When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.

Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”

In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.

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His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.

ImagePeople sitting in rows, some holding signs supporting Donald J. Trump.
Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign quickly turned his booking photo from Georgia into a piece of promotional material, appearing on posters, T-shirts and buttons.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable. Any one of those scandals by itself would typically have been enough to derail another politician. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first bid for the presidency collapsed when he lifted some words from another politician’s speech. George W. Bush came close to losing after the last-minute revelation of a long-ago drunken-driving arrest. Hillary Rodham Clinton fell short at least in part because of an F.B.I. investigation into emails that led to no charges.

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Not Mr. Trump. He has moved from one furor to the next without any of them sinking into the body politic enough to end his career. The unrelenting pace of scandals may in its own way help him by keeping any single one of them from dominating the national conversation and eroding his standing with his base of supporters.

He even turned that mug shot into a marketing tool, selling T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and even beverage coolers with the image and the slogan, “NEVER SURRENDER.” And victory next month may yet help him escape the biggest threat of all — potentially prison.

Nonetheless, the full record stands out.

Making and Losing Money
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A black-and-white photo of two men holding a blueprint and standing on the roof of a building.
Mr. Trump and his father, Fred Trump, at a construction project in Brooklyn in 1973.Credit…Barton Silverman/The New York Times
Mr. Trump got an early start learning how to cut corners. As a high school student at New York Military Academy, he knowingly borrowed a friend’s dress jacket with a dozen medals attached to wear for his yearbook photo, in effect appropriating medals that he did not win himself, according to a new book, “Lucky Loser,” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig of The New York Times.

He likewise cheated to get into college, according to his estranged niece, Mary L. Trump. The future president paid a friend to take the SAT for him, Ms. Trump asserted in her own book, earning a score that later helped him transfer to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, a credential he has boasted about ever since. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump has denied this, and the widow of a man with the name cited by Ms. Trump as the test-taking friend said that she was confident her husband did no such thing.)

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After graduating from Pennsylvania in 1968, however, the former military academy cadet had no interest in serving in the real military and risked being sent to fight in Vietnam. He managed to avoid the draft with a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels — a diagnosis that evidently was obtained as a favor from a podiatrist in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump. Two daughters of the podiatrist, who died in 2007, have said that he often told them about saving the younger Mr. Trump from Vietnam as a courtesy to his landlord.

Freed from military obligations, Mr. Trump went into the family business, helping run his father’s empire of rental apartment buildings in the outer boroughs. Even in those early days, he came under suspicion of misconduct. In 1973, the Justice Department sued the Trump family company for racial discrimination in renting apartments. Applications from Black applicants were marked C for “colored.” Mr. Trump fought the matter in court but ultimately agreed to a settlement that the Justice Department at the time called “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”

His business career vaulted him to fame, and he had notable successes, perhaps most prominently the rehabilitation of the Commodore Hotel and the construction of Trump Tower. But he often reached further than he was able to deliver. His record in business was pockmarked with plenty of failures.

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A neon red-and-yellow sign at night that reads “Trump Taj Mahal,” but the last three letters are not illuminated.
The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., was just one of Mr. Trump’s many business failures.Credit…Mark Makela for The New York Times
The Trump Shuttle airline? Failure. His dreams of building a Television City in Manhattan? Failure. A United States Football League franchise? Failure. The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump’s Castle Casino Resort, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks, GoTrump.com? All failures.

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His most spectacular flameouts came in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, where he overextended himself building or buying three casinos that ultimately cannibalized each other’s clientele as he failed to keep up with enormous debt payments. He filed bankruptcy for the Taj Mahal in 1991 and then for the other two casinos in 1992. He also filed bankruptcy in 1992 for the Plaza Hotel.

Even after recovering from that debacle, Mr. Trump failed again. His casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again in 2009, for his sixth trip into that process. In his various bankruptcies, he was compelled to sell assets, and creditors were forced to write off some of his debt. But Mr. Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.

Mr. Trump played the game along the edge, and sometimes over the line, of propriety. To grease his path, he would hire a governor’s son or a federal prosecutor’s brother. Along the way, he was investigated time and time again. Federal, state and local authorities looked into his ties with the Mafia, found violations of money laundering laws and penalized him for skirting stock trade rules.

At one point when Mr. Trump was strapped for cash to make an interest payment, his father sent a lawyer to one of the son’s casinos to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a bet. New Jersey’s casino regulators imposed a $65,000 fine for what amounted to an illegal loan.

But Mr. Trump makes a point of not admitting misdeeds or mistakes. Even his failures he portrays as triumphs. “I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” he once said, “and I’m very proud of it.”

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‘When You’re a Star’
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A younger Mr. Trump with brownish red hair sits and smiles in front of TV monitors.
Mr. Trump in the control room of “The Apprentice” in New York in 2003.Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
For years, Mr. Trump’s personal life was full of scandal, too, enough to make him a frequent topic of the gossip columns of the era. He did not mind. There was almost no headline too scandalous for him. “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile,” he said in front of his campaign manager later in life.

After marrying the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and fathering three children, Mr. Trump began carrying on an affair with a younger model, Marla Maples. He and Ivana fought out their divorce battle in the news media, at one point making the tabloid front pages 11 days running. He even maneuvered The New York Post into running a banner headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” supposedly describing Ms. Maples’s assessment of their bedroom life.

While living with Ms. Maples, he boasted of infidelity to a reporter during a call when, bizarrely, he impersonated a spokesman for himself and insisted that Mr. Trump had “three other girlfriends” in addition to the woman sharing his home. He and Ms. Maples later married anyway and had a daughter before divorcing, too.

He met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, and married her in 2005. But he was not always faithful to her either, according to other women. Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, claimed to have had a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to his fifth child.

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Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, said she had a 10-month fling with Mr. Trump around the same time. Michael D. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s lawyer and self-described fixer, arranged for six-figure payments to be made to both Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal in 2016 to ensure their silence before the presidential election, hush-money that would later come back to haunt Mr. Trump.

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A woman with long blonde hair speaks into a microphone at a bookstore. People can be seen in and out of focus sitting in the audience.
Hush-money payments made to Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor known as Stormy Daniels, were at the center of the first indictment of Mr. Trump.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
His view of women and his belief in his right to pursue them with impunity ultimately was put on display before that election anyway. The now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape posted by The Washington Post weeks before the final balloting revealed his belief that he could “do anything” with women because he was famous. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

While he later dismissed that as mere “locker room banter,” Mr. Trump has been a one-man #MeToo magnet, accused by two dozen or so women of sexual misconduct that goes well beyond banter. One said he grabbed her breasts and tried to run his hand up her skirt on an airplane. Another said he kissed her while she worked for him, and at least two others said he groped them at the U.S. Open. Perhaps most famously, E. Jean Carroll, a writer, said he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.

He has consistently denied all charges, suggesting that all of these women, one after the other, simply made it up. “Every woman lied,” he said in 2016. In a couple of instances, he has dismissed the allegations, not by saying that he would never do such a thing but by saying that he would never do such a thing with those particular accusers because of their looks. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said last month about one of them.

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In the only time one of these allegations made it to a verdict in court, a New York jury last year did not establish that he raped Ms. Carroll but did unanimously find that he sexually abused and defamed her and ordered him to pay her $5 million. Another jury earlier this year found that he continued to defame her and ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million. He is appealing both judgments.

Avoiding Taxes
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A partial view of a tall building in downtown Chicago, reflected in a window. Part of the “Trump” marquee is visible on the building.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
No president in American history has been wealthier than Mr. Trump. And no president in the modern era, at least, paid less in federal income taxes in their first year living in the White House.

Tax documents obtained by The Times in 2020 showed that Mr. Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he originally ran for president, and only $750 again in 2017, the first year of his presidency. In fact, in 11 of the 18 years examined by The Times, Mr. Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government whatsoever.

