So, just how clever are Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the rest of the pirate crew which imploded the “Blue Wall” of the electoral college and took down the fabled Clinton machine en route to seizing the White House?
Last Friday, Trump did what he claimed repeatedly he would never ever do, i.e., commit to a massive pay-out to make the “Trump University” fraud case go away. His lawyers spun the $25 million (!!) as just the cost of clearing his busy schedule as president-elect. A big trial in the case was due to start at the end of the month here in California, which Trump just lost by a whopping 29 points, the biggest shellacking of a Republican presidential nominee in the Golden State since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election 80 years ago. No one was going to buy the spin on the huge settlement, something that, had it occurred in the campaign, would have doomed Trump’s chances. (Just as an indictment of Hillary Clinton for her amazingly slipshod handling of her sensitive e-mails as U.S. secretary of state would have sunk her.)