We may wish that he would long be gone, but he’s hard to erase. The damage he has done to our national psyche is enormous. We elected a common real estate broker with a limited belief in democracy to be the leader of our land, and nothing will ever be the same again. He has impacted our institutions of governance in a way that should never be forgotten. If we are lucky, or at least peripherally vigilant, we won’t make the mistake of electing such a personage to be our President ever again.
Already, I digress.
He is not in this story at all, except for the long shadow that he has been able to cast over our previous concept of democracy, a notion that goes back to the Colonies in New England in the early 1600’s. We’ve had centuries of practice in democracy. We honed to, discussed it, fought over it, legislated it; the overwhelming majority of us based our lives on its tenets. We thought we were good. We came to love the hypothesis that we were all created equal, and we utterly believed that our vote, once we were all awarded it, counted. We learned that nobody was above the law.
The property-owning huckster begged to differ.
God knows what image of himself he fell in love with in front of his mirrorball; however he did it, he fell for a self-inflated ego the likes of which has rarely been seen across the land. He thought omnipotence, he thought all-powerful, he thought Ayatollah; he cosied up to Kim Jong Un. Things got out of hand. He ended up questioning the operation of democracy in multiple states, and pushed in Georgia for imaginary votes to materialize.
This man has, as far as I can tell, never encountered humility.
Confucious once said Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues. Without a solid foundation in life, where are you? Well, possibly in a Barbiland place called MAR-A-LAGO, about as far away from reality as you can get and still be in the United States.
Do we care?
Yes, and no. We don’t want him back in the White House, so we have to constantly keep an eye out and an ear cocked for erratic and half-baked truths that might again threaten our foundations of self-government. Let him busy himself on his apparently multitudinous golf courses; we don’t really have to give a second thought to his golf escapades unless, of course, he’s hiding highly sensitive and classified documents on nuclear programs in his golf course bathrooms. Then, we might need to be concerned.
We elected Biden. We were ready to move on, but our loser-in-chief resident of Inflated Ego Tower in New York, doesn’t want to let us go. He keeps dragging us, desperately, back, repeating his false claims and hurt feelings ad nauseum. His desire for headlines swamps us, even now, daily. Many of those headlines date back to his time in office, and many involve prosecutions and lawsuits that appear to be reproducing like rabbits. A date in 2024 has been set for a trial involving the man’s fetish for hoarding official government documents at his residences; the Justice Department has brought 37 counts against him for his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. It doesn’t end there. New York is charging him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. A jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million. This is only a partial list of accusations. Bubbling just under the surface is Georgia’s 2020 election meddling case; the Grand Jury has already submitted their report there.
Perhaps most serious of all is the January 6 insurrection case in Washington. Did the con man actually direct an assault on our Capitol? This past week, he received a letter of concern from Justice Department prosecutor, Jack Smith, informing him that he is a target in Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The potential charges against our former loony-in-chief are obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government, incitement of an insurrection and conspiracy to violate civil rights.
None of it looks good.
Where is Trump? Out on the campaign trail for 2024, where else, disinforming and continuing with his usual bragger and swagger, and now being threatening too. To understand that more, just take a gander at Robert Reich’s instinctive column today, Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we:
A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.
It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.
Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.
Let’s just hope. As Reich reminds us:
We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.
Here I was thinking that I was going to write a piece on the nascent concept of Bidenomics, much in the news these past few weeks.
What do you know? The elephant in the room trumpeted (ah ha, that’s what elephants do!), growled, squeaked, and snorted. The churning of the legal battles of the man who held the most prestigious office in the land not even 4 years ago, got in the way. The most damning legal struggles of our President from 2017 to 2021 seem to be getting underway at a moment when Biden’s economic initiatives are clicking into place.
As someone once said. That’s politics.
There was never going to be a Trump in this headline. There never should be. There never should have been.
But there you go.
Life is full of surprises. It will continue to stymie us until we can never be stymied again, or until justice is served.
Fingers crossed.