By David Underhill –

When Roman emperors knew they were finished, the courageous ones would fall on their own swords. Infirm and unable to defend themselves against their rivals. Or about to lose in a palace coup or civil war. Or having done something so disgraceful their reputation could never recover.

Rather than submit to the humiliations their successors would impose, they committed suicide.

The less courageous would have guards stab them to death. Or swallow a poison. Or slit a wrist vein and bleed out, drifting away in a warm bath.

Donald Trump will have to make a choice like this if he’s serious about executing drug dealers. He has long been muttering in semi-private about this “solution” to the drug problem and he’s expressed admiration — nearly envy — for Philippine despot Duerte whose killing campaign has butchered many thousands of supposed dealers.

But now Trump has done this publicly last week at a rally for a congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, rousing the crowd to cheers by calling for the execution of drug dealers. And rumors circulate that he will soon announce a plan for legal changes allowing such executions.

He hasn’t specified himself as an execution target, but he must if he’s serious about using death to deter the street drug trade.

Merely wiping out the local pushers is not serious. As long as users with money sprout up, their demand for dope will spark the rise of replacement pushers — who will be supplied with merchandise by the global drug cartels that remain untouched, through death or otherwise, by anything Trump proposes. That turns his call for executions into just a deadly cops and robbers comic, a video game. Bang! Pow! Blood! Bodies! And the dope trade continues.

Curtail the Cartels

To stop it or drastically shrink it the cartels must be dismantled. They are not charities providing maintenance doses to suffering addicts. They are businesses in it for the money. And not just for pirate loot that they can shovel into a trunk and bury on some remote island. They’re trying to make mega bucks they can spend on glitzy stuff in the respectable, legal world.

This is why they need money laundering services, and this is how a gangster financier like Donald Trump can partner with them. Real estate deals are a handy laundromat for such activities.

A cartel with a load of dirty money from street sales uses it to buy property from somebody who doesn’t ask too many questions about the sources of this cash. Later the cartel sells this property to somebody else in what looks like an ordinary real estate transaction. The proceeds of that sale are laundered money that can be used anywhere to buy anything without raising suspicions.

That is a highly simplified schematic picture. In practice these deals wind through multiple layers of false fronts, shell companies and complex accounts. They are designed to be baffling and hard to trace. But these are all just variations of the basic scheme.

The Mueller investigation may never prove decisively that Russians diddled the 2016 presidential election enough to alter the outcome. But it has already dug up enough dirt and slime to show that the Trump family has been woven into the global gangster web for decades. That’s obvious only from the bits that have leaked out. Mueller and crew must know much more not yet revealed.

Money Laundromat

This makes the Trump hotel-condo tower in Panama stand even taller in imagination than it does on the Panama City skyline, and it’s supposedly the tallest building in Latin America. It’s been in the news lately because of a tangled legal squabble between the Trump company and other partial owner-managers of the property. Panama—prime intersection of world commerce, home of law and accounting firms periodically exposed as agents for international oligarchs hiding their billions from tax collectors and other claimants, and historic locale for many of the drug cartels’ dubious deeds.

How instructive it might be to discover who has bought swanky condos in Trump’s Panama tower over the years, with how much money from where, and who these condos were later sold to, for how much, and who profited from such transactions. Pursue similar inquiries at his other properties around the world and likely discover they have been the site of routine golden showers — not the liquid kind, the hard cash kind.

Without such money laundering by real estate tycoons, reckless banks and kindred operators the drug cartels wouldn’t thrive, might barely survive. And street dope sales will shrivel. They will never cease completely. Some devoted users will persist and shrewd suppliers will provide for them. But the big cartels that make and move the bulk of the most ruinous drugs will lose their reason for existence if they lose their money laundering services.

Donald Trump is right that executions would discourage the dope business. He’s just wrong about who to kill to bring about this pleasant result. Noticing shifty dudes doing sneaky deeds on dusky street corners makes the minor drug pusher easily visible. Everybody has seen this or has seen TV and movie depictions of it. So election rally crowds, rightly worried about the rising scourge of opioids and more, are primed to cheer for the execution of these pushers.

Morality Laundering

It takes more mental effort to see the system that generates the street deals. Those with the platform to put this system visibly and persistently on the public agenda shrink from doing so—because they benefit not only from the money laundering but also from the morality laundering services of the system.

Donald and his children never touch dirty money. Their lives are arranged to keep them at an insulated distance from the origins of their wealth. The crystal chandeliers of Mar-a-Lago are so sparkly. The gilded Trump Tower gleams. The jets and resorts are so elite. The business empire circles the world. The dazzle deflects thought from how this all came about and from what sustains it.

None of this is exclusive to the Trumps. It is typical of all commercial royalty and their governmental branches. The social mechanisms that perpetuate this morality laundering will be apparent in the hyper-dazzle surrounding the looming royal wedding in Britain.

The evidence of a lifetime says Donald Trump’s abiding loyalty is to his place in this cozy arrangement, not to the rally crowds he stirs into cheers for the death of dope pushers. But the cheers do please him.

He could greatly increase the cheering section if he named himself, along with his money laundering syndicate, as prime candidates for execution under his drug dealer eradication plan.