Epilogue
The core hypothesis of this book is that before and during the Trump Presidency there was a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Republicans in Congress. That conspiracy tainted all the judicial appointments made while Trump was President, so those appointments should be undone, if possible.
My reason for writing this book is that I haven’t seen the core hypothesis articulated elsewhere. Perhaps it has been so articulated and I simply missed it. I don’t read the news nearly as much as I used to. So there is the possibility that the hypothesis has already had an airing, in which case the book may be redundant. Alternatively, it may be that the assertion of Congressional criminality is something that others can’t fathom. Trump criminality, well we’re seeing this play out in real time. Congressional criminality, however, will never be established in courts of law. That the hypothesis remains more than plausible, I believe, survives in spite of that.
The additional reason for writing this book is that evidently the wheels of justice turn extremely slowly. And Trump, if he is found guilty, will likely still escape guilty verdicts for crimes while in office that preceded the judicial appointments. So, waiting to look at the collateral damage (the judicial appointments) created by his Presidency until the full set of Trump’s crimes have been tried in court is a big mistake, in my view. This is why I’ve written the book now. Indeed, I feel as if I should have written it months ago. Better late than never.
While working on the last few chapters and notes for those chapters, I’ve been slowly watching the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. Does the Enron story directly connect to the Trump Presidency? Probably not. But let’s look at the history since. (And perhaps the S&L crisis from a decade earlier should be part of this recounting.) The burst of the housing bubble in 2008 exposed banking practices every bit as unsavory as what Enron did. The utter amorality of those higher ups in banking parallels what happened at Enron. The current debacle of cryptocurrency may be a little different, in the organization structure that supported this so-called innovation, but the amorality is the same as in these previous episodes.
Is it so surprising to imagine this amorality permeating into our national politics? Further, if you consider the influence of high roller insiders who make dark money donations in obscene amounts, perhaps the connection is more direct than ordinary citizens like you and me can know about. At a minimum, I think this adds to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
I have called the book a novelette on the Website, but really it is some mixture between fiction and an extended hypothetical. The hypothetical is meant to address the core hypothesis and reach a satisfactory conclusion. Really, as with much of what I write, the intent is for the reader to puzzle through these matters. I tried to keep the story interesting, so all the questions regarding what should be done are put on the table. My proposed solution may be too difficult to implement. Does that mean we have to live with the status quo? Or is there still something else that might be done?
Stylistically, I tried to be quite spartan in my descriptions. This concerns locations and character backgrounds. There is a challenge with writing fiction in a contemporary setting of whether real people enter the story as anything more than backdrop and if they do whether what the reader already knows about those people will impact how the reader reacts to the story. I tried to minimize that. I know I’ve been imperfect and somewhat inconsistent in doing so. The reader should not think that all the choices I made were according to some grand design. Sometimes, it just pleased me in the moment of writing and I kept it in the story thereafter.
There are also a lot of fragments that don’t get resolved. Just to give one example of this, in Chapter 06 there is a meeting between Caroline and Mary Stanford, a very wealthy potential donor, with the meeting held at Mary’s request. I tried to make that meeting as benign as possible, so it wouldn’t otherwise take over the story. And Mary Stanford as a character never shows up again in the book, though Caroline’s interactions with high rollers/big donors eventually becomes her main task. I wanted to get at the issue of a non-profit succeeding in its mission but then requiring substantial funding to keep up the good work. This is a non-trivial issue. I know about it a tiny bit from the volunteer work for a charity that I do. So, I wanted the reader to be aware, but then not belabor the point. Many of the other fragments that don’t get resolved are in the same category.
There is also that the story concludes before the election of 2024, so doesn’t work through whether The Minute Women’s goals actually are reached then. Forecasting about that seemed to me a bad idea. So I treated it as part of the indefinite future, one we’re still facing.
Then, let me make mention of some errors I made in the writing. One was to confound the goals
- 70 Senators willing to vote guilty on Judges and Justices who had been impeached, with
- 70% of the population willing to vote for Senators who would, in turn, being willing to vote guilty.
These are not the same thing. It is the first that’s needed to achieve the goals, but it is the second that The Minute Women can directly influence by their education effort. I decided to not correct this in the story.
Had I made a big thing out of it, I think I would get wrapped up in the whole Electoral College/popular vote thing. It’s a big issue, no doubt. But it is not the issue that my story wants to focus on. So, I just left it as is.
Surely there are other errors, though I hope most of them are benign. In spite of multiple times in proofreading, there likely are typos and similar errors remaining. Here I will note my own fallibility and promise as recompense to write an ode to homophones, sometime in the near future.
On a more serious note, if the book does get some readers then I wonder how the Never Trumpers and the No-Longer Trumpers will react to it. In particular, do they buy into the core hypothesis? If so, do they accept that those judicial appointments need to be rescinded? It seems to me that these questions might occupy pundits of both stripes for some time to come, and pollsters too.
Here is one other thought and then I will close. An implicit assumption made in the book is that dealing with the core hypothesis is more important to voters than any other matter. That, indeed, may be wishful thinking. Surely, other issues not related to the core hypothesis will manifest between now and the 2024 election. My hope is that in advance of those issues emerging, we don’t dilly-dally in considering how to respond to the core hypothesis. It is urgent that we address it fully as soon as possible. That is the main message of the book.
