USA

It won’t surprise too many people to hear that I’m a numbers guy. Images, words, ideas… sure, I can work with all of them. But numbers are what I understand more fundamentally than anything, and it’s also what I remember and correlate best.

As a result, there are numbers that instantly remind me of multiple things in my past, and often those things have nothing to do with each other… except the number, which binds everything together.

I have countless examples, none of which I’ll bore you with… except one… and that is the number 19.

Nineteen is a pretty important number in Canada… suddenly, you can drink, you can gamble and you’re recognized as an adult in every way. We get a two-year head start on our American cousins in that regard. I remember when that Paul Hardcastle song came out, talking about how the average age of American soldiers in Vietnam was nineteen. N-n-n-n-nineteen. And how ludicrous it was in my mind, that you could send a 19-year-old into battle where he will kill or be killed, but that same solider can’t drink a beer with his buddies or place a $2 bet at Santa Anita.

I remember my own countdown to my 19th birthday… which landed on a Tuesday.

And… there’s another Tuesday I’d like to talk about, and that is 9/11. On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, nineteen terrorists changed the course of the world (and especially America) forever. It’s not just all the Homeland Security and TSA nonsense… it’s the fundamental stripping away of constitutional rights in the name of security. Sure, as an American, your constitution and its amendments will ostensibly protect your rights, but if you’re suspected of being a terrorist? It all goes out the window. And you don’t have to be Arab or Muslim to have that distinction bestowed upon you, as many innocent people have learned over the last 22 years.

When I see the number 19, that’s mostly what I think of. 9/11, and those 19 terrorists that wrecked the country. So, naturally, reading the news headlines last night and seeing the number 19 and being reminded of all of this; that’s what led me to write what you’re presently reading.

Nineteen is the number of people recently indicted under the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

If the name of that Act feels a little contrived, you’re right. Americans love their acronyms, and if you have to shoe-horn the words to fit the intended target, so be it. Imagine the brainpower consumed by the guy who came up with “Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies”. Really. It’s a thing. I’ll let you figure it out.

So… some guy was tasked with naming the Act to do with organized crime. At the time, when you thought of organized crime, you thought of the Mafia. And the Mafia made you think of Italians… so hey, hahaha, let’s name the Act after an Italian. It could just as easily have been the Murder, Aggression, Racketeering, Intimidation and Obstruction Act. But it’s RICO, and when you think of RICO, you also think of Al Capone and John Gotti and Tony Soprano.

What you probably don’t think of, at least until now, is a former President of the United States and his former Chief of Staff and a disgraced former New York City mayor. Not exactly what the guys who came up with RICO had in mind. Yet, here were… those three, plus sixteen others – all charged with differing offences, but all of them, at the very least, individually charged with violating the RICO Act.

On 9/11, nineteen terrorists managed to permanently scar the fabric that makes up the United States. Nineteen years later, a different group of nineteen – ok, we won’t call them terrorists, because they’re not. What’s the right word? Traitors? Yeah, that’ll do.

Nineteen traitors tried to subvert what’s at the bottom level, the ground zero of the
Foundation of the United States. Democracy. That a former president is involved is almost unbelievable, but not quite. The truth is, this sort of nonsense goes on all around the world on a near-continual basis. We take it for granted that elections are fair, and that losing candidates will genuinely bless their opponent, thank those who voted for them, and ride into the sunset gracefully. They will always wax poetic on how the people have spoken, and how proud they are to have been part of this timeless process, even if they lost. Certainly, having watched numerous Canadian elections at every level, whether municipal or provincial or federal, I sincerely don’t ever remember hearing what I’d call a sore loser.

For Trump to be a sore loser is really no big surprise. For Trump to question the election results is also no big surprise. He was doing it before he won in 2016, ready to arm the cannons with “Election Fraud!!” if he’d lost. Long before the 2020 election, he was already screaming the same thing. Either he wins, or it’s fixed. Yawn. We all heard it a million times.

Then came all the post-election bullshit. Then came January 6th. Then came yesterday’s indictments.

So, here we are. It’s not my 19th birthday and it’s not 9/11… but it’s a Tuesday, and many people will remember it forever… the Tuesday they learned a former president and his cronies, his crime family… are on par with the Al Capones and John Gottis and Tony Sopranos of the world.

But here’s the thing, the actual thing that I simply can’t wrap my head around. This guy, Donald Trump, has a very reasonable chance of winning the next election. There are more than seventy-million people who’d vote for a man who tried to steal an election and then try to cover it all up when he failed.

So now, we are in what’s known in the horse-racing world as a match race. It’s a two-horse race, winner takes all. One horse is Donald Trump, racing towards an election which might save him from prison. The other horse is Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis, a name none of us had heard till now, but you’ll be hearing it a lot for the foreseeable future. Fani Willis is tasked with prosecuting these 19.

Unlike an actual match race, though, this one has many layers. It’s important to note that the RICO Act under which these 19 are indicted is not the federal one; it’s the State of Georgia’s own version, meaning all of the federal protections typically granted a US President don’t apply. If he’s found guilty and sentenced to prison, in theory, there’s nothing he can do to prevent it. But Donald Trump doesn’t think that’s the case.

Of course, this is all uncharted territory. What if he’s found guilty, sentenced to prison, but elected President before his prison term starts? Would he serve from behind bars? Would he wear an ankle bracelet in the White House?

There are 19,000 “What-if?” questions that can be asked, and it’s a waste of time trying to unravel it all because nobody knows. The most knowledgeable jurists, constitutionalists, judges, lawyers… nobody knows. We’ll deal with it when we have to.

It worries me greatly that Trump might wind up winning, and, if that happens, it’s certainly the last free election in the US for a very, very long time. At least until everyone facing criminal charges (and there may be some, waiting in the wings, for Trump’s kids) is out of the picture. If he wins, he’d try to find his way out of prison and pardon whoever he can, and he’d make sure the Trump dynasty… Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, Barron — were all in the line of succession. It’d turn into a weird mix of North Korea and Russia.

You know, Russia… did you know that Vladimir Putin was elected, in 2000, to a 4-year term? No problem. Then, in 2004, he was re-elected to another 4-year term, a resounding victory with 71% of the popular vote. All good. Then, in 2012, it was time for a fresh face. Much like in the United States, two presidential terms is all you get in Russia. So, gracefully, Vladimir Putin stepped down in favour of welcoming a new…

Oh, wait. Yeah… no. That’s not what happened. I will skip the details, but the end result is that Putin has been in power since then, and will remain in office until he’s dead… election shenanigans, private-deal shenanigans, corruption shenanigans all notwithstanding. He plowed his way to a permanent presidency, and here we are. On the edge of WW III because nobody managed to figure out how to pull the emergency brake.

Could that ever happen here? Putin is a lot smarter than Trump. Putin, like a Russian chess grandmaster, has always been five moves ahead. Trump is the proverbial bull in the china shop, and the storekeeper has finally had enough. But is it enough?

Al Capone was a gangster who was famously ultimately nailed by a different federal act, one to do with tax evasion. Capone was convicted and sent off to prison, where his brain, plagued by syphilis and gonorrhoea and cocaine withdrawal, ultimately left him very sick and confused and with the mental acuity of a child. John Gotti was ultimately convicted and died in prison. Tony Soprano – well, I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the series. Highly recommended.

What’s to become of Trump? Fasten your seatbelts… we’re going from zero to 100 in a lot less than 19 seconds.