The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

When the neo-western crime drama Breaking Bad first hit Netflix, I watched the first episode and said “no,” I don’t want to watch this. But after Donald Trump was somehow elected president of the United States and the drug cartel-related money laundering plot of the show seemed to seep into the American psyche and culture, I gave in and began to watch, just getting through season four Saturday night after catching Stormy Daniels on Saturday Night Live.

It’s almost as horrifying to watch as the Trump reality show presidency, and the similarities are more striking than you might think. Bear with me on this.

One of my favorite characters on Breaking Bad, the shyster lawyer Saul Goodman played by Bob Odenkirk ended up with his own show Better Call Saul, although his name in the spinoff series is changed to James Morgan “Slippin’ Jimmy” McGill.

This week, in a clever piece of Hunter S. Thompson style journalism for the National Affairs Desk of Rolling Stone magazine, the case begins to be made that the lawyer character could almost be based on Trump’s controversial lawyer Michael Cohen.

The Rolling Stone investigation found that before he moved into Trump Tower in New York and began representing Trump in 2007, Cohen had a long history of representing numerous clients who were involved in deliberate, planned car crashes as part of an attempt to cheat insurance companies. He practically wrote the script for Slippin’ Jimmy.

Investigations by insurers showed that several of Cohen’s clients were affiliated with insurance fraud rings that repeatedly staged “accidents.” Sounds just like Slippin’ Jimmy. And at least one person Cohen represented was indicted on criminal charges of insurance fraud while the lawsuit he had filed on her behalf was pending.

Cohen also did legal work for a medical clinic whose principal was a doctor later convicted of insurance fraud for filing phony medical claims on purported “accident” victims. Taken together, according to the magazine, “a picture emerges that the personal attorney to the president of the United States was connected to a shadowy underworld of New York insurance fraud, a pervasive problem dominated by Russian organized crime that was costing the state’s drivers an estimated $1 billion a year.”

Then I get up Sunday morning and read long investigations about Cohen by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the dots begin to connect in my mind in a way that may or may not be occurring in news rooms and special counsel Robert Muller’s office.

Look at the timing of these two things.

According to the Times, Cohen started working for the Trump Organization in 2007.

While there are varying accounts of how he met his new boss, Mr. Trump said Mr. Cohen appeared on his radar after he began buying up properties in Trump buildings — by then, Mr. Cohen’s office addresses included tony Fifth Avenue locations. For his part, Mr. Cohen has said that the job came after he helped resolve a board dispute at one of the Trump buildings where his family owned several units.

Mr. Cohen became a roving fixer for Mr. Trump. In his first year on the job, he and Ivanka Trump kicked the tires on a potential golf course development project in Fresno, Calif. A year later, he was named chief operating officer of Affliction Entertainment, a mixed martial arts venture that Mr. Trump had started. Mr. Cohen traveled to the former Soviet bloc on Mr. Trump’s behalf, visiting Georgia in 2010. He even scouted out Iowa for Mr. Trump ahead of the 2012 presidential campaign and set up a website called ShouldTrumpRun.org.

During Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen pursued plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow with Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant and friend of Mr. Cohen, who had worked on other real estate development deals with Mr. Trump and had explored possible ventures in Russia. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen worked with Mr. Sater even after his role in a stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals was revealed. (Mr. Sater pleaded guilty and became an informant for the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies.)

Then according to the Post, quoting a book written by George Ross, a senior counsel who advised Trump for 25 years, summed up the developer’s attitude toward debt in one sentence.

“Borrow as much as you can for as long as you can,” Ross wrote in his book Trump Strategies for Real Estate.

In the book, Ross explained that borrowing allowed Trump to seed his money into multiple projects at once, then fill out the rest with loans and partners’ investments, protecting his bank account and getting significant tax write-offs on the interest he had to pay.

