For all his adult life, Donald Trump—as a businessman, Presidential candidate, President and now re-elected President—has trafficked in bribery and coercion.  First bribery:         

• Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (and now United States Attorney General) personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates.
• After Bondi dropped the Trump University case, he wrote her a $25,000 check for her re-election campaign. The money came from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
• Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who said he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons.
• Paxton’s office issued a cease and desist letter to former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens after he made public copies of a 14-page internal summary of the state’s case against Donald Trump for scamming millions from students of his now-defunct real estate seminar.
• After the Texas case was dropped, Trump cut a $35,000 check to the gubernatorial campaign of then-attorney general and now Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

• Throughout his career as a businessman, Trump forced his employees to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, threatening them with lawsuits if they revealed secrets of his greed and/or criminality.
• In 2016. USA Today found that Trump was involved in over 3,500 lawsuits during the previous 30 years: “At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings” were from contractors claiming they got stiffed.
• On March 16, 2016, as a Republican Presidential candidate, Trump warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
• An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear: ‘Nice convention you got there. Shame if something happened to it.'”
• Speaking with Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post investigative reporter, Trump confessed: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
• During his Presidential campaign he encouraged Right-wing thugs to attack dissenters at his rallies, even claiming he would pay their legal expenses. 

Donald Trump

But when he has confronted men and women who can’t be bribed or intimidated, Trump has reacted with rage and desperation.

Alaska’s Republican United States Senator Lisa Murkowski should have kept those truths in mind before she sacrificed access to healthcare for millions of Americans.

On July 3, Murkowski cast the deciding vote on Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” that extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, funds his immigration crackdown, imposes work requirements on social safety net programs, and cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid.

The largest cuts come from Medicaid work reporting requirements ($326 billion; limits on state provider tax arrangements ($191 billion); and restrictions on state-directed Medicaid payments ($149 billion).

The United States population is estimated to be between 341 and 347 million. But Murkowski wasn’t concerned about them.

Lisa Murkowski

What she cared about were the 740,133 people she represented in Alaska.

Murkowski was upset at Trump’s plan to cut federal funding for wind and solar projects. So, in return for selling out the rest of the country, she demanded that Congress agree to protect Alaskan wind, hydropower and solar projects. 

Murkowski believed that Trump administration officials understood how local wind and solar projects could offset the costly diesel fuel that many Alaskan rural communities must import by barge to provide electricity for their homes and businesses.

She also thought she’d negotiated an agreement to protect a 12-month window for solar and wind projects to continue to receive tax credits.

“It’s not everything that I wanted,” she explained then, “but it’s going to keep some of our projects alive, and that’s important.”

After her vote, Trump issued an executive order to limit solar and wind project awards. Continuing to insist that renewables provide only unreliable power, the executive order also gives a nod of approval to polluting options such as oil, natural gas, and hydropower. 

Suddenly, Murkowski feels betrayed.

“To me, it’s just reckless by the administration. Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes.”

Murkowski would have done well to study Trump’s past behavior.  

When Donald Trump—as a businessman and President—has been confronted by men and women who can’t be bribed or intimidated, he has reacted with rage and frustration.

• Trump boasted that he “never” settled cases out of court. But New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pressed fraud claims against the real estate mogul’s counterfeit Trump University—and Trump settled the case out of court rather than take the stand.
• “Today’s $25 million settlement agreement is a stunning reversal by Donald Trump,” said Schneiderman on November 18, 2016, “and a major victory for the over 6,000 victims of his fraudulent university.”
• On May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller to investigate links between Russian Intelligence agents and the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign. 
• Upon learning of his appointment, Trump wailed: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”