A hog-tied Joe Biden is depicted in a life-size decal on the tailgate of a pickup truck in an image Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, Good Friday. Cue howls of outrage. Clearly, The Donald wants to make himself centre of attention again, via a “dead cat on the tailgate” decoy, in case we dwell on Biden’s rise in the polls. Or his success in fund raising.

Biden-gate is bad. But if anyone is all trussed up and in for a wild ride, it’s Trump. He is indicted on eighty-eight charges which include two federal counts for attempting to overturn a federal election and the alleged mishandling of presidential documents.

If full penalties were applied, (it’s unlikely), Trump could face seven hundred years in prison and eleven million in fines. This week, he must explain to a Manhattan court how he dipped into campaign funds to pay hush money to keep his squalid personal life out of the news.

Just before the 2016 presidential election, Trump pays $130,000 hush money to adult film star and film director, Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, with whom he had a brief affair in 2006. Fearing for her life, Clifford signs a non-disclosure agreement.

“… There would be a paper trail and money trail linking me to Donald Trump so that he could not have me killed.”

But look over there. It’s Kevin Bloody Rudd. Reports he calls Trump “destructive” and a “traitor to the west”. How very dare he? A barrage of smoke bombing erupts. Murdoch’s Empire strikes back. Every corporate news outlet has a Simon Benson, an Andrew Bolt or a Rita Panahi, huffing and puffing and clutching their pearls, over how Kevin Rudd cannot possibly be our next US ambassador because Trump hates him.

It’s clear Trump has no idea who Rudd is, but even our ABC credits his response to a loaded question written by Sky News and asked by yet another Murdoch tool. Take a bow, Brexit dimwit, Nigel Farage. Nigel’s another life member of chameleonic, cheapjack populism international.

It’s a tempest in a teapot but it shows how deeply our MSM is in thrall to Murdoch. Trump, a FOX production, is unlikely to be re-elected. But he’s still Murdoch’s sock puppet. He can’t even recall Joe Hockey, an embarrassingly unctuous toady, who as Bondi Partners founder, tapped into a lazy $368 billion, AUKUS boondoggle, where grift meets graft.

POTUS doesn’t appoint our US ambassadors, of course. The manufactured incident, Trump’s Gulf of Tonkin, disrupts news of the former failed president in court, as his sleazy past and lack of fiscal probity catch up with him. It slows his campaigning. For a while.

Trump is charged with no fewer than thirty-four cases of having falsified business records in relation to bribes or blackmail. No president can pardon state felonies.

It’s a world first even in the hanky-panky of POTUS which stars the late Marilyn Monroe’s breathy, X-rated rendition of Happy Birthday to JFK at a Madison Square Garden party fundraiser, 19 May 1962. Marilyn is sewn into a sequinned gown which just sold at auction for US$4.8 million. No room for underwear, commentators spluttered at the time.

Seven other presidents are alleged to have dropped their daks; or had affairs while in office, from FDR to Trump, yet Lyndon Baines Johnson is -until the current Trump case is settled- the only POTUS known to have paid child support for a child he fathered.

In a new twist, which Trump’s former doorman, Mr Dino Sajudin is prevented from discussing there is evidence that American Media Inquiry, a company offering a “catch and kill service” to those evading bad publicity, paid Sajudin $30,000 to keep mum about the child support Trump pays for a child he fathered in the late 1980s, at his World Tower built on the site of a department store, demolished by underpaid, undocumented Polish workers. Classy? He did quietly settle a class action with $1.4 million in 1988.

“Whenever Trump would come to the building, he would quite often give everybody a hundred-dollar bill,” the doorman recalls. On the other hand, he adds, “It’s like a corporate mob, so to speak. They’ll try to be nice to you in the beginning, to try and get what they want. And then, if that doesn’t work, they try to strong-arm you.”

The strong-arming in focus, today, in court is via non-disclosure agreements. Trump has a company for those, The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid has American Media Inc, a shell company. AMI pays you to keep silent while you pay them a million dollars if you blab. What makes the three hush money payment cases felonies, and not misdemeanours, is that they are alleged to have been made from election campaign funds.

The seventy-seven-year-old dotard faces thirty-four counts of fraud in the first criminal trial of a former president. Trump’s payments to Daniels and McDougal break federal rules on corporate and individual campaign donations, prosecutors contend. Above all, the bribes are meant to “conceal damaging information from the voting public.”

Will a hog-tied Biden upstage Judge Juan Merchan? The federal judge slaps a gag order on Trump for threatening the judge’s daughter and orders Trump not to publicly attack potential witnesses, prosecutors, court staff, their families or prospective jurors.

Sounding off on the oxymoronic Truth Social, Trump calls Merchan a “true and certified Trump hater who suffers from a very serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“In other words, he hates me,” Trump adds, should the word “hater” need a gloss. “Judge Merchan should recuse himself, he cannot give me a fair trial.” Trump also alleges Merchan’s daughter is “a senior executive at a Super Liberal Democrat firm.”

The gag order won’t worry Trump. Nor curb his antics. His dog-eat-dog world view is of life as a bleak, pitiless, contest in which winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

But wait. Is Trump condoning vigilante violence, riot and affray, again? A Biden kidnapping is mild compared with his MAGA mob, of two thousand rioters, led by Proud Boys and sundry other, gun-toting, thugs which attempted to hi-jack democracy, 6 January 2022.

