Many Americans tend to identify with and root for underdog success stories, particularly when pitted against powerfully advantaged adversaries who play dirty.
This spirit is epitomized in advice by fictional fighter 'Rocky Balboa' to his son in the iconically popular 2006 movie:
"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
"You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!"
Donald Trump exemplifies this winning comeback ideal as no other presidential contender in modern U.S. history, having been incessantly pummeled by false accusations and lawfare assaults from the time he announced his first 2016 candidacy.
It began with the FBI’s "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation of the Trump campaign which continued into his presidency.
These were purportedly based upon fictitious Russia collusion charges allegedly cooked up by Hillary Clinton as a distraction from her alleged illegal destruction of more than 30,000 email messages on her private server and cell phones, reportedly using "Bleach Bit" and hammers which were under congressional subpoena.
Some reportedly contained classified national security-sensitive materials obtained during her tenure as U.S. secretary of state.
Trump’s enemies impeached him for asking incoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to look into former Vice President Biden’s suspicious ties to the corrupt business practices of Burisma, an energy company that was paying son Hunter $1 million a year as a board member.
This inquiry was obviously a legitimate national security matter given Biden's braggadocio about withholding $1 billion in U.S. military aid unless Ukraine fired its lead prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at the time was investigating Burisma.
The Senate acquitted.
The FBI sat on demons lurking in Hunter’s "Laptop from Hell" for nearly a year throughout the 2020 election, and even advised media companies to dismiss any upcoming rumors of Biden family scandals as Russian disinformation.
Intelligence officials, totalling 51 joined that choir in falsely dismissing a bombshell New York Post article on the contents as bogus.
A second Trump impeachment involved politically stacked banana republic style kangaroo court Senate hearings regarding chaotic Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots falsely branded as an "insurrection."
The carefully staged theater allowed no cross examination of witnesses and entirely omitted Trump’s statement: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
All of this has been followed by endless legal assaults clearly intended to make Trump ineligible for reelection, or failing that, financially bleed his campaign coffers dry while deflecting attention away from the Biden family corruption accusations.
An armed early morning August 2019 FBI raid on his private Palm Beach, Florida Mar-a-Lago residence for documents Trump was authorized to declassify somehow served as an indictment pretense, whereas those discovered at multiple Biden properties including his unsecure garage with no such legal privilege are somehow no big deal.
U.S. Special Counsel Robert Hur later found Biden to be an "elderly man with a poor memory," a finding, if not excuse, many have rightfully regarded as unacceptable.
A second federal indictment charged Trump with attempting to overturn the 2020 election by challenging its results - which 17 state attorneys general similarly disputed.
Another felony indictment cooked up by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charges Trump with attempting to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election vote counts.
Willis now faces steamy legal heat of a different sort, having paid her lover as an unqualified special prosecutor in the case.
Were some of these payment(s) spent on "romantic" vacations they allegedly spent together?
Meanwhile, Trump’s Manhattan indictment for paying porn actress Stormy Daniels to bury reports of an alleged sexual encounter two decades ago got lots of juicy press coverage – not so much for the 1993 sexual accusations by former Senate staffer Tara Reade against former Delaware Sen. Joe Biden alleging that he sexually assaulted her in the U.S. Capitol building.
An $83 million Manhattan court judgement was issued against Trump over an even earlier alleged sexual encounter about three decades ago, although the accuser, Jean Carroll, was unable to confidently recall the year or even season it supposedly occurred.
That transparent attempt to bankrupt the former president and drain his campaign funds was outdone in a ruling by Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron ordering Donald Trump and his organization to pay $453 million in damages for purportedly inflating the claimed value of loan property which even the lending institutions have subsequently rebutted.
The suit, representing one of the largest corporate sanctions in New York history, was brought forth by New York Attorney General Letitia James who centrally focused her election campaign on pledging to shine a "bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings."
Apparently recognizing that this bright light will also illuminate a mass business exodus by revealing that all real estate developers and investors follow the same standard practices, a New York appeals court has since reduced that impossibly large bond requirement to $175 million.
Despite all these below the belt body blows — and largely because of them —Trump seems to keep on winning bigly in every swing state and national poll.
It’s beginning to look much like an American 'Rocky Balboa' victory story after all.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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