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Mr. Trump and his accountants have proved to be master manipulators of the tax code, bending it to benefit him in ways that would usually be damaging to a politician. The self-proclaimed billionaire, currently estimated to be worth $5.5 billion by Forbes magazine, managed year after year to pay less in income taxes than at least half of American taxpayers through creative bookkeeping if not more questionable tactics.

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According to a Times investigation in 2018, Mr. Trump and his siblings took a real estate empire from his father that banks a few years later would value at nearly $900 million and, through favorable appraisals, paid taxes on it as if it were worth just $57 million. Buildings given by Fred Trump to his children were valued low by the Trump family for tax purposes and high for other purposes, turning a potential $10 million tax bill into a charge of just over $700,000, The Times reported.

He has even gotten the Internal Revenue Service to send him large amounts of cash. By declaring large losses on paper at least, he collected more than $90 million in local, state and federal refunds. Even Mr. Trump was astonished. “He could not believe how stupid the government was for giving ‘someone like him’ that much money back,” Mr. Cohen, his former lawyer, recalled in congressional testimony.

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A woman in business clothes rolls a cart piled with storage boxes past two gold elevators.
A congressional staff member wheeling boxes of what were believed to be Mr. Trump’s tax returns to a House Ways and Means Committee meeting in 2022.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Mr. Trump constantly found ways of getting around paying taxes. At one point, an invoice padding scheme allowed Mr. Trump’s family to sell supplies to itself to get out of gift taxes. At another point, he shifted ownership of a failed Chicago tower to another partnership that he also owned to try to claim additional losses for tax purposes, according to an I.R.S. inquiry, a double-dipping scheme that effectively allowed him to claim the same losses twice.

Unlike every other modern president, Mr. Trump refused to voluntarily release his tax forms, going all the way to the Supreme Court in an ultimately futile effort to shield them from public view. But he has made no apology for avoiding taxes where he can. “That makes me smart,” he famously said in 2016.

The tax forms that did eventually become public highlighted the disparity between his public claims of business conquests and his private claims of business setbacks. In the same year that he published “The Art of the Deal,” his iconic best seller promoting himself as a masterful business mogul, his core businesses reported $45 million in losses on his tax returns.

Mr. Trump relied heavily on his father’s fortune to assemble his own. While he likes to say that he parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into his own empire, the Times investigation in 2018 found that his father had begun giving him $200,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars starting at age 3 and that over the course of his career he received $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate business. (Mr. Trump disputes this.)

The future president was not content to exploit his own inheritance. He got into a legal battle with his own niece and nephew, who accused him of cheating them out of their share of Fred Trump’s estate. Mary Trump and her brother Fred Trump III, the children of Donald’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., argued that they were originally supposed to split a 20 percent share of their grandfather’s estate, worth millions, upon his death. Instead, under a revised will, the two were each offered a one-time payment of $200,000.

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A black-and-white portrait of Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump, holding a black telephone to his ear.
Fred Trump in 1983. Donald Trump’s niece and nephew accused him of largely cutting them out of his father Fred’s will. Credit…Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
When they sued, the future president retaliated by cutting his niece and nephew out of the family’s medical insurance fund at a time when the younger Fred Trump was using it to pay for care for his severely ill infant son. “I was angry because they sued,” Donald Trump later explained to The Times. Fred and Mary eventually settled, but were embittered that their uncle would betray them in what seemed like a bid to find cash to pay his debts.

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“He was willing to squeeze his own niece and nephew and manipulate his father’s wishes, all to try and stop his own creditors from collecting the money he legally owed them,” Fred Trump wrote in “All in the Family,” a memoir published in July. “If that meant screwing his late brother — well, so be it. If it meant raiding the inheritance of his brother’s two children — well, OK.”

Mr. Trump’s relatives were not the only ones who considered themselves bilked. Over the years, so did contractors, bankers, business partners, customers and competitors, among others. By the time he first ran for president in 2016, he had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits, according to a count by USA Today, although in many of them he was the plaintiff.

Not counting personal injury lawsuits, which are common for many businesses, Mr. Trump or his firms were the defendants in at least 1,026 of those cases, accused of not paying taxes, not paying overtime, not paying companies he had hired, not paying back golf club fees that were to be refunded and not abiding by contracts. He won many of those fights but lost or settled others.

His educational and philanthropic enterprises were also seen as shams. Just after he was elected president in 2016, Mr. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to students of his defunct Trump University who accused him of defrauding them. Two years later, New York state authorities found “a shocking pattern of illegality” at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”

And in 2022, one of his tax schemes came unraveled when the Trump Organization, a family-owned business that he controlled, was convicted in criminal court of 17 counts of tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records for doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. The company was given the maximum fine of $1.6 million.

Pursuit and Punishment
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A partial bird’s-eye view of a man seated at a desk in a committee room surrounded by photographers.
James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Scandal followed him to the White House, so much so that he called it “the cloud” and complained that it was getting in the way of governing.

The most consuming scandal of his time in office stemmed from the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia sought to tip the contest to Mr. Trump, the newly sworn-in president refused to believe that and took any inquiry into the matter as an attack on his legitimacy.

Along the way, he escalated the matter by firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director leading the investigation into whether his campaign had any ties with the Russians, and then told visiting Russian officials the very next day that doing so had “taken off” what he called “great pressure.” Actually, it did not. Instead, it led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.

After nearly two years of investigating, Mr. Mueller concluded that the Russians did interfere on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he uncovered a stunning array of contacts between people in the president’s orbit and Russian figures. But Mr. Mueller reported that he did not establish any illegal coordination between Russia and the campaign and that “the evidence was not sufficient to charge” anyone with criminal conspiracy.

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At the same time, he outlined more than 10 instances where Mr. Trump might have committed obstruction of justice by trying to thwart the investigation — including the dismissal of Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller said he did not decide if charges were warranted because Justice Department policy precluded prosecution of a sitting president. Mr. Trump insisted this amounted to “total exoneration,” although Mr. Mueller explicitly said he was not exonerating the president.

The investigation and media attention on what he called “the Russia hoax” embittered Mr. Trump, and during his four years in the White House he expanded the use of government power to target perceived enemies in ways not seen since Watergate. While other presidents shied away from giving the impression that they were wielding the authority of their office for political vengeance, Mr. Trump was open about going after his adversaries.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia looks at the camera, an earpiece in his ear. Next to him is Mr. Trump, out of focus, speaking into a microphone.
Mr. Trump with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018. Mr. Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence agencies when they said Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Time and again, he publicly pressed his attorneys general — first Jeff Sessions and then William P. Barr — to prosecute Democrats or government officials who angered him. At various times, he called for the prosecution of Mr. Biden, Ms. Clinton and former President Barack Obama and lashed out when advisers resisted.

He grew particularly obsessed with prosecuting certain people, like former Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Trump was fixated on the former top diplomat for talking with the Iranians with whom Mr. Kerry had negotiated a nuclear agreement from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States. In meeting after meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to charge Mr. Kerry, according to a memoir by John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

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Mr. Bolton’s memoir was another example of Mr. Trump pushing the bounds of the presidency to punish someone. Angered that Mr. Bolton had criticized him, Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to block his former aide from publishing his book. The decision to go to court to squelch a memoir prior to publication after it had been initially cleared for classified information by a career official was seen as so beyond the pale that the assistant attorney general who filed the suit on White House orders, Jody Hunt, immediately resigned.

Mr. Trump tried to put so many people who irritated him in the cross hairs of the legal system that it is hard to maintain a thorough list. He wanted prosecutors to investigate Mr. Comey as well as Andrew G. McCabe, his acting successor, and other F.B.I. officials who participated in the Russia investigation, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

The president was so determined to revoke security clearances for John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who both criticized him on television, that his chief of staff John F. Kelly estimated that Mr. Trump raised the matter between 50 and 75 times.