My reason for writing this book is that I haven’t seen the core hypothesis articulated elsewhere. Perhaps it has been so articulated and I simply missed it. I don’t read the news nearly as much as I used to. So there is the possibility that the hypothesis has already had an airing, in which case the book may be redundant. Alternatively, it may be that the assertion of Congressional criminality is something that others can’t fathom. Trump criminality, well we’re seeing this play out in real time. Congressional criminality, however, will never be established in courts of law. That the hypothesis remains more than plausible, I believe, survives in spite of that.
The additional reason for writing this book is that evidently the wheels of justice turn extremely slowly. And Trump, if he is found guilty, will likely still escape guilty verdicts for crimes while in office that preceded the judicial appointments. So, waiting to look at the collateral damage (the judicial appointments) created by his Presidency until the full set of Trump’s crimes have been tried in court is a big mistake, in my view. This is why I’ve written the book now. Indeed, I feel as if I should have written it months ago. Better late than never.
While working on the last few chapters and notes for those chapters, I’ve been slowly watching the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. Does the Enron story directly connect to the Trump Presidency? Probably not. But let’s look at the history since. (And perhaps the S&L crisis from a decade earlier should be part of this recounting.) The burst of the housing bubble in 2008 exposed banking practices every bit as unsavory as what Enron did. The utter amorality of those higher ups in banking parallels what happened at Enron. The current debacle of cryptocurrency may be a little different, in the organization structure that supported this so-called innovation, but the amorality is the same as in these previous episodes.
Is it so surprising to imagine this amorality permeating into our national politics? Further, if you consider the influence of high roller insiders who make dark money donations in obscene amounts, perhaps the connection is more direct than ordinary citizens like you and me can know about. At a minimum, I think this adds to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
I have called the book a novelette on the Website, but really it is some mixture between fiction and an extended hypothetical. The hypothetical is meant to address the core hypothesis and reach a satisfactory conclusion. Really, as with much of what I write, the intent is for the reader to puzzle through these matters. I tried to keep the story interesting, so all the questions regarding what should be done are put on the table. My proposed solution may be too difficult to implement. Does that mean we have to live with the status quo? Or is there still something else that might be done?
Stylistically, I tried to be quite spartan in my descriptions. This concerns locations and character backgrounds. There is a challenge with writing fiction in a contemporary setting of whether real people enter the story as anything more than backdrop and if they do whether what the reader already knows about those people will impact how the reader reacts to the story. I tried to minimize that. I know I’ve been imperfect and somewhat inconsistent in doing so. The reader should not think that all the choices I made were according to some grand design. Sometimes, it just pleased me in the moment of writing and I kept it in the story thereafter.
There are also a lot of fragments that don’t get resolved. Just to give one example of this, in Chapter 06 there is a meeting between Caroline and Mary Stanford, a very wealthy potential donor, with the meeting held at Mary’s request. I tried to make that meeting as benign as possible, so it wouldn’t otherwise take over the story. And Mary Stanford as a character never shows up again in the book, though Caroline’s interactions with high rollers/big donors eventually becomes her main task. I wanted to get at the issue of a non-profit succeeding in its mission but then requiring substantial funding to keep up the good work. This is a non-trivial issue. I know about it a tiny bit from the volunteer work for a charity that I do. So, I wanted the reader to be aware, but then not belabor the point. Many of the other fragments that don’t get resolved are in the same category.
There is also that the story concludes before the election of 2024, so doesn’t work through whether The Minute Women’s goals actually are reached then. Forecasting about that seemed to me a bad idea. So I treated it as part of the indefinite future, one we’re still facing.
Then, let me make mention of some errors I made in the writing. One was to confound the goals
- 70 Senators willing to vote guilty on Judges and Justices who had been impeached, with
- 70% of the population willing to vote for Senators who would, in turn, being willing to vote guilty.
These are not the same thing. It is the first that’s needed to achieve the goals, but it is the second that The Minute Women can directly influence by their education effort. I decided to not correct this in the story.
Had I made a big thing out of it, I think I would get wrapped up in the whole Electoral College/popular vote thing. It’s a big issue, no doubt. But it is not the issue that my story wants to focus on. So, I just left it as is.
Surely there are other errors, though I hope most of them are benign. In spite of multiple times in proofreading, there likely are typos and similar errors remaining. Here I will note my own fallibility and promise as recompense to write an ode to homophones, sometime in the near future.
On a more serious note, if the book does get some readers then I wonder how the Never Trumpers and the No-Longer Trumpers will react to it. In particular, do they buy into the core hypothesis? If so, do they accept that those judicial appointments need to be rescinded? It seems to me that these questions might occupy pundits of both stripes for some time to come, and pollsters too.
Here is one other thought and then I will close. An implicit assumption made in the book is that dealing with the core hypothesis is more important to voters than any other matter. That, indeed, may be wishful thinking. Surely, other issues not related to the core hypothesis will manifest between now and the 2024 election. My hope is that in advance of those issues emerging, we don’t dilly-dally in considering how to respond to the core hypothesis. It is urgent that we address it fully as soon as possible. That is the main message of the book.
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