DONALD TRUMP REMINDED US ALL, OF THE KIND OF “MOB-BOSS” HE IS

… Former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch

Donald Trump talks and acts like he’s running an organized crime family.

Sometimes when Donald Trump blurts out his comments, it’s just the case that as a pathological narcissist, he just can’t help himself.

I was not surprised when the president went after the former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in real time, with an obvious threating tweet.

This was the content of Trump’s tweet: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a US President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

It is ridiculous for the president to accuse any single individual for the mass corruption in a country such as Somilia.  And as to the Ukraine, many diplomats had previously commented in how much of an anti-corruption ambassador that Ambassador Yovanovitch was.  In fact, that was why she had been asked to extend her time in Ukraine.

Our un-leashed commander-in-chief didn’t even understand that his outburst in a public tweet against the ambassador could become another item listed in the anticipated impeachment list as that of a direct threat to, or of the witness tampering of a public US diplomat.

This was a direct threat aimed at a US ambassador as she was testifying, under oath, in the impeachment inquiry about the successful smear campaign engineered against her by Trump’s allies.  She was explaining how intimidating it was to learn that Trump told the president of Ukraine that she was “bad news” and is “going to go through some things.”  Trump obviously had decided that she didn’t feel quite intimidated enough, so he tweeted his additional threat during her testimony.

The president may find out just how stupid it is when you are the most powerful person in the world and you go after an intelligent, well respected public servant.  The ambassador has an impeccable history as a US ambassador over the past 33 years.  Ambassador Jovanovich is also one of the most awarded public servants in the State Department.

Whether this action by the president was technically “witness tampering”, it is appalling.  But I am not alone in finding the president’s tweets out-of-line.  Even on Fox News, Ken Starr called Trump’s attack on Yovanovitch during her testimony, “extraordinarily poor judgement”…..yeah think?.

What it showed, as did all of the former ambassador’s testimony, along with lots of other evidence we have seen, is show that Trump has been running what the New York Police Department would call “a thugocracy”.  One in which the president talks and acts like the Mafioso he is, and as with any mob, so do those people who have the greatest influence over him.

This Trump story of the smear campaign against Yovanovitch is not straight forward, but is very complex, as it it involves the two Ukrainians at the heart President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuilani’s allegations. These are allegations against former US Vice President, Joe Biden and his son Hunter.  Both of these Ukrainians headed Ukraine's prosecutor's office, Viktor Shokin between 2015 and 2016, and Yuriy Lutsenko between 2016 and 2019.

Both Shokin and Lutsenko were feeding bogus information about the ambassador to Giuliani and his recently arrested colleagues Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who are linked to Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch and to the American right-wing media.

In their efforts to get Yovanovitch removed, the corrupt Ukrainian Lutsenko, in the Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, revealed an understanding of what motivates Trump.  Lutsenko spread a bogus story that she had given him a list of people not to prosecute, an allegation widely dismissed as totally preposterous. This kind of thing could damage any person’s reputation in Ukraine, but obviously, no one thinks Trump actually cares about corrupt people being prosecuted.

People who know Trump better, they understand what turned him against Yovanovitch: That is the allegation that she was insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.

This is why Mr. Joe diGenova, a Trump ally who is the lawyer for both of Giuliani’s goon types, Parnas and Fruman, and for Dmytro Firtash, who went on Fox News in March and said that Yovanovitch “is known and reported by people there to have bad-mouthed the President” and “she told Ukrainians not to listen to him [Trump] or obey his policy, because he was going to be impeached.” He repeated this to Sean Hannity, and then of course, due to Fox, the allegation quickly spread through all conservative media.

Parnas and Fruman’s lawyer, DiGenova, has never admitted where he supposedly learned Yovanovitch was “bad-mouthing” Trump.  In her testimony, Yovanovitch was emphatic that she never did.  But Parnas worked the same approach as he recounts that at a gathering, he told Trump that Yovanovitch didn’t support him, and Trump reacted by saying she should be fired.

In addition, Parnas and Fruman directed huge contributions to former Texas Rep. Pete Sessions’ campaigns.  On the same day that Parnas visited him in his Capitol Hill office, Sessions had written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complaining that Yovanovitch was not loyal to Trump and she should be fired.

So, you can see that, what we see here is that the people who understand Trump, they know exactly how to manipulate him.  They all know that Trump values personal loyalty far more than any competence or the interests of the United States.  All anyone has to do was to keep telling him that Yovanovitch wasn’t loyal to him, and they knew she’d eventually be gone.

“How could our system fail like this?” Yovanovitch asked in her opening statement at the inquiry. “How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?”

Though she didn’t say it, the answer is two words: Donald Trump.

Corrupt interests, some foreign, some domestic, are manipulating our government because the president is himself totally corrupt.  He is so insecure, and vindictive, and he is someone who talks and acts like he’s running an organized crime family.  (Actually, his family is a “crime family”, but that’s another story.)

It was amazing that, just as Ambassador Yovanovitch was calmly explaining how all this had happened against her, Trump was letting everyone know exactly what kind of thug he really is with his tweet during her testimony.  He was actually trying to intimidate her one more time with his added tweet.

But it was way too late for that.

Because all he really did, was remind everyone who Donald J. Trump really is.

Copyright G. Ater 2019