The climax to the presdidential soap opera in Washington is nearing detonation.
Trump is taking a vacation but the unfolding drama of his presidency will not.
Toronto Star columnist, Tony Burman, draws some very plausible possibilities as to how the ‘Turnip presidency’ will conclude.
Tony Burman is a well known and highly respected journalist who writes opinion pieces regularly for the Toronto Star.
He is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News, and was visiting professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism between 2011 and 2016. While Managing Director of Al Jazeera’s English news channel in Qatar from 2008-2010, its worldwide reach more than doubled to 220 million households, and he led the campaign that brought Al Jazeera to Canada in 2009 and expanded it throughout the United States. While at the CBC, he spent more than three decades as an award-winning news and documentary producer, working in 30 countries, including seven years as CBC’s Editor-in-Chief.
Without any doubt, his opinion has gravitas and recently he wrote a piece in which he describe how Trump’s circus show is drawing to a close. He writes that the Trump presidency will end in the following ways:
“1. America is hurtling towards a constitutional crisis that will rock its institutions to the core.
2. Its president and his business empire will soon be exposed as beholden to Russian oligarchs and mobsters.
3. Trump will try to fire special counsel Robert Mueller to prevent this from becoming known, but Congress will intervene.
4. His only remaining hope will be a 9/11-scale disaster or contrived war that he can exploit.
5. If we are lucky enough to survive all of the above, Trump will resign before he is impeached — but only in exchange for a pardon from his servile vice-president, Mike Pence.”
There are some very ominous points Burman makes about the Trump presidency. One for sure is that whatever Trump is trying to hide, Robert Mueller will uncover and it will become public.
Burman also quotes a very revealing piece written by the New Republic columnist, Craig Unger under the title, “Married to the Mob: What Trump Owes the Russian Mafia.”
Unger was stark in his conclusions: “Whether Trump knew it or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs used his properties not only to launder vast sums of money from extortion, drugs, gambling and racketeering, but even as a base of operations for their criminal activities. In the process, they propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.”
A Burman conclusion may be very prophetic when he writes of the possibility of a Pence pardon for Trump. If so, we will never see the photo below and that may acceptable.
However, Burman’s final words are very ominous when he concludes his piece with “next stage of this Trump story will no longer be a diverting reality show. It will be the moment when Americans — and the rest of us — will learn if U.S. democracy is strong enough to stop him.”
Read Burman’s full article at Burman article
