Donald Trump knows virtually nothing about American history.
He has probably never even heard of The Federalist Papers. All he knows is that when he gives a federal judge a lifetime appointment, he listens only to Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose project for many years has been to fill our federal courts, at all three levels, especially the Supreme Court, with ideologically conservative Republican judges such as Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. And it’s worked beautifully for Leo and McConnell et al.
Alexander Hamilton (not Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry) wrote Federalist Paper No. 1 in 1787, to urge citizens of New York to agree to ratify a new Constitution.
Federalist Paper No. 1 reads, in part:
“It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political consitutions on accident and force.”
As Bob Woodward has plainly said in Fear: Trump In The White House, Trump operates on the principle that power is based on fear. He believes in bravado, lies, and most of all fear and force. He is the virtually total opposite of President Obama.
Trump has probably never read the Constitution.
Rudy Giuliani has; so has Michael Cohen; and so has Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Today, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort copped a plea, agreeing fully to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller.
Your solitary reporter has, since February, been wearing, virtually every day, a t-shirt given to him on the occasion of his birthday. It reads “It’s Mueller Time” against the backdrop of the well-known “It’s Miller Time” beer brand. He regularly tells those who admire it that he will gladly sell it to anyone who wants it, for a donation to the Democratic Naitonal Committee or to the Denver Democratic Party.
Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was with Trump earlier today as he watched Fox News’ report that his close personal friend Paul Manafort had agreed to cooperate with Mueller. Yup, that was the same Manafort, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist and friend of dictators, who had previously vowed to go to trial next week, and who had said that he would never betray Trump.
As Jones watched in horror, Trump signed a pardon for Manafort. Then she watched him board a helicopter that took him straight to Wilmington, North Carolina.
Associate solitary reporter Vincent Compton was in Wilmington as Hurricane Florence took four lives — but Trump was there trying unsuccessfully to explain to nobody in particular that Hurricane Florence had never happened.
Has anyone in Trump’s rapidly diminishing orbit told him that both Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, who wants to go to the Senate, and the Sunshine State’s GOP gubernatorial candidate and Trump clone Ron DeSantis, that they simply want him to shut up about his paranoid conspiracy theory that the fact that nearly 3,000 American citizens in Puerto died, only that fact was made up by Democrats just to make him look bad? (https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/09/13/mr-president-shut-up-florida-republicans-pan-trumps-puerto-rico-conspiracy-608895).
For an answer to that, we turned to associate solitary reporter John Mulford, a lifelong resident of Florida.
Mulford was typically succinct. His immediate answer to our question was, “Of course not!"