Richard Wolffe: The Trump-Ukraine scandal is a taste of how dirty the US elections will get

NB: 'In some corner of his (Trump's) orange-tipped cranium there are surely a handful of brain cells that are fully aware that his entire family has engaged with foreign dictators and their oligarchs for personal profit...Trump apparently knows nothing about his own officials lining his own pockets. But he does know a thing or two about Ukraine.' 

Yes, this is the man whom India's Prime Minister chooses to endorse while in the USA! What would the RSS & Co. have said if the boot were on the other foot, and an American President had endorsed the Congress Party on an official visit to India? Speaking of boots, Modi's sickening display of sycophancy toward the racist neo-Nazi buffoon who currently occupies the White House must be a record in shameless flattery, even for patriots like him. What a joke. DS

America has a grand tradition of the brazenly dumb criminal: the kind who is so desperately needy that he brags about his guilt. Back in the earliest days of the new media known as newspapers, a certain Chicago mob boss rose to fame by calling a press conference to proclaim everyone else’s guilt, if not exactly his innocence. Al Capone claimed he played no role in the gunning down of a young state’s attorney called Bill McSwiggin. 

In fact he said he could have killed him any time but preferred to keep him alive. “I paid McSwiggin,” Capone said. “I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for.” Sure enough, Capone was cleared of the murder and became the darling of an insatiable press pack. If you don’t act guilty, will anyone really think you’re guilty? Especially if everyone else is guilty too.

Almost a century later, Donald Trump has cornered the Scarface strategy. If he didn’t think neo-Nazis were very fine people, Trump could win a Maccabiah medal for chutzpah. In some corner of his orange-tipped cranium there are surely a handful of brain cells that are fully aware that his entire family has engaged with foreign dictators and their oligarchs for personal profit.

But the rest of Trump’s brain is an irony-free zone entirely empty of self-awareness. So he and much of his Cabinet fanned out across the gullible media to proclaim everyone else’s guilt in a Ukraine scandal that would normally lead to certain impeachment...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/the-trump-ukraine-scandal-is-a-taste-of-how-dirty-will-the-us-elections-get