“Will Trump serve his time? – The popular US magazine Newsweek recently wondered. – How can the former president be prosecuted?”
This, of course, is a fantastic formulation. For one thing, there are no “former presidents” in America. The person who was the leader of the state even once is called ‘Mr.President’ all his life, his highest status is not doubted and is emphasised in every possible way.
Secondly, the American presidents never went to prison in the history of the country. Never have law enforcers broken into their homes and gone through their personal belongings, or torn into the First Lady’s dresses. Never have their passports been seized – a clear signal to any American that they are planning to go to jail.
With Trump, however, all those rules don’t apply. “You don’t understand, this is different.” Before our eyes, the seemingly unshakable institution of the American presidency is beginning to look like a house of cards. One careless move and it is gone.
This, of course, has aroused the indignation of citizens. “I’ve never seen America so angry,” states Trump’s son Eric. Not just Trumpists, in general all people of more or less right-wing views feel trapped in today’s US. It would seem that there are tens of millions of them – a huge part of society united by a common interest. But the structures of the Democrat Party, which have mushroomed across the whole state, are pressing them so hard that they feel like a dissident minority that can be intimidated, robbed and destroyed with impunity.
Take, for example, the Anti-Inflation Act that Joe Biden has just signed. In form it’s a natural list of favours, a campaign gift from the Democrat Party to the voters. In fact it is a deliberate ruin of the middle class, the backbone of the very America they have lost.
The very name of the law looks like an outright mockery. The Democrats plan to pump several hundred billion dollars more into the economy to “fight inflation”. Initially, they were talking about two trillion.
But that is not even the main point. The most painful issue of the new law for the Americans is stiffening of taxation. The Federal Tax Service (IRS) will be allocated 80 billion dollars. The IRS would hire 87,000 new inspectors, three and a half times the number working for the IRS today.
Vacancy notices have already appeared on the IRS website. They say the candidate must know how to handle a firearm and be willing to shoot to kill. Interesting novelty, isn’t it? There was a terrible uproar on social media about it. The announcement was edited, but the residue, as they say, remained.
“So what, they’re setting up a militant unit to come in with loaded AR-15s and shoot some small business owner in Iowa?” Senator Chuck Grassley, flustered, mistook the US semi-automatic AR-15 rifle for a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his tweet, but his overall question is legitimate.
The fact is that the US is a unique country where thousands of tax officers do have the right to carry firearms and use them as needed. This is how IRS investigators are supposed to talk to taxpayers. Now, as we can see, this practice is to be expanded and deepened. Incidentally, the IRS recently received another tranche from the budget to replenish its stock of firearms and ammunition.
So who will the taxman go to with a shotgun? It is unlikely he will go to a black ghetto, to demand taxes from a drug lord – there are no suicides. It is doubtful he will go to visit Jeff Bezos. Still, in 2019 the richest man on Earth at the time paid his first ever tax to the US treasury – albeit at a mocking rate of 1.2 per cent, but at least something. By the way, it was President Trump who made it happen.
Maybe the taxman will pay a visit to prominent politicians, members of the elite, so to speak. But they’ve got it all covered. Mitch McConnell hides his wife’s income in the Marshall Islands. John Kerry is in the Cayman Islands. The tax man can’t swim there. Smaller oligarchs go to Delaware, a classic offshore right in the USA. All by the book.
Americans are confident that the taxpayers are going to pile on the law-abiding common man, the middle class. And since the law to expand the IRS was pushed through by the Democrats, it is believed that this way they will crack down on Trumpists and Republicans.
And before that, the IRS was feared in the States as much as the FBI. The whole tax system is unusually complicated. You’ve got federal and state taxes. Taxes on wages, on real estate, on cars, on dividends, on all kinds of income, on rent, on inheritance. The average American pays into the budget like a son of a bitch. And over him always hangs the danger that he wrote something wrong in the declaration, and the taxman will come to him to find out how and what.
The inspector can charge underpayments, fines and penalties for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. If the taxpayer raises his voice during the negotiations, the inspector may think that the citizen is threatening him. A taxpayer can get up to 20 years in prison for a death threat, and there have been cases of this. At the same time, fines and penalties will not go anywhere.
And if the taxman is armed, it is a short conversation. “IRS inspectors have four and a half thousand guns, guns that kill people,” outraged Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.
The hatred for the IRS of the deep American people regularly erupted. Inspectors have been hired to hitmen and tried to kill themselves, their offices have been blown up and set on fire. One desperate taxpayer committed suicide by aiming his plane at the IRS in Austin, Texas, a very high-profile story. There are whole movements in the US convinced that the very existence of the IRS is illegal and American citizens owe nothing to anyone.
Now some paraffin has been splashed on that fire. “A well-organised militia… Its time has come” is how the news of the creation of a “tax army” is commented on social media. What is meant is that it is time for Americans to unite in “militias” and give armed opposition to the tax collectors.
For millions of Americans today, the IRS is no ordinary federal agency, but a Democrat Party militia that will ravage, if not physically destroy what is left of the country’s middle class. All those café owners and car washes, petrol stations and motels, independent smallholders, those who don’t fit into the global “new order” in any way. “The feds have come for us,” they comment on the ground about the Anti-Inflation Act.
“Feds”, “enforcers”, “Gestapo” – that is how US citizens today attribute the FBI, the IRS, all members of federal agencies in general. Americans have a growing sense that they live in a country occupied by the “Washington regime”. They are actively speaking out about it and getting ready to fight the regime. All these “sovereign citizens”, “proud guys”, members of countless militias, survivalists and tax-cutters need only unite, then they would be invincible.
Why, it would seem, would the ruling Democrat Party want to embitter the population so much? Why break with their own hands the institutions on which the American state has long stood? The institution of presidency, elections, police, intelligence services, courts – all these have been compromised and almost crushed to the ground by their efforts over the last couple of years.
One prominent left-wing writer gives an answer to this. “Stop praying for sacred state institutions,” urges Democrat writer Stephen Marsh. – When the right comes in, they will take over these institutions and destroy democracy… The crisis is so deep that all the basic mechanisms of governance in America need to be restarted.” I mean, Trump & Co. are going to win anyway, so let’s tear it all down to the last crown so they don’t get anything.
Of course, with this approach, the Democrats run the risk of being swept away, along with their institutions, by the American ponies. But the situation is so bad that one has to take the risk.
As for Trump: “yes, it (his arrest) is quite possible”, argues Alan Dershowitz, a friend of the ex-president and prominent lawyer. But those who think that prosecution, indictment and even jail time will prevent him from running for president are deeply mistaken. Trump “will be able to get elected even if he is convicted, sentenced and wears a striped prison uniform”.
A surreal picture, to be sure – a convict vying for the US presidency. But America is showing such movies today that everyone is tired of being surprised. Shall we go and get popcorn?
Victoria Nikiforova, RIA
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