No, AAA isn’t branching out into porn or online dating. We’re doing a little current events twofer, specifically regarding American Media CEO David Pecker and US Representative Duncan Hunter, both of whom were in the news the week of August 19th (though where they found the oxygen for that is beyond me, as the Trump Show rolled on through its worst week ever). Pardon the pun, but there’s not enough meat here for two full articles, so we’ll just target the highlights.
Have you ever had a bad day? I mean, a really, really, REALLY bad day? Well, unless it involved bodily harm, it can’t have been much worse than Tuesday, August 21st, 2018 was for Donald J. Trump, when two of his closest associates were found guilty of fraud and criminal conduct. Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s Campaign Managers in 2016, was convicted of eight counts of bank fraud and tax evasion by an Alexandria, Virginia jury; and in New York, Michael Cohen, his long-time lawyer and fixer, pled guilty to eight similar charges, as well as campaign finance violations, implicating the President in the process.
On Tuesday, 7 August 2018, Ohio’s 12th Congressional District held a special election to replace Representative Pat Tiberi, who resigned effective January 15th to lead the Ohio Business Roundtable, despite having served as US Representative for the district for 17 years. Ohio 12 is the former seat of John Kasich, current Ohio governor and 2016 GOP presidential nomination contender. The district, which includes suburbs of Columbus and more rural counties, is a reliably Republican one, which Donald Trump won by 11 points in 2016; Tiberi won it then by 36 points, 66-30% against his Democratic challenger.
That was then, this is now.
The first of two trials of former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort opened in Alexandria, Virginia on August 31st, with Manafort facing federal bank and tax fraud charges. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 as a non-paid consultant, when the GOP nomination became a likely outcome; his expertise in politics was sought to derail a possible floor fight at the convention, smoothing Trump’s path by locking in delegates’ votes. Promoted to Campaign Manager in June, Manafort resigned under a cloud in August, allegedly because family members had become worried about the extent of his Russian connections.
With the increased attention being paid to Trump’s Russian connections after that soul-crushing joint press conference with Vladdie Putin in Helsinki last Monday, I thought it was time to review what we know astrologically about Donald Trump’s oligarch obsession. We’ve given bits and pieces of this over the past year in several articles, but nowhere has it been assembled into a comprehensive overview.
Until now.
With his background in real estate, Donald J. Trump is doubtless aware of the concept of a “balloon payment”, a one-time last-minute huge increase in disbursement before a contract term expires. If the President’s outrageous remarks at the breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on July 11th, and his subsequent trashing of British Prime Minister Theresa May in a tabloid interview on July 12th, didn’t constitute just such a payment immediately before his annual performance review with his boss Vladimir Putin, then I don’t know what would.