“When Trump invests in a real estate project, he typically puts up less of his own money than you might think,” Ross wrote, explaining how Trump followed this rule. “Typically, his investors in the project will put up 85 percent while Trump puts up 15 percent.”

Then in 2006, the same year Ross’s book was published about about the time he met Cohen, Trump changed his approach.

He began buying up land near Aberdeen, on Scotland’s North Sea coast. Trump ultimately paid $12.6 million for the property. He’s spent at least $50 million more to build a golf course there, which was wrapped up in land-use fights and didn’t open until 2012.

“Even his closest senior advisers in NYC were surprised” that Trump paid cash, recounted Neil Hobday, a British developer who worked on the Aberdeen project with Trump.

Why did he do it?

Perhaps the papers will read each others reports this week and by next Sunday, we will find out more about where this is going. But what seems quite obvious to me from these detailed factual reports that fail to connect the dots is that Trump “changed his approach” from borrowing to paying cash at the very same time that the shyster lawyer Cohen entered his life at Trump Tower. Who had money they needed to launder in the U.S.? The Russian mob, of course.

I’ve been writing since last December that it is clear, at least to me, that Trump is running a criminal enterprise out of the White House. That criminal enterprise is a money laundering operation, just like the fast food chicken chain, industrial laundry and car wash on Breaking Bad.

Could it be that Cohen is the key link in the chain here, which is why the FBI raided his home, office and hotel room and seized the files? Of course. It’s as clear as the nose on your face.

How can we continue to let this happen right before our very eyes? Are the ratings just too high for this reality show to end? Are the increase in circulation numbers just too great for what’s left of newspapers in America that we can’t risk bringing this farce to an end just yet?

Must we continue to tell both sides of this story?

There are commentators all over the place who want this to go on, including one on the front page of the Sunday New York Times website, who literally goes so far as to say Trump is winning! What? How is that possible?

“…we are Trump addicts, hooked on the hyperventilating rush of wild stories and all the great things that accrue from playing Beowulf to Trump’s Grendel,” according to another Times columnist, the queen of New York snark, Maureen Dowd. “Trump’s game is keeping everyone, especially the press, riveted.”

I can’t wait to get through season five so I never have to see Breaking Bad ever again. It’s almost as riveting to watch as the Trump presidency, but I never want to see it in syndication. That said, I can’t wait to see how it ends. It will be an exciting finale when we see how the Trump show ends too.

If we somehow survive the Trump presidency, I never want to think about him again, accept in an orange prison jump suit that matches his fake tan and hair.

I don’t know if it’s possible now, since the culture and our psyches have already been so damaged by these crazy shows. But I would like to see the day when we walk this idiocy back so we can feel normal again. I never thought I would reach a point in my life when I would admit to longing for a better world from days gone by. I’ve always felt a little ahead of my time and looking to the future.

But right now I would take another eight more years of Barack Obama in the White House. I slept well for most of that time. Now every day is a waking nightmare.

I don’t care if it’s Russian meddling that does it, Michael Cohen, or Stormy Daniels. I just want this show to end.

On Face the Nation Sunday morning, George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the Stormy Daniels case may present an easier obstruction of justice case against Trump than the firing of FBI director James Comeny.

“It is possible that a porn star could bring down a president,” he said with a straight face.

That would be an embarrassing ending for an American president. But if that’s what it takes, can we please get to the end of this awful series? There are very real problems in the world we need to get busy solving, and we are wasting valuable time.

I mean hurricane season is approaching again here along the Gulf Coast and the power is still not back on in Puerto Rico. The pro-big business, pro-Trump sycophants can pretend on TeeVee to deny global warming and climate change from the burning of fossil fuels all they want, but the rest of us need to get busy doing something about the problem NOW! The Gulf Stream is slowing down, people.

We are in for a series of major disasters in the days ahead, and this administration is not even trying to get us prepared. Our attention is being diverted by one lie and scandal after another. We really don’t have time for this shite.