March 30, 2023.
A day which will live in Schadenfreude.
On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:
“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”
(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)
Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.
Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?
Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.
Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?
We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”
Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.
The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.
When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.
Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?
All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.
This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?
And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.
On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.