How the “Rules” Determine if Criminals Become Politicians

How do criminals take over countries?

Donald Trump, for example, is a criminal, as the Supreme Court arguably determined yesterday when they denied his efforts to claim executive privilege to conceal his crimes. And as would be strongly suggested by his son Eric invoking the Fifth Amendment over 500 times in a single deposition about fraud.

His niece and multiple biographers have well-documented how he’s been a criminal since his youngest years, working with his father to skim government rental money by faking maintenance work, refusing to rent to Black people, and openly stealing tens of millions from members of his own family.

And he is still at it: he’s raised several hundred million dollars just in the last 12 months from gullible followers based on lies about not losing the last election.

Today his crimes of tax evasion, bank and insurance fraud are in the headlines, along with his attempt to draw Georgia’s Secretary of State into a criminal conspiracy to steal the presidency of the United States for his own personal gain and to keep himself out of jail. As several biographers and his fixer, Michael Cohen, have told us straight up, Trump thinks of himself as a mafia-type crime boss and revels in behaving like one.

So, how do criminals like this become politicians? And how did it happen here?

Sometimes it’s through brute force. I was in The Philippines in February, 1986 when a…