He also sought to use his power to help specific companies he favored and penalize those that angered him. He told aides to instruct the Justice Department to block the merger of Time Warner with AT&T, which would include the CNN network, one of the biggest thorns in his side. The Justice Department unsuccessfully sought to stop the merger in court, although officials insisted they acted on their own initiative, not at the behest of the White House.

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John R. Bolton whispering something to John F. Kelly in the doorway of the Oval Office. Mr. Trump is out of focus in the corner of the photo.
John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff, in 2018. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Kelly, second from left, to revoke the security clearances of certain critics.Credit…Tom Brenner/The New York Times
Mr. Trump also tried to penalize Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, another media irritant, by pressing for increases in U.S. postal rates for the company and by blocking a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.

But he monetized the presidency for himself, as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. Critics took him to court charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution barring the acceptance of gifts from “any king, prince, or foreign state,” although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.

Most notably, Mr. Trump sought to use his office to strong-arm another country to deliver dirt on Mr. Biden, a political rival. The president suspended military aid to Ukraine and leaned on its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favor” by announcing an investigation into supposed corruption involving Mr. Biden and other Democrats.

For that, the House ultimately impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power on a largely party-line vote, making him only the third president ever to be charged with high crimes, although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction.

Mr. Trump made prolific use of his presidential pardon power to help friends and political allies — and particularly figures who he might have had reason to fear would turn against him by talking with prosecutors if faced with prison time. Critics argued that dangling pardons amounted to an attempt to obstruct investigators.

Among others, Mr. Trump gave pardons or commutations to Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman; Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Roger J. Stone Jr., his friend and political adviser, all of whom had been in the cross hairs of prosecutors looking at Mr. Trump. In the final weeks of his presidency, he also used his clemency power to help convicted felons who paid people close to him to lobby for them.

Mr. Trump’s presidency ended in violence as a result of his concerted effort to overturn the 2020 election that he lost so that he could hold onto power despite the will of the voters. He filed dozens of lawsuits and pressured state officials, members of Congress, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help reverse his defeat, something no president has ever done before. And when the crowd of supporters he told to march on Congress stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the finalization of Mr. Trump’s defeat, he sat in the White House watching on television without trying to stop it for 187 minutes.

The House impeached him again as a result, accusing him of inciting the riot, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats. Never before had a president been impeached a second time. The Senate ultimately acquitted him again, but this time seven Republicans voted for conviction and several others said they voted no only because he was already out of office by the time of the trial.

‘The Real Verdict’
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Mr. Trump, wearing a gold tie, is seen in deep shadow, his eyes closed.
Mr. Trump outside the New York State Supreme Court during his criminal trial in May.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The explosive finale of the Trump presidency did not bring an end to the Trump scandals. On the contrary, it opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the epic and still-unresolved struggles between the 45th president and the American law enforcement system.

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In the months after he departed the White House, authorities in Washington, New York, Georgia, Florida and Michigan opened investigations that ultimately led them to Mr. Trump. Civil lawsuits also mounted. Mr. Trump became a target or defendant in so many courthouses that his post-presidency has become a full-employment act for defense attorneys.

One after another, judges and juries found against Mr. Trump, branding him a fraudster, a sexual abuser and, through his real estate firm, a tax cheat. The two verdicts on behalf of E. Jean Carroll have left him on the hook for nearly $100 million including interest. The tax fraud conviction of the Trump Organization made him the first president to head a criminal company.

A separate civil lawsuit brought by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, went to the heart of Mr. Trump’s self-image as a tycoon of Olympian proportions. Mr. Trump’s practice of valuing properties according to his needs came back to bite him when a judge found him liable for sweeping business fraud, ruling that he illegally inflated his net worth in securing loans. The judge not only hit him with penalties that could top $450 million, he also barred Mr. Trump from leading any business in his original home state for three years. Mr. Trump is appealing.

While that judgment in itself was a first in presidential history, it barely seemed to register compared with the criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump. In what was then a stunning move, the F.B.I. conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find classified documents that Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House and then refused to give back even when subpoenaed. That, too, was a first.

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Document boxes stacked up in a bathroom, which features a chandelier, marble and crystal sconces.
A photo provided by the Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.Credit…Department of Justice
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And then came what might have once been unthinkable — criminal charges against a former president. Mr. Trump was indicted not once, not twice, not three times but four times. While other presidents like Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton were not without their own scandals, none of them were ever charged with felonies.

The first indictment centered on those hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, charged Mr. Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the affair and the payments. The second indictment came in federal court in Florida where the special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump with mishandling classified documents and obstructing authorities trying to retrieve them.

The third and fourth indictments both stemmed from Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost. Mr. Smith brought an election interference case against him in federal court in Washington, while Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a racketeering case against Mr. Trump for trying to switch Georgia’s electoral votes. The Michigan attorney general, for her part, named Mr. Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in her own election case. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and blamed Democrats for coming after him for partisan reasons.

The drumbeat of hearings and appeals and procedural fights that have followed may have numbed the shock value, but these cases will stand out in those future history books. He has gone to trial on only one of the four indictments so far, Mr. Bragg’s hush-money case, and the jury unanimously found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Sentencing has been pushed off until after the election.

The other three cases are in various states of limbo in part because of aggressive and successful defense moves by Mr. Trump’s lawyers aimed at delaying or undercutting the charges against him. The Georgia case was sidetracked by revelations that Ms. Willis had a personal relationship with the prosecutor she chose to manage the case.

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The Florida case was thrown out in July by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, not because she found Mr. Trump innocent but because she considered Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel to be procedurally improper, a decision that stunned legal experts. Mr. Smith is appealing, and the charges could be reinstated.

The federal election case was thrown off track for months by Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had immunity as president. The Supreme Court largely accepted the argument, ruling for the first time in history that presidents have substantial immunity for crimes related to official acts. Now Judge Tanya S. Chutkan must determine whether Mr. Trump’s actions in trying to overturn the election to hold onto power constituted official acts, a process that could stretch out for months.

In the end, she may not get a chance. If Mr. Trump is elected next month, he could pull the plug on the federal prosecutions, and even the state cases in New York and Georgia may be frozen while he is in office again. He knows that, and he is counting on it. As he said earlier this year, “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people.”

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Mr. Trump, his arms outstretched, as supporters in a crowd behind him smile, cheer and take pictures.
Mr. Trump at a rally in New York last month.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 23, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Scandal-Plagued Career Nears a Decisive Moment. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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When a country is attacked, and the attacker is focused solely on total victory, domination, destruction, something else is going on, behind the scenes, in the global environment. With news and instant communications flying around the planet, a peace loving burgeoning majority of humans (peace is after all an intrinsically life sustaining natural order and we would not be alive without it), are taking sides.

After all, we can’t help projecting, what if it was us being bombed? Thus a wave builds, almost invisibly, which at its routes is akin to an Hegelian anti-thesis.

And as criminal thugs are cast out of planetary societies, so too are whole groups (which can be described as “whole nations”) are, by necessity, cast out of a planetary society.

This “casting out”, this penalty, is evidence of what the philosopher Hegel surely would have called an “antithesis.” This species human survival trait is what is happening now. It is going to take some time. Hegel called what emerges a “synthesis.”

So after death and wide destruction, peace and harmony inevitably returns to the planet. And yes, we all do suffer fools and evil doers. Part of sharing a planet together.

Almost any publicly facing issue is subject to political (or similarly, social) contention. Now, mind numbing contention. This likely also results in procrastination in working out and testing potential solutions. This routine delays achieving good outcomes, or worse, invites bad outcomes. It is better to anticipate potential problems, and thoroughly understand their underlying trajectories and likeliness. For example, aggressively delaying dealing with global warming, will likely bring us to the point of “much harder to reverse,” or worse “the point of no return”. Conversely, weighing epidemics, recessions, inflation, wars, and climate change, by their probabilities, with constant reference to their potential damage to humanity, is the only logical way to address them in a rational society.

