Trump Indicted for Trying to Cheat Us of a Fair Election

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FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS

CNN’s Anderson Cooper gets credit for using the straightforward term, “arrested,” on air to describe the former president as cameras caught a glimpse of him having to open the door to the courtroom by himself Tuesday. My best headline award goes to the Daily Mirror of London, “Trump in the Eye of the Stormy,” coming in just ahead of Time magazine’s cover, a visual of a big orange finger print with a yelling Trump mouth in its center and the single word, “Unprecedented.” Both are keepers.

Yesterday’s arraignment of the Orange One marked a huge cultural change for America and the world, for all of us suffering greater or lesser effects of “posttraumatic stress disorder” resulting from the last eight years (since that first walk down the escalator in 2015). His four years in office, of course, were the worst, and the fact that seems so remote, so almost cartoonish, now is a sign of PTSD itself. We have been suffering collectively from a very bad time.

That’s what makes the image from Tuesday, of an unhappy Trump seated in the courtroom surrounded by security personnel, so cathartic. He was trapped there, he was not going to get away. Thank f***ing God!

No, Arraignment Day was not a “sad day for America,” as some allegedly nonpartisan commentators claimed. It was an amazingly wonderful day. This two-bit New York mafia crook who had been allowed to ascend to the presidency of allegedly the greatest democracy on the planet, was willing to sell our nation out to our sworn adversaries and set us on an irreversible course to totalitarian rule. This punk was barely able to contain the fear he was experiencing inside himself facing the proverbial “music” for the first time in his life, with no escape route in sight. That scowl we saw in the courtroom Tuesday was the best he could do to prevent himself from breaking down like a scared child in a flood of howls and tears.

Yes, Tuesday was what he’d spent his entire criminal career of ripping off innocent people and our government to avoid. He would spare no expense to avoid just the situation he’d arrived at Tuesday. Finally at long last, the system caught up to him, no longer thwarted and frustrated by others in high places, like former Attorney General Barr.

Tuesday marked the happy first real break in the floodgates of legal reckoning for this grifter-in-chief.

As Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg stated plainly, the 34 felony charges leveled against Trump are for far more than just buying the silence of a porn star. The media continues to misrepresent the substance of the case in just that way.

No, this case is about trying to illegally rig the outcome of an election, one of the first of many attempts.

Even if there was no salacious element at all, the behavior documented in the indictment reveals a callous and nihilistic attempt to cheat the American people out of a fair election.

Given the equally nihilistic disregard for justice and fairness of so many other people in high places, including but not limited to the Republican Party, he was aided and abetted through the process. It can be argued it dated back to 1987 when Trump came back from a trip to Moscow and the emerging Putin faction there announced he would be its presidential candidate of choice in the U.S.

Up until then, he was just another crooked, and thereby malleable, real estate mogul in New York. But he was then given the national profile of a popular TV show host, and his rise was off and running. He cultivated his fake “tough guy” persona on that show and carried it off with the help of a traditional Mafiosa-style organization, conning enough American voters right into the White House.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was right to focus in her podcast, “Ultra,” on the subject of the book by Bradley W. Hart, “Hitler’s American Friends, the Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.” Trump’s fascist roots go far back in the U.S. Trapping him at last presents our best chance yet to revert it all back to society’s darkest fringes.

Our Man in Arlington

Your household fee rate for trash collection and recycling would rise 33 percent, under the county manager’s recent 2024 budget, hitting $409 a year as a result of cost increases in both the collection and recycling contracts.

To me it feels worth it. I rise early enough Mondays to witness all three visits during the day from three-man crews who guide their American Disposal trucks onto our cul de sac. In their safety reflector vests, the energizer-bunny-like workers (driver included) leap out and pull the wheeled carts over to the rear-hatch electric lifts. Then they return the black, blue and green carts to their rightful houses’ curbs (mostly). Often the guys wave at customers, or shoot an imaginary basketball to our neighbors’ nearby hoop.

It takes character to do this messy job.

Once as a naïve college student, I tried to arrange to spend a summer playing professional trashman in San Francisco to be near a girlfriend. Turns out the unionized firms wouldn’t even consider me.

Remaining curious about the nature of the job in Arlington, I queried the managers of parent company, Canada-based Waste Connections, but they declined an interview.

Up stepped Adam Riedel, principal environmental management specialist at the county’s

Environmental Services Department, to explain today’s challenges.

The waste management business is going through “a very competitive market for drivers and labor right now,” he said. “It’s tough to recruit because many can drive an Amazon truck, with easier work and pay that’s about the same.” Though many trash and recycling employees can earn a bit more, it’s hard work—made harder by the pandemic.

American Disposal Services is based in Manassas, Riedel noted, and employees have to start work at 6:30 a.m. having inspected trucks and donned their gear. For some, that might mean arriving by 5:00 a.m. “if not earlier,” because it takes an hour with traffic to get to Arlington, he added.

Depending on whether their crew is collecting trash, recycling or organics, their routes may not be completed until 5:00 p.m., which means that driving back to Manassas and “clocking out is a 12-hour day” before they “get home and do it over the next day.” Consider also that it’s hot in summer and cold in winter, requiring thick clothing boots and gloves. Some suffer heat exhaustion.

Do the math, Riedel said: Arlington’s routes comprise 33,200 customers a week, which adds up to 100,000 carts to be serviced by 15 crews (two or three per truck); that’s 30 workers emptying 18,000 carts per day. Given “the scale and amount of time on the road, it’s a very hard job.”

The crew work a five-day week and all holidays except Christmas, New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving. To give them other holidays, like President’s Day, would simply push collections a day later, the official said. (That happens occasionally when trucks are full, and residents are alerted.) Federal law prevents working seven consecutive days, but managers try to give “adequate time off, overtime, and adjusted schedules “not to appear uncaring,” Riedel said. Training includes commercial driving protocols as well as Arlington’s stricter standards for separating materials, plus policies on accepting large, improperly bunded or dangerous objects—enforced by an inspector with punishments for noncompliance.

In recent years, American Disposal “did have some staffing troubles, which we publicized,” Riedel said. “They were aggressive in the fall and brought in people with a new wages and benefits package, so they’re now fully staffed.” The county’s seven-year contract with ADS was signed in 2015 with two renewal options, and was just renewed until June 2024.

Overall, largely because of traffic fatalities, waste disposal crews perform the county’s second-most dangerous job, after coal mining, he said. Increasingly, female workers are making their way in the field, Riedel added. But overall, “it’s a young man’s game, pretty intense.”