Trump as an Abiding, Toxic American Security Risk
When I was a teenager, my father used to have to get security background checks and security clearances periodically. These were necessary in order to clear him for the research missions to the Palmer Base in Antarctica he undertook to go on for six months of the year during the southern hemispherical summers.
When a security check is underway, American subjects lose their civil rights and their Constitutional right to privacy; their phones can be tapped, their mail checked, and their families’ activities surveilled. (Snowden has proven that these rights are now merely illusory for any and all American citizens in any case, regardless of consensual security checks, since the establishment of the NSA.) My father used to beg me to tone down my political/social protest activities when a check was being done on him, and on us by extension, so that I and my radical associations wouldn’t prejudice him being cleared to accompany the next season’s mission to Antarctica. Though my activities were entirely non-violent, entirely wholesome, ethical, lawful and right-minded in a left-leaning way, which was my right, if pursued unabated they could land my dad in the soup of suspicion re: ‘commies,’ and make him ineligible for the scientific expeditions to the U.S. military base.
Trump wouldn’t have passed an ordinary security background check. He would have flunked even a rudimentary one right out of the gate, yet he was made President of the United States, chief custodian of all of the nation’s secrets. So ridiculous. Traditionally, ex-presidents continue to get security briefings. If this professional courtesy is extended to Trump as if he were a normal responsible adult and presumably patriotic statesman, classified information could literally turn up anywhere — in the purview of Mohammed bin Salman, for example, perhaps in exchange for Trump getting permission to build a golf course in the desert, or of Putin, in return for finally being able to erect a Trump hotel in Moscow.
Deutsche Bank’s loans to Donald Trump were underwritten by Russian state-owned VTB Bank, according to the whistleblower whose collection of thousands of bank documents and internal communications are the subject of federal investigations currently underway. Val Broeksmit acquired the emails and files of his late father, Deutsche Bank executive William S. Broeksmit, after Broeksmit took his own life in 2014. “Val informed the FBI in late 2019 about his knowledge of VTB’s underwriting of Trump’s loans, information he attributed to a network of sources connected to the bank he cultivated over the past five-plus years.” (Scott Stedman, Eric Levai and Robert J. DeNault, ‘Trump Deutsche Bank Loans Underwritten By Russian State-Owned Bank, Whistleblower Told FBI,’ Forensic News, January 3, 2020.)
Shouldn’t some ordinary, even rudimentary security background check be run on presidential candidates? These would include histories of serial bankruptcies and outlandish debts to hostile foreign powers, Russian state banks, and Putin-connected oligarchs, of course. With such a precaution in place, when even a conventional stateside bank won’t give a known security risk like Trump an ordinary loan or line of credit, chances are such an individual would be found ineligible to hold presidential office as well.
I mean, really!
And now, having been let into the chicken coop and given the keys to the kingdom (apologies for random mixed metaphors), unless he’s jailed and imposed with a gag order, he’s forever a thorn in the side for any remote semblance of American security going forward.
Pathetic.
This was NOT carefully thought out.