Walking down most streets in American cities, one can’t help but reflect that on average, almost every other person that walks by you, voted for Trump.

Yet well before election time, a plethora of disqualifying information, revealing future predictive behavioral characteristics, had already emerged. We had Charlottsville. Or credible reports of female molestation. Or grabbing woman by the …….

Or after his election loss, the devastating directions to his staff at his election denying rally to disable metal and gun detectors, because the people in the crowd, were “not there to hurt me”. Never mind the police, other guards. And members of Trumps’ own crowd.

Those that have joined Trump as political allies, have been learning some of Trump’s elementary secrets. Like how to cheat a political or business opponent. Think Trumps’golf game, and his habit of moving the ball when other players were not looking. Or gaming the IRS. Or misleading one’s bank, to make him more “loan worthy”, or wildly inflating property insurance claims. No one really questions the validity of the respective news reports.

News is not all fake. If it were, by now, no one would trust anything, which is absurd. Almost everyone believes there is a material substance to at least some of the reporting regarding Trump’s behavioral foibles, Nothing can remain a secret for long anymore. There are too many observers and observation points.

For Trump, everyone is really an opponent or potential opponent that needs to be treated accordingly. Those seeking Trumps endorsement, surely, if elected, or before, will likely have to perpetuate some “good” relationship. Probably based on such things as accolades, money, status and the promise of pardons for Trumps’ people, or Trump himself, as reciprocation.

A potential danger is electing another Republican, that might be a “wolf in lambs clothing”, or a baby wolf in lambs clothing. Adopting Trump techniques and style. A Disantis for example, may have to privately pledge loyalty to Trump to “earn” a hardy endorsement, and one that is not rescinded prior his own re-election or presidential run. Do we know now what contingent currency Trump will demand in return? And, of course, part of the endorsement would no doubt require the quid quo in the form of a Trump pardon when or if needed. A profitable business deal perhaps? It is all a matter of endorsements. It is sadly already obvious that a Republican presidential candidate may not have much of a chance of being elected president absent a Trump endorsement, and an un-endorsement would likely be fatal. This is the “curse” the Republican leadership has brought on themselves.

Republican politicians, hoping for re-election, now have to publicly compliment the naked emperors’ clothing for all to see. While non-captives of his cult, can only look on in amazement. It is unreal, and truly unbalancing, sadly bearing a resemblance to the very early days of Hitlers’ rise to power.

Trump is adept at using persuasion techniques, which largely explains his following. It surely was not his skill at governing a country, state, or city, and arguably, even a business (I say arguably) because he has now really “gotten caught”. (Using this phrase “gotten caught” is ironic because it is itself one of his favorite persuasion techniques), bringing public suspicion to any adversary of his choosing.
Caught for what, you might ask? As the mind falls asleep, few ask. These techniques are well known to those who study the science of persuasion. They are incredibly effective. For example, using “social proof.” Example, the claim “everybody knows,” “everybody is saying,” makes the listener want to join “everybody” by simply agreeing with the claimant.

Or nicknaming his adversaries, making them fight to get their identity back. He has got 6 or seven of these tactics, and they are highly effective, having enabled him to get this far. Even Hitlers’ Mein Kampf, highlights, for example (though many more comparisons can be sited) the concept of large rallies, one of Hitler’s favorite tactics, providing all onlookers the persuasion technique of ‘social proof.” “Wow”, one bystander might reason, can all these people be wrong?

No need to define how far Trump got, it was an amazing feat, but with unfortunate history making repercussions, and now books and books have and will continue describing the journey. The cascade has years ago started. The historical record, looked at through almost any perspective, will be hard to deny by future generations of Americans. It is an inevitability.

Historical events, and the reality that surrounds them, though subject to some level of debate, are hard to completely deny. A famous man’s Ill judgement, irrationality, poor mental condition, countered by cunning, evilness, narcissism, will all be universally recorded, and eventually seen, alike, by most onlookers. It will be a long-term embarrassment to America.

There will always be lots of eyes on Trump. He has made himself a “newsmaker.” He has a “following”. That is both good and bad. Every front has a back. The bigger the front, the bigger the back. Trump (and his eventually humiliated followers) will pay an awful price. The only pertinent question is how much will all the rest of us pay?

7/9/22: Martin Westerman

A black hole at the center of a spiral galaxy called The Milky Way causes it to revolve in the universe. But 25,800 light-years away at the galaxy’s far end, on a tiny planet populated by tinier creatures – a small collection of pale-skinned hominids, think the galaxy revolves around them.

They call themselves “homo sapiens,” they call their planet “Earth,” and they are the latest hominid species to exist on Earth, which is 4.5 billion years old (1 year = a rotation of Earth around the “sun,” a minor star at the center of their solar system). Hominids have existed there for 1 million years. Sapiens – also known as “humans,” have existed for 100,000 years.

But today, about 40 million loud, pale humans who call themselves “White,” and live in an artificially bordered area called “the United States” (located between two bodies of saltwater they call “oceans”), are screaming and arming themselves against being “replaced” by hominids of other skin colors. Earth is divided into many artificially bordered areas (“towns,” “counties,” “cities” “states,” “provinces,” “countries”), each with its own human population, in various shades of skin color, various levels of “development” (ability to provide populations with adequate water, food, shelter and commerce), and various languages for communication.

Sapiens have developed a trait they call “humor,” which involves creating surprise at incongruity in context, or in a short story or question called a “joke.” The final statement of a joke is called a “punch line.” Humor stimulates a range of reactions, from a relaxation of the face to several bursts of exhaled air. Most sapiens possess some capacity for generating or appreciating humor, but generally, the more agitated the humans (like the Loud Whites), the less they appreciate humor. Humans judge humor with one of two statements: “That’s funny,” or “That’s not funny.”

Here is some humor:
• If sapiens are the last of five hominid species who once walked on Earth, and they have already replaced the other four species by seeing them die off, killing them or interbreeding with them, why is any sapiens worried about replacement?
• A joke: what do you call a sapiens whose skin color ranges from pink to brown? Punch line: A White.
• Another joke: What do Whites call non-Whites? Answer: “People of color” (or “POCs”).
• Another joke: which sapiens group represents less than 0.5% of Earth’s total population, and barely 20% of the United States White population, but thinks they’re the only humans who should occupy the Earth? Punch line: Loud Whites. Is that funny?

The Loud Whites’ activities in the United States would be humorous and insignificant if they existed in a vacuum, such as an asteroid in space. But they live amongst other humans, and magnify their agitation through demonstrations, murders, and broadly distributed public media, and control of local governments (agreed-on structures for managing affairs within borders).

Most Loud Whites subscribe to the “Christian” religion (religion: a belief and principles system generally based on myths, and presided over or commanded by one or more all-powerful gods or god-like sapiens). Must humans on Earth have agreed to abide by a Christian calendar based on the supposed birth date of the demi-god Jesus Christ, even though there is no agreed Year 0, time actually began at the birth of the Earth, and many hominid religions mark time differently, starting from 5780 to 10,000 years before the present year. The current Earth year is 2022 post-Jesus Christ birth, but is called A.D. (after death), while the years before the birth are called B.C. (before Christ). No Christians acknowledge the indulgence of other cultures in granting their time frame primacy, by calling it the “Common Era.”

Christianity shares founding documents (The Bible) with two other religions – Islam and Judaism. The Bibles are contradictory: they counsel both loving and respecting all creations on Earth, and dominating and killing all creations on Earth. The Loud Whites speak of the former, and act on the latter.

