Clear and Present Danger

Donald Trump has a superpower: He gets people to believe he gives a crap about them and that if they work hard for his interests and exhibit loyalty, he will do the same for them in return.

And—this is key—Trump gets them to ignore the legion of broken, unpaid, and abandoned former contractors, employees, and allies he’s consistently left behind. Somehow, he convinces the next suckers that they’re different.

But Trump will never change, and he has now stabbed two more of his closest allies in the back.  

Trump has fashioned himself after a mob boss, but those guys are generally smart—they make sure to keep anyone who might testify against them either happy or dead. We can stipulate that Trump hasn’t resorted to murdering his enemies, but he could at the very least take care of those with access to his damning secrets. For example, he could pay the legal bills of all his indicted co-conspirators, making sure they remain dependent on him for their freedom.

But of course Trump won’t do that.

First we have attorney Jenna Ellis, who pushed every crackpot theory in pursuit of Trump’s Big Lie effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Back in March, she was publicly censured by the Colorado state bar, admitting in a sworn statement that she had “knowingly engage[d]” in conduct involving “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”

“The parties agree that Respondent, through her conduct, undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election, violating her duty of candor to the public,” read the censure document. “Finally, the parties agree that two aggravators apply—Respondent had a selfish motive and she engaged in a pattern of misconduct—while one factor, her lack of prior discipline, mitigates her misconduct.”

Ellis being Ellis, she immediately then lied about the agreement on Twitter. But despite her years of service to Trump, she was cut off because she now supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary.

In response, Ellis created a crowdfunding page to raise money for her legal defense. It has raised around $35,000 so far, enough for maybe 100 hours of cheap legal representation; half that for a top-level criminal defense lawyer. We’re talking one or two weeks’ worth. Still, this fundraising elicited the ire of fellow Trump grifter Laura Loomer, who posted the most hilarious screed on Twitter.

For the last several months, she has been attacking Donald Trump online with @TeamDeSantis. She betrayed Donald Trump (I personally think she intentionally sabotaged him because I can’t fathom how anyone can be as stupid as she is) and decided to support @RonDeSantis instead.

She has been attacking Donald Trump online for having his PAC pay his legal fees, even though his supporters are more than happy to donate to the cause. Jenna has called Trump supporters GRIFTERS and she’s been Retweeting other DeSantis supporters who attack Donald Trump.

Now she is crying online begging Trump supporters to donate to her legal defense fund.

This woman is vile. She’s a liar, and she doesn’t deserve your sympathy, your prayers, your forgiveness or your money.

Again, a smart criminal would pay her legal bills to shut her trap. By cutting her off and publicly attacking her, what rationale does she have for going to trial? She’ll sing whatever hymn Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis needs her to sing.

At least one conservative outlet, Hot Air, noticed Trump’s abhorrent behavior to a former ally. In a story headlined, “She got indicted because she helped Trump and in return he abandons her,” conservative author David Strom wrote, “I find Trump’s abandonment of Ellis and the joy that his supporters have for her being hung out to dry disgusting. Ellis has committed the ultimate sin, which is being a ‘traitor’ to Trump by not being a full-throated supporter of his 2024 campaign.”

“Trump hires a lot of traitors, apparently, since almost everybody he has ever hired has been accused of being one at some point,” Strom quipped.

Now, the assumption had been that Ellis was the only co-conspirator cut off from Trump’s legal financial support. Indeed, of all the co-conspirators, she was the one most vocally supportive of DeSantis.

But nope, Trump even backstabbed his most loyal lieutenant: Rudy Giuliani. CNN has the equally hilarious story.

“With his attorney in tow, Rudy Giuliani traveled to Mar-a-Lago in recent months on a mission to make a personal and desperate appeal to former President Donald Trump to pay his legal bills,” reported CNN. “By going in person, a source familiar with the matter told CNN, Giuliani and his lawyer Robert Costello believed they could explain face-to-face why Trump needed to assist his former attorney with his ballooning legal bills.”

Ha ha ha, the naivety!

“Giuliani and Costello traveled to Florida in late April where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, making several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest,” CNN further reported. “But the former president, who is notoriously strict about dipping into his own coffers, didn’t seem very interested.”

We can all guess what Giuliani, a former prosecutor, told Trump: ”If I can’t afford my legal bills, I will have no choice but to plead out, and they’re going to want something in return!” In response, Trump yawned and essentially shooed him away.

After we all get a good laugh at Giuliani’s expense, let’s remember that he knew Trump had a long history of backstabbing people around him. He just thought he’d be different.

Trump will keep doing that. He still has lawyers representing him, thinking that they’ll get paid for their work, that they’re somehow different from all the other lawyers Trump has stiffed. He still has foot soldiers at his properties slinking around the bushes conspiring on their boss’ behalf, thinking they’ll be protected and rewarded for their service.

It’s like the cliché action movie “you have failed me” trope, when the evil villain kills one of his henchmen for “failing him” and some new dumbass steps up after a “don’t you fail me” warning. Those movie scenes always seem so implausible, yet Trump somehow pulls it off in real life. New people will step up to bask in Trump’s orbit, unaware that they too will someday feel the shiv in their back.

Kenneth J. Chesebro was among 19 people charged Monday in Georgia with a raft of crimes related to alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A 98-page indictment secured by Atlanta-area prosecutors portrays Chesebro as central not just to the convening of sham electors but also to the “strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” He faces seven felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to file false documents, as well as violation of an anti-racketeering act originally aimed at dismantling organized crime groups.

In the separate federal case brought against Trump this month, Chesebro has not been charged. Prosecutors described him only as “Co-Conspirator 5,” saying he was behind “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”

“He was not making good-faith legal arguments for his client,” said Laurence Tribe, who said he has been distressed to see his former mentee emerge as an architect of Trump’s plans to cling to power. “He was inventing legal fiction that paid no attention to the law and creating a pretext for a conspiracy to steal an election.”

The Eastman memos, also known as the “coup memo“, are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump advancing the fringe legal theory that the U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified State electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President’s own party’s favor.

Trump and Eastman used the memos in an unsuccessful campaign to pressure then vice president Mike Pence into preventing or nullifying the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, and eventually overturning the 2020 United States election of Joe Biden, so that Trump could retain power.

The Trump campaign engaged Eastman with a formal retainer agreement signed December 5 for services in litigating the election outcome. The memos have been described as an instruction manual for a coup d’état.

After the 2020 United States presidential election in which Joe Biden prevailed, then-incumbent Donald Trump, as well as his campaign, his proxies, and many of his supporters, pursued an aggressive and unprecedented effort to deny and overturn the election by means of a legalistic soft coup (or self-coup).