How could anyone forget Trump’s assault on the Capitol and the violent disrupting of a joint session called to ratify Biden’s election as America’s forty-sixth president according to the Final Report of the House January 6 Committee, published late last December?

Trump was conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, obstruct the certification of the election results, and discount citizens’ legitimate votes as special counsel Jack Smith spells it out. Nor was he any innocent bystander.

“The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” reads the report. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”

A grave threat to democracy, the attack “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” the nine-member panel concludes. But that was yesterday. Or at least last year.

Trump’s invective is ever more violently dystopian. Biden’s border bloodbath? Immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation, claims the son of a Scottish mother and the grandson of an enterprising Bavarian immigrant, Friedrich Trump, 1869-1918, who ran a barbershop and a Yukon brothel among other ventures, in his quest to make his fortune.

Ironically, when Friedrich did make enough money to return home to marry the girl next door, authorities deported him as a draft-dodger. Too young for military service when he left; he was a few months too old when he returned. He and his wife were deported.

Trump warns of “a bloodbath” if he’s not re-elected causing the nation to forgo Don- economics which include a hundred percent import duty on China’s cars. It will be the end of democracy itself, he says. Everybody knows Biden is a dark state tyrant.

A rich kid who was sent to military school to cure his teenage intransigence, Trump, once the playboy of the Western World who dedicated his life to burning through his father’s fortune, is down on his luck, broke and increasingly desperate and demented.

Appearing in his fever-dreams, doubtless, is the ghost of a doting father, Frederick Christ Trump, workaholic property developer, rack-renter and a Republican who made donations, developer-friendly friends and did favours for the Democrat machine running Brooklyn.

Fred Trump’s idea of fathering was to let his boy watch him work. A master of the art of the crooked deal, Fred’s scams include setting up a company to inflate invoices relating to the upkeep of his rental empire. His tenants would see their rents increased according to the fraudently calaculated expenditure. What a mensch!

“Be a king. Be a killer”, he told Donald. Yet he expected his son to learn how by osmosis.

A quick and dirty way to build identity and forge community is by mocking, vilifying and excluding outsiders and transgressors. Get in the van, Biden. The decal is selling well.

The $254 million which poured into Donald Trump’s “election defense fund” between 4 November 2020, the day after Joe Biden’s election and 20 Jan, Bidens’ election, is almost gone on legal fees. Baulky billionaires alienated by Trump’s followers’ armed attack on Capitol Hill 6 January are now kissing and making up with Mr Tangerine Tan.

What makes Trump richly attractive is that the professional hustler, serial liar, sex pest and rapist is no Joe Biden, who proposes a twenty-five percent billionaire’s tax.

Not content with his gold, “never surrender” sneakers, a steal at $399, freak of the week, in the elite billionaire redhead class, goes to Father Don Trump who is now flogging bibles to help pay his legal fees. Come on down. For $59.99, you, too can say “God Bless America” by ordering your own (two testaments for barely the price of one).

You also get all the words to God Bless The USA, The Declaration of Independence, The Pledge of Allegiance and a copy of the Constitution of the United States, which Trump broke in at least eight ways during presidency, before we even getting to the vexed question over his legal culpability for his role in inciting the insurrection.

But Trump’s bizarre attempt to pose as an honest to goodness, sweet little old Bible-toting guy, itself so deeply inappropriate yet so fittingly inauthentic will not save him. Nor will Trump Media and Technology Group Corp Inc., a way of floating his cash-strapped vanity publishing and propaganda unit, Truth Social, on the stock market.

True, in another richly attractive world first, Trump Media etc provides a vehicle for any kind of outfit to buy a stake in his presidency, without the risk of being named or found out,

“Think about it: Saudi sovereign funds, Russian oligarchs, Sicilian mobsters, Nigerian oil ministers, hedge-funders, private-equity bros, and MAGA-loving billionaires now have a direct, unregulated money pipeline into the presumptive Republican nominee.”

Yet on the downside, Trump Media and Technology Group Corp Inc. has attracted the attention of authorities who suspect it of being another Trump, pump and dump scheme. Whilst its value soared following its float, DJT is beginning what may be a rapid if not disastrous free-fall. Trump, himself is prohibited from selling his shares for six months but by that time, the company will probably be yet another Trump bankruptcy.

One sure way of triggering that decline is for a desperate Trump to get his henchmen to collude in his selling some of his fifty-eight percent holding. Once the market gets wind of that, his stock like his political fortunes will sink like a stone.

The image of Joe Biden hog-tied is a type of call to violence as is Trump’s thinly veiled attack on the daughter of a judge and his increasingly violent imagery of bloodshed. In the context of his urging over two thousand supporters to storm the Capitol and in the testimony of those he has paid hush money, moreover, there is every reason to take Trump’s threats seriously – especially in the context of what we know of his upbringing with its emphasis on ruthlessness, cruelty, dishonesty and winning at any price.

The Murdoch empire’s attempts to distract our attention from the monster it created and its legitimising of one of the most toxic candidates for the presidency of the US should be called for what it is, a last-ditch attempt to prop up an ugly and increasingly strident faux-populist demagogue who has only ever been interested in his own, personal gain and who will cheerfully destroy whatever remains of justice, democracy and decency in his path.