To power their activities on Earth, hominids originally used energy resources on the planet’s surface – water, wind, burnable materials (woody plants, oils from plants and animals), and heat from their sun. But late in the 1600s A.D., they discovered burnable, carbon-based energy sources beneath Earth’s surface (coal, oil and gas). These “fossil fuels” are the decayed by-products of life forms that lived on Earth 65 million years before hominids. They were wiped out by a meteor that struck Earth, caused geological disruption and oxidation, left dust and carbon compounds blanketing the atmosphere, and killed most of Earth’s life forms. Eventually, other life forms replaced them, including hominids 64 million years later.

Now, burning fossil fuels powers most hominid activities and inventions. Their oxidation produces carbon dust and compounds, which are again overloading Earth’s atmosphere and killing its plants, animals and humans. Hominid activities, including agriculture, habitation development, resource extraction, and landfills (designated collection areas for unusable objects), are displacing living areas of other life forms, driving many to extinction, and replacing them with imported species of flora and fauna.

Most of Earth’s flora and fauna exhibit both intelligence and the ability to communicate, but humans consider themselves Earth’s premier life form, and rarely recognize other species’ capacities, or communicate with them. Instead, humans exploit them for their food and economic assets. Humans even cannot recognize intelligence in other humans, or communicate with them, if their beliefs, cultures and/or colors differ from their own.

Since the Christian (or Common Era) 1400s, Whites from Earth’s Northern hemisphere have conquered vast areas of Earth’s Western and Southern Hemispheres by force, overwhelming, enslaving, subverting and/or killing (replacing) the original inhabitants (White and non-White alike) – all for the glory of the Christian gods. Whites accept and celebrate replacing others, but not others replacing them.

As part of their conquests in the 1700s, Whites created the ironically named “United States,” structured to favor only Whites over all POC, including the original inhabitants (misnamed “Indians”). Their founding document states that “All men are created equal,” but it meant only White males, not White females. POC were imported from the Southern Hemisphere to labor as slaves on farms without citizenship rights, and forcibly converted to Christians. When large groups of other United States Whites in the 1800s decided slavery was wrong, the pro-slavery Whites declared war on them to retain their slaves. They lost the war, and the anti-slavery Whites, who controlled the government, freed the POC slaves, and granted them citizenship rights. But pro-slavery Whites have been resisting this progress ever since, and now they control the United States government.

As POCs (and women) sought to achieve the freedom, economic and political status of White males, ruling Whites restricted their opportunities. The small group of Loud Whites has invented “white replacement theory” as the latest reason to restrict POC rights. Most POC Christians and non-Christian Whites think benefits can derive from shared opportunities, and do not subscribe to “White replacement theory.” But many Whites acquiesce to restricting POC and women’s opportunities, as a way to retain White male supremacy. Many Loud male and female Whites use their Christianity and 18th Century United States founding documents to justify restrictions on the rights and opportunities of anyone who does not agree with them – both POCs and non-compliant females.

Loud Whites insist the Christian religion is the best and only belief system, and that fossil fuel production, poisoning of air, land and water resources and life forms that depend on them, and warring activities are harmless and justified. They also insist that anyone who disagrees with them should be destroyed. Loud Whites therefore pose significant dangers to others on Earth.

It would appear that Loud White hominids should worry less about POCs replacing them, and more about their effect on Earth. Their planet’s natural processes may dispose of them and the hominids they fear, and replace them all with new life forms in due ourse. Whether this happens or not won’t matter to the planet, its solar system, the stars or the black hole around which they, not the Loud Whites all revolve.

Why the environmental movement will fail, and how you can make money on it
 Martin Westerman / ©2022

If you had let environmental groups pick your stocks since the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, instead of paying high-priced “gurus” to pick them, you’d have long-ago made your fortune. Why? Because the environmental groups’ villains included aircraft, chemical, fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, tourism and other bedrock enterprises of the New York Stock Exchange, S&P 500 and mutual funds. Environmentalists would have picked you a winning portfolio at a bargain price.

More than 50 years after Earth Day #1, every country in the world still depends on fossil fuels to power its economy – from energy generation and leaf blowers to transportation and wars (currently, U.S. vs. “drugs” and Russia vs. Ukraine), all supplied by such climate change deniers as Shell, Exxon, BP and Gazprom. As the price of fossil fuels rises, economies decline; as they fall, economies rise.

Today’s Americans have bigger things to think about than the environment. As former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson asked Exxon shareholders on May 29, 2013: “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

One might find that statement ironic. Without a planet, there would be no humanity, hence indeed no suffering. And thus all human potential forever gone.

Economists in the early 1990s conservatively valued the environment’s benefits and savings (ecosystem services) at $33 trillion a year (Robert Costanza et al.), a number that dwarfed the $28 trillion generated by the world’s economies. But ecosystem services do not show up on any public or private entity’s balance sheets. No accounting standard (GASB or GAAP), or budgets or financial statements assess or account for oxygen production, carbon sink, erosion control, stormwater management, public health, property value enhancement, extreme weather moderation and more that the environment provides for free. In 2022 dollars, the $54 trillion value of Earth’s ecosystems still dwarfs all value that enterprises create (E-commerce? Only $5.5 trillion).

While irony informs environmentalists, it doesn’t inform investors. Even though the scale of “soft” green assets (the environment) dwarfs the scale of hard “grey” ones (built infrastructure), investments in “grey” assets dwarf those in green. Successful enterprises operate “in the black,” unsuccessful ones “in the red.” None operate “in the green.”

Following Rachel Carson’s 1962 expose book Silent Spring, the U.S. banned DDT, which major U.S. chemical companies had been producing. Yet, the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) includes an exemption for DDT, where its benefits to control insect-borne illnesses “outweigh (human) health and environmental risks.” Where humans benefit, harming the planet and its life forms is an acceptable trade-off.

Americans’ balanced portfolios and wealth building are based on investments in enterprises that create more negative than positive impacts on the environment: the real estate, agribusiness, aircraft, automotive, asphalt, beauty, building materials, cement, chemical, clothing, coatings and paints, construction, defense, electrical and electronics, fast food, fossil fuels, furniture, glass, government, grocery, health care, hospitality, marine, medical, metals, mining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, tourism, treated wood and waste management industries.

Besides stuffing landfills, North America’s investment sweethearts have also created “forever chemicals” and substances that either do not, or take decades or centuries to break down in the environment: DDT, heat- and oil-resistant poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), flame retardants (PBDEs), insulation liquids (PCBs), lethal radioactive waste (from the energy, military and medical establishments), and micro-plastics, phosgene, cyanide, herbicides (e.g., DuPont’s Agent Orange and Monsanto’s glyphosate), roadway paint, vehicle tire and rail brake dust, lead, arsenic, asbestos and mercury. Most of these products are now found in and harm humans, other fauna, flora, air, land and water. The U.S. is also the world’s #1 plastic waste contributor, and a chief contributor to the 50 million tons of electronic waste dumped every year worldwide.

“This isn’t personal; it’s business,” goes the saying. People can afford to be moral or immoral. Money is amoral. And survival of for-profits, non-profits, governments and economies depends on money.

Environmentalists have made the moral case, showing human impacts on polar bears and other animal s. But they have failed to get the monetary impacts incorporated into business and government balance sheets (via GASB and GAAP). They have come close with Ecosystem Service Valuation (ESV) – incorporating ES monetary values in nature restoration projects, and with Transfers of Development Rights (TDR) – land swaps between suburban and exurban landowners. The exurb retains a pastoral landscape by selling development rights to parties who add development density in other urban or suburban locations.

But the specialization inherent in capitalist economies challenges environmentalists. It has unwittingly separated end users, intermediaries and producers from the environment that provides the resources for their products and their survival on Earth.

