“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Step right up to the Greatest Shitshow on Earth! Ya pays your money, ya takes your chance! What will it be? Who will you choose – the Felon or the Feeb?” So says the Cosmic Carnival Barker to promote the first (and now likely only) 2024 US Presidential debate. For incumbent Joe Biden, it was an unmitigated disaster, which is an apt word for an astrologer to use, since its literal meaning is “against the stars.”
On 11 June 2024, Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, was convicted in a Wilmington, Delaware courtroom on three felony counts related to drug use and gun possession. US Department of Justice Special Counsel David Weiss brought the case, stemming from an October 2018 purchase where Biden lied about his drug use to obtain a firearm. Charged with unlawfully possessing a gun as a drug user, lying on a federal form when he bought the gun, and making a false statement about information required to be collected by a federally licensed gun dealer, the jury took less than three hours to decide that Biden was guilty, after a trial lasting six days.
At last! Some level of accountability for the biggest criminal scofflaw ever to infest the Oval Office. Fond of setting records, on 30 May 2024 Donald J. Trump entered the history books yet again, as the only former US President, and presumptive GOP nominee, to be convicted of a felony. And not just one – the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict on each of the 34 criminal counts against him.
On Sunday, 3 September 2023, Republican presidential nomination contender Vivek Ramaswamy was muffled by the collapse of a huge banner reading “TRUTH” as he stumped in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Footage of the event shows the massive backdrop slowly folding forward onto the unexpecting Ramaswamy, in a moment of cosmic irony worthy of a Wes Anderson film. Unhurt, except perhaps in his pride, the incident has led to a plethora of Tweets and internet memes calling attention to the aptness of the visuals, for a candidate who can’t seem to keep his stories straight about his opinion of the prior president.
With national Republican figures, from the highest to the lowest, being indicted, tried and convicted of multiple crimes in both civil and criminal cases, the GOP runs the serious risk of becoming identified as the party of lawlessness as the 2024 elections careen toward us. Two major developments in as many days in early May added fuel to the fire of Republican miscreants, much in the way a spate of stories involving GOP corruption and sexual misconduct led to Democrats reclaiming the House in 2006. On May 9th, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll civil rape suit, and on the following day Trump Mini-Me George Santos, with aspirations to ascend to Liar-in-Chief, was arrested and charged with 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and lying to Congress.
April 25, 2023 witnesses the opening of the first salvo of courtroom dramas involving former US president Donald J. Trump, although as a civil case, he’s not required to attend in person, and likely won’t do so. The case is brought by journalist and author E. Jean Carroll, who alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan in the mid-1990s. No, the charge isn’t rape – it’s defamation of character, following statements Trump made after Carroll publicly accused him in 2019, when he denied ever meeting her, much less assaulting her, in terms peppered with his patented brand of denigration and misogynistic dismissal.
