The Guardian

Trump's countless scams are finally catching up to him | Rebecca Solnit

The daily news drip can make it difficult to recognize the immense scale of the president’s legal troubles
‘Trump and his children don’t seem to grasp that the scamming and cheating that got them through the dirty world of New York City real estate doesn’t work as well on the global stage.’ Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

The news is generally reported piecemeal, with a focus on what just happened or the specifics of one story. The result is that the cumulative effect often escapes detection. Journalism tends to describe the fragments and not the pattern they make up, which for readers can be like watching a movie shot entirely in closeups. So it is with the travails of Donald J Trump. He is in so many kinds of legal hot water, and the explosive new stories tend to erase the earlier ones from view, just as his own transgressions tend to overshadow his earlier misconduct.

Who talks of how grotesquely he groveled before Vladimir Putin and denied his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions in the long-ago, far-away world of July 2018 when so much has happened since? Who (up to 5,000 in September) and the New York Times of people, places, and things he’s insulted on Twitter (548 as of Monday) are helpful.

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