One way to help reduce that separation is to extend private property rights to their end point: any material mined or produced on private property remains the property of the mining or producing company. Thus, any transfer through monetary exchange to intermediaries and end users would make possession of that property a limited-term lease, so the originator and/or its assigns would be responsible for the material’s ultimate disposition. This would internalize costs, and stop the transferring of disposal responsibility to others. But the opposite occurs.

Externalizing environmental costs has changed the planet’s weather patterns, as well as the migration and growth patterns of marine and land animals and plants. Rare bomb cyclones, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, thermal inversions, and wildfire seasons are now becoming common. The resulting destruction and dislocation costs are astronomical. But the U.S. economy regards payments for fire-fighting, damage recovery and resettlement, medical care, increased use of fuels and electric power for mitigation of heat waves (air conditioning) and cold snaps (heating), and even increased insurance premiums – as credits, not debits on the U.S. GDP. Our accounting systems are obviously flawed.

Thus, human commerce and exploration have unwittingly spread invasive species and diseases worldwide. Europeans since 1634 have brought smallpox, Yellow Fever, cholera, scarlet fever, and Spanish flu to the Americas. Also, polio, Asian flu, HIV-AIDS, SARS, Swine Flu, ZIKA, Ebola, H1N1, Norovirus, MERS and COVID. Likely next epidemics: monkeypox and avian flu. They have proliferated plant diseases, too: blights that killed the American chestnut, corn species, boxwood and other flora; fungus infections that killed oaks and larches; rusts and borer insects that are killing madronas, birches and other trees. All these diseases have generated widespread deaths, massive impacts to world economies, and profitable activities for chemical, pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies.

We eat unwittingly – more meat per capita today than in 1970, even as global bovine flatulence (methane) from the livestock and dairy industries adds more greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than cars, aircraft, trains, ships and all other modes of transport. Meanwhile, U.S. factory farming of beef, pork and poultry generate more waste than local disposal systems can manage.

We drink and irrigate unwittingly. The U.S. Forest Service reports that half of our 204 freshwater basins cannot keep up with demand, and within the next 50 years, many parts of the U.S. could see their freshwater supplies shrink by two-thirds. Consumption-encouraging water agreements and government policies ignored potential extreme weather impacts, and the time, snow pack and rainfall required to replenish water supplies. Americans are boosting GDP in their search for more drinking and irrigation water – digging more wells, and building energy-intensive desalination plants, which deliver filtered water at about twice the price of fresh, but at 99.4% less than the cost of bottled. About 80% of their power comes from fossil fuels, 11% from renewables, and 9% from deadly-waste nuclear.

And we live unwittingly. Environmentalists assert that urban areas are the most ecological places to live. Today, nearly half of the world lives in them. But they present downsides: heat island effect, income inequity, economic and governance challenges, traffic congestion, poor air and water quality, aging infrastructure, supply chain issues, elimination of green spaces, commercially delivered invasive species, high living costs, increased homelessness and slum growth, drinking water and waste-disposal challenges, high energy consumption, high resident and worker stress, faster disease spreads, shorter lifespans.

Meanwhile, a population the size of Florida – about 21.5 million, is roaming the planet as “climate refugees” (U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)). By 2050, a population the size of China – 1.5 billion, may be out there. The wrong perspectives here are (a) expecting humans will adjust to climate changes, and (b) viewing refugees as potential customers for housing, clothing, food and entertainment.

Environmentalists have succeeded since Earth Day 1970 in passing laws and creating agencies that have made significant progress in both addressing environmental problems, and improving human product efficiencies. But politics trumps the environment. Right-wing U.S. politicians and conservative justices, financed by the U.S. commercial, fossil fuel and agribusiness industries are now working through the North American administrative, judicial and legislative systems now to dismantle those agencies and laws.

All of this reminds me of a scene from the television series Battlestar Galactica (Episode #206), where the Cylon Symbiant whispers into her partner’s ear, “There’s one thing we know about human beings with certainty: they are masters of self-destruction.”

Art imitates life. In Sapiens, Yuval Harari notes that, “The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach (from Africa) was the moment that Homo Sapiens climbed to the top rung of the food chain on a particular landmass and therefore became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.”

Most ironically, homo sapiens is the last of five hominid species that once walked the Earth. But its record of driving animal and plant species to extinction is second only to the meteor that hit Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out 97% of all life. While humans consider themselves uniquely intelligent, all Earth’s plant and animal species display intelligence – from basic instinct to near-human reasoning. Yet humans rarely recognize or communicate with those intelligences, and instead have asserted their own primacy, and exploited “lesser species” for their protein, ritual value and other assets. Often, groups of humans do not recognize the intelligence of other humans, or communicate with them if their belief systems or color differ from their own.

Humans should have long ago mastered the challenge of “Saving the Earth.” But polarized politics, stymied governments, patterns of commerce, land development, travel and conflict show that humans have little interest in or political will to change their habits.

The economy is providing well for them, and all welfare and progress depend on healthy economies. So the environmental movement will fail, but we’ll all make money on it — until the environment fails us.

Why the environmental movement will fail, and how you can make money on it

Since Earth Day in 1971, if you had paid $10 a year to join the Sierra Club and Greenpeace instead of shelling out thousands a year to financial gurus for the “best” stock picks, you’d be rich now. Why? Because those groups’ “environmental villains” list included most of the fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, commercial and agribusiness “bad actors” that underlie the S&P 500. So basically, the environmental movement would have picked a winning portfolio for you at a bargain price.

More than 60 years after Rachel Carson alerted us to the dangers of DDT, it’s still the pesticide of choice for eradicating mosquitoes where mosquito-borne illnesses are prevalent. More than 120 years since Teddy Roosevelt declared, “I’ve been poisoned!” after reading Sinclair Lewis’ meat packing industry expose, The Jungle, meat consumption and land devoted to cattle ranching in the U.S. have increased. Between those bovines and dairy cows, cattle flatulence is now counted as a major contributor to global climate change.

While energy efficiency in all human inventions and buildings has improved, and the EPA was created and laws passed and enforced to reduce pollution in air, water and land, no government has yet valued the environment in monetary terms. Even though its benefits and savings (“ecosystem services”) were valued in the early 1990s at more than $33 trillion a year (about $54 trillion in 2022 dollars — Robert Costanza et al.), no government or enterprise in North America has assessed or accounts for those values in their budgets or financial statements. The only land value they recognize is real estate appraisal. Owners of private timber lands make more money selling their land for subdivisions than by harvesting the trees on it. So residential and commercial land development has continued unabated, millions of acres of trees have been cut, habitats erased and ecosystem services lost.

The “green lifestyle” (living in dense residential areas, taking public transit everywhere, bearing few children, eating organic and vegetarian, etc.), hasn’t become mainstream, despite more than 50 years of marketing, promotion, experimentation and discussion since the first Earth Day. Organic food products cost 2-4 times more than standard products; “ecological” construction and commercial products are also cost significantly more. Many enterprises now practice “sustainable business,” but most of those on the Sierra Club-Greenpeace bad actor list don’t. There are 18.7 billion Google entries under “Going green,” and 1.8 billion under “books on green practice,” yet this massive self-help area has relatively few practitioners.

Recyclable and compostable materials are mixed in most restaurants and commercial enterprises, and end up in landfills. Industries rarely control their end-user waste, or much of their own production waste. Plastic collects in rivers, and in sea and ocean hot spots and gyres; lethal radioactive waste generated by the energy, military and medical establishments since the 1930s has yet to find a re-use or permanent disposal site. The freighters and tankers that carry the world’s globalized fuels and products burn a gallon of sulfurous oil per 150 feet they travel across our oceans. A Los Angeles study found that ocean-going ships berthed at Long Beach docks produce more aggregate air pollution than all five million cars on the LA freeways.

