then the chipper smile magically reappeared on her face and she took the printout of the email with my Costco Visa rewards that I'd brought, deducted the $5.32 for the rotisserie chicken and handed me my change in cash and said something to the effect that she'd already said too much.


As I carefully placed the tantalizingly-warm plastic container holding my chicken into my reusable shopping bag and resisted the urge to tear it open, rip off a juicy leg and devour it right there in the checkout line, I wished the cashier a nice day and she glanced at me with a mischievous smile and said pleasantly (and not a little sarcastically), "I hope you get a nice tax refund."

With the news on Friday that Washington Governor Jay Inslee has officially declared his candidacy for the 2020 presidential race, the number of Democratic candidates now running is at least 12 - with some big names like former VP Joe Biden and former billionaire New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg still considering.

Based on the impromptu Costco confession I heard on Friday, it's not the growing list of Democratic presidential hopefuls, or even voters like me that the Trump campaign should be worrying about in 2020.

It's people like that cashier at Costco.