Every country in the world uses some fossil fuel to power its economy, from coal-fired power plants to leaf blowers to weapons systems. When the price of fossil fuels goes up, the economy goes down. Humans keep mindlessly boosting their carbon output, blanketing the earth in dust and greenhouse gases, and ignoring that egregious carbon producer, war. Most of it does not get mitigated in carbon offsets.

Let’s also add the long-term effects of toxins that have been released into the environment over the centuries – from early millennia lead and mercury to current DDT, PCBs and methane. None are being fully addressed or mitigated. Chemical flame retardants (PBDE’s) for example, harm human nervous systems, hormonal functions and reproductive organs, and cause cancers. They vaporize when heated, or simply rub off of products where they’ve been applied, and rise into the air as dust that can travel great distances. They take decades to break down. Many countries in the world, but not the U.S., have outlawed them. Manufacturers have replaced them with other flame retardants, and these chemicals are also sparsely regulated in the U.S.

Diseases have also been globalized since the Spanish flu and cholera epidemics appeared around 1918. Following on, we have seen polio, Asian flu, HIV-AIDS, SARS, Swine Flu, ZIKA, Ebola, H1N1, MERS and COVID, with more to likely appear. COVID has been the deadliest virus in the U.S. since Spanish flu.

As humans produce harmful products, lurch from crisis to crisis, dig themselves out of wars, natural disasters and vast man-made catastrophes at fabulous costs in lives, resources and treasure, I’m reminded of a scene on the tv series Battlestar Galactica, where the alien symbiont whispers into her partner’s ear: “One thing we know about humans: they are masters of self-destruction.”

We created this mess. How do we dig ourselves out of it and save the Earth? The question seems ridiculous, since this is the only place in the universe where we can survive. Of course humans would mobilize to save themselves. Yet, they don’t. Between polarized politics and stoking the economy with purchases of goods and services, commercial and residential development on former forest and farm lands, travel, uses of non-recyclable and non compostable materials that are simply investments in long term landfill development, and driving billions of fossil-fueled miles in millions of vehicles, they exhibit no interest in or political will to change their habits. The economy is providing well for them.

All welfare and progress depend on a healthy economy, and sustainable business is a more expensive and less economical proposition than standard practice. People have bigger things to think about than the environment – jobs, homes, families, prestige, entertainment, politics. So the environmental movement is failing, but we’re all making money on it.

Martin Westerman,(4/1/2022)

What Biden could have said:

My fellow Americans, 90 years ago a madman in Europe threatened to destroy the world if Europe did not give him a piece of Czechoslovakia. So Europe capitulated, and gave Adolf Hitler that piece of Czechoslovakia. But then he wanted all of Czechoslovakia, as well as Austria and Poland. After that, he wanted the rest of Europe. The United States and allies around the world went to war to stop that madman, and decades of peace and prosperity have followed.

A great historian once said, if we don’t learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat them. Today, another madman is threatening to destroy the world if he doesn’t get a piece of Ukraine. The world gave him Crimea in eastern Ukraine, but now Vladimir Putin wants all of Ukraine. And then he will want Latvia, Estonia and Albania, and Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and half of Germany. He seems to think that he can recreate the Soviet Union, or Russia of the czars. He cannot. Time has moved on. And if he doesn’t move with it, history will leave him and Russia behind.

But Mr. Putin has not gotten the message of history yet. Instead, he has activated his nuclear arsenal and threatens a global catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. If the world does not give him Ukraine, he says he will destroy us all.

So we will now be clear. First, the United States does not abide authoritarian government here at home, and it does not abide authoritarian governments attacking sovereign states abroad.

We went to war 90 years ago to prevent a madman from imposing his violent, authoritarian rule over Europe. The United States supports the will of people in every country to choose the government they want. Putin is not giving Ukraine that choice.

This unprovoked attack on Ukraine is partly the fault of the previous American administration. It gave Mr. Putin the impression that the United States is weak and that it will not act to prevent naked aggression against a peaceful, sovereign state. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States economy is the strongest in the world, and we are using it to support the people of Ukraine, so they can determine their own future. It is up to them, not Russia, to choose their future.

The United States military is unequaled in the world. We choose when and where to engage for the greatest possible effect. We and our European allies warn Mr. Putin that he does not want to invite our combined military force into the Eastern European theatre to act on Ukraine’s behalf. The leader of Russia may also have forgotten that no state has ever acted on a nuclear threat, thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Russia’s nuclear arsenal is one third the size of the United States. So what the Russian leader is telling us is that he is willing to risk nuclear warfare, and to sacrifice all of Russia to get Ukraine. That kind of thinking is illogical, and it can only make sense to a madman.

In the card game of poker, a player without the winning cards may pretend that he has them anyway. We call that a bluff. We are confident that Mr. Putin is bluffing, and he does not hold the winning cards.

So I now urge all world leaders who support self-determination for every country, to warn the Russian leader that he must cease his country’s aggressive actions, and pull all Russian and Russian proxy forces out of Ukraine. Otherwise, he and his country will face immediate and severe, global diplomatic and economic consequences.

The Russian leader has said that economic sanctions against Russia are an act of war. This is almost humorous coming from a man who is waging unprovoked war against a peaceful neighboring state.

Next, the United States will continue its diplomatic and economic sanctions against the aggressor until its war operations cease and it removes its forces from Ukraine. In addition to those actions, I am ordering US forces Europe to DEFCON 2, and I am authorizing US commanders, and requesting NATO commanders to alert their Russian counterparts that US and NATO air forces will begin enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine at 1200 hours local time February 6, 2022. I am also authorizing US forces to respond appropriately to aggressive behavior by Russian military ships and planes at sea and in the air. Until now, US naval and air forces have exercised enormous restraint and grace in the face of provocative and unwarranted acts by their Russian counterparts. Our naval and air forces no longer need to exercise that restraint.

Likewise, the United States and its Allies and supporters have exercised enormous restraint in the face of this Ukraine aggression. We have reached our limit. It is time for the Russian state to cease its aggression, and act as a modern partner with its neighbor nations. It cannot turn back the clock. It cannot rebuild the Soviet Union. It cannot recreate the Russia of the czars. It cannot reverse the tide of history. Any attempt to do those things is not just folly.

What Biden could have said:

My fellow Americans, 90 years ago a madman in Europe threatened to destroy the world if Europe did not give him a piece of Czechoslovakia. So Europe capitulated, and gave Adolf Hitler that piece of Czechoslovakia. But then he wanted all of Czechoslovakia, as well as Austria and Poland. After that, he wanted the rest of Europe. The United States and allies around the world went to war to stop that madman, and decades of peace and prosperity have followed.

A great historian once said, if we don’t learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat them. Today, another madman is threatening to destroy the world if he doesn’t get a piece of Ukraine. The world gave him Crimea in eastern Ukraine, but now Vladimir Putin wants all of Ukraine. And then he will want Latvia, Estonia and Albania, and Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and half of Germany. He seems to think that he can recreate the Soviet Union, or Russia of the czars. He cannot. Time has moved on. And if he doesn’t move with it, history will leave him and Russia behind.

But Mr. Putin has not gotten the message of history yet. Instead, he has activated his nuclear arsenal and threatens a global catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. If the world does not give him Ukraine, he says he will destroy us all.

So we will now be clear. First, the United States does not abide authoritarian government here at home, and it does not abide authoritarian governments attacking sovereign states abroad.

We went to war 90 years ago to prevent a madman from imposing his violent, authoritarian rule over Europe. The United States supports the will of people in every country to choose the government they want. Putin is not giving Ukraine that choice.

This unprovoked attack on Ukraine is partly the fault of the previous American administration. It gave Mr. Putin the impression that the United States is weak and that it will not act to prevent naked aggression against a peaceful, sovereign state. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States economy is the strongest in the world, and we are using it to support the people of Ukraine, so they can determine their own future. It is up to them, not Russia, to choose their future.

The United States military is unequaled in the world. We choose when and where to engage for the greatest possible effect. We and our European allies warn Mr. Putin that he does not want to invite our combined military force into the Eastern European theatre to act on Ukraine’s behalf. The leader of Russia may also have forgotten that no state has ever acted on a nuclear threat, thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Russia’s nuclear arsenal is one third the size of the United States. So what the Russian leader is telling us is that he is willing to risk nuclear warfare, and to sacrifice all of Russia to get Ukraine. That kind of thinking is illogical, and it can only make sense to a madman.

In the card game of poker, a player without the winning cards may pretend that he has them anyway. We call that a bluff. We are confident that Mr. Putin is bluffing, and he does not hold the winning cards.

So I now urge all world leaders who support self-determination for every country, to warn the Russian leader that he must cease his country’s aggressive actions, and pull all Russian and Russian proxy forces out of Ukraine. Otherwise, he and his country will face immediate and severe, global diplomatic and economic consequences.

The Russian leader has said that economic sanctions against Russia are an act of war. This is almost humorous coming from a man who is waging unprovoked war against a peaceful neighboring state.

Next, the United States will continue its diplomatic and economic sanctions against the aggressor until its war operations cease and it removes its forces from Ukraine. In addition to those actions, I am ordering US forces Europe to DEFCON 2, and I am authorizing US commanders, and requesting NATO commanders to alert their Russian counterparts that US and NATO air forces will begin enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine at 1200 hours local time February 6, 2022. I am also authorizing US forces to respond appropriately to aggressive behavior by Russian military ships and planes at sea and in the air. Until now, US naval and air forces have exercised enormous restraint and grace in the face of provocative and unwarranted acts by their Russian counterparts. Our naval and air forces no longer need to exercise that restraint.

Likewise, the United States and its Allies and supporters have exercised enormous restraint in the face of this Ukraine aggression. We have reached our limit. It is time for the Russian state to cease its aggression, and act as a modern partner with its neighbor nations. It cannot turn back the clock. It cannot rebuild the Soviet Union. It cannot recreate the Russia of the czars. It cannot reverse the tide of history. Any attempt to do those things is not just folly.

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Cancel culture for everybody!

Cancel culture is becoming the new Godwin’s Law. Godwin (1990) said as any online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler becomes more likely. Today, the same applies to “cancel culture.” Reductio ad Hitlerum is now an overblown Reductio ad cancelum.

Cancel culture has been the human norm since the dawn of history. It only appears new today because the phrase was re-invented in 2017 to describe “cancelling” the reputation and accomplishments of someone prominent (like Harvey Weinstein) who had behaved or spoken egregiously. But since then, it has come to include “cancelling” groups (Confederacy sympathizers), monuments and site names (named abusers, criminals and slaveholders), turns of phrase (anything non-PC), and finally, whole culture (white people).

The Neanderthal, Denisovans, Homo Naledi and other homo erectus species have disappeared, some (like Neanderthals) apparently canceled by us homo sapiens, some wipoed out by environmental disasters. Today, we are the last of the homo erectus species (unless Yeti and Sasquatch still walk the Earth).

Sapiens ended up here by overrunning, absorbing and/or killing off the world’s other tribes, cultures and species. The Neanderthal, Denisovans, and Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Nabateans, Babylonians, Spartans, Phoenecians, Visigoths, Sassanids, Çatalhöyük, Cahokia, Angkor, Harappan, Maya, Anasazi, Clovis, and so many more are just memories now. All were actually cancelled.

Generally, current humans stand on the bones and rubble of canceled predecessor cultures, get excited about their pasts, and use past names for present sites, enterprises and sports teams. Why? Would today’s folk really want to recreate those past cultures as places for themselves to live? That seems to be the goal of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) supporters. Homo sapiens’ success rests on its ability to see what isn’t and imagine what could be. Imagination is the realm of fantasy, belief and creativity; it comes before truth and facts. While most of us grow out of the fantastical world of children as we mature, many of us don’t.

In this country, where the norm is peaceful transitions of government, the mostly white MAGA people and the politicians who represent them oppose it. Transition is progress, and they fear progress will cancel their way of life. They want to recreate some form of imaginary past America, where whites were not just in the majority, they were the most visible color of human everywhere – in business, government and media. The MAGAs don’t want to see any non-white colors. To them, having to share power means getting their culture eliminated.

That’s ironic. American Indians fought the railroads and the killing of buffalo, because it actually was canceling their way of life. Southern plantation owners fought elimination of slavery, because it cancelled their Antebellum culture. They were right. At the turn of the 20th century, whites who were 2nd or earlier generation immigrants themselves, fought new immigrants whom they feared would take their jobs and cancel their “true American” culture. They were wrong. From the 1860s to today, Blacks have fought embedded racism because it canceled their African culture and is still cancelling their lives.

More ironic are Southern plantation whites in a new insurrectionist form (proof enough to believe in reincarnation?), attacking the U.S. Congress, as it affirmed the peaceful transfer of government power January 6, 2021. They claim Congress was trying to cancel their culture. To any observer, it is clear they don’t know what it means to “cancel” a culture, they haven’t read the U.S. Constitution – even though nearly 150 of the Congresspeople who represent them took an oath to protect and defend it, and they don’t know what America stands for, even though they grew up here.

They don’t balance their fantasies with facts and truth. Besides thinking they’ll “save America” by attacking its Congress and courts, they imagine that COVID is a hoax, science can’t be trusted, Trump won the presidency in 2020, and the U.S. faked the moon landing. They run to “free” women and “save babies” from Planned Parenthood clinics that rarely (< 3%) perform abortions, and attack a pizza parlor that serves pizzas but was rumored to abuse children. The goal is always to intimidate, threaten and kill opponents so they can retain power. And they have formed groups for 150 years to cancel non-white cultures: the Ku Klux Klan, the Know Nothing Party, the American Nazi Party, John Birch Society, QAnon, Proud Boys and white nationalists. These fantastical American “saviors” act mostly like foot-stamping, breath-holding children. William Golding laid out the worst-case scenario of this in his book, Lord of the Flies. It ended with abuse, injuries and death – and the child characters crying out for rescue by adults. Nearly a third of Americans are magical MAGA thinkers, and so are about 25% of the U.S. Congresspeople who represent them – as well as large minorities of leaders in more than 20 U.S. states. While none of these groups is in the majority, most hold power anyway thanks to the electoral privileges of gerrymandering, and control of voting structures. They also use police forces, the levers of government, and denial of access to voting, to public spaces, free speech, public meetings and services, and redress of grievances to intimidate and disempower opponents. Much of this is unconstitutional and illegal. Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-CA), for example, enlisted the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Bill Barr, to aid him in trying to shut down the Twitter account of a “cow” that posted critical comments about him, and sue the unknown person who created the cow. When the DOJ activity was publicized, the assistant state’s attorney Michael Friedman, who in effect served as Nunes’ personal attorney, refused to comment. Like parenting, corralling and shutting down bullies takes work – especially on a national scale. It requires standing up to them – nationally and in every state, embarrassing them, prosecuting their actions, laughing at them, and educating them. An Nunes-DOJ investigation is underway; a move is afoot to disbar Bill Barr; the Biden DOJ is going after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrectionists; lawsuits have been filed in every state against Republican legislatures attempting to suppress and restrict voting, as voting rights advocates continue registering voters and supplying them with the means to get mailed ballots and reach the polls despite new state restrictions. And President Biden and Congressional Democrats and Independents are mostly standing up to obstructionist Republicans, and forcing approval of needed legislation that helps block and reverse the bullies’ agendas. American culture is hard at work, and most everyone is participating. It doesn’t look to me as if anything or anyone is getting canceled.