“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of classified information.”
-Donald Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign
Since June 8 was not only the day that Pat Robertson died, but the day Special Counsel Jack Smith finally announced federal charges against once-and-future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, it is that much more a day which will live in Schadenfreude.
That was Thursday. Friday was the day that Smith actually had the indictment unsealed for public release so we could get to see just how many spines are on the cactus that is going up Trump’s ass. When we first heard the news it was around seven charges. The current count is 37. I had heard it was 38. When you’ve got so many, it’s hard to keep track.
The whole series of revelations leading up to Friday systematically demolished all of Trump’s chimerical defenses, including the otherwise plausible defense that he was too stupid and ignorant to know what he was doing. It is perhaps for such reason that people gave his premise that he could declassify government documents “just by thinking about it” a lot more credibility than it deserved. At the very least, you couldn’t prove HE didn’t think that. Not anymore. The indictment says, among many, many other things, that Trump had shown a document referring to a military plan against “Country A”, and told his guests, “See, as president, I could have declassified it … Now, I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Documents were piled up in various locations at the estate, including a bathroom that had its own ceiling and wall chandeliers. (For the man who has everything.) At one point he had had documents taken with him to a vacation home in New Jersey just to make sure he had physical access to them. On at least two occasions he showed these documents to people without security clearances. The evidence trail indicates that Trump and his staff played an elaborate shell game with not only the National Archives and other government representatives (including the Department of Justice in their subpoena) but with at least one of Trump’s own lawyers, identified here as “Attorney A.” At one point in the subpoena request, Trump asked an attorney, “what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them? Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
According to one of the charges, “The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Hey! Didn’t they kill the Rosenbergs for that?
If Trump were somehow convicted of multiple charges, the terms would be served concurrently, but the longest single term would be 20 years. Which is basically a life sentence if you’re over 70 and you eat more fast food than I do. Although as I say, my suspicion is that Trump will die of old age in the next few years anyway but linger on as a zombie for the rest of the century while he ties up his case in litigation with God.
This week was also noteworthy because of the death of Robert Hanssen, a seasoned FBI agent who turned out to have been a major source of intelligence for the Soviet Union. Hanssen served in the FBI from 1976 until 2001 when he was arrested after long-term investigation established he had been selling secrets to the Russians that among other things led to the exposure of undercover agents who were then executed by the KGB. Notably, Hanssen continued selling secrets to the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union. With the overwhelming evidence against him, to avoid the death penalty, Hanssen made a deal for life imprisonment in 2001, and died this June 5, apparently of natural causes.
If we re-elect Donald Trump, that would be like electing Robert Hanssen president.
If we re-elect Donald Trump, knowing what we know now, we will not deserve to lead the free world, and very quickly thereafter we will NOT be leading it, because all the other nations in that sphere know which side Donald Trump is on.
We would also not be leading the free world because we would no longer be in it. We have seen what his followers want to do if they ever get back in charge. We have seen what he was willing to do to stay in power: Whether you like it or not, he went silent for hours while his followers, acting in his name, riled up by his speech on January 6 2021, the day the Electoral College vote was to be certified in Congress, stormed the Capitol to stop the proceedings, under the impression that Trump was coming there to lead them, beating and breaking and threatening. Well, he wasn’t totally silent. At 2:24 pm, he twitted, “Mike Pence didn’t the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts” – in other words, blaming Pence as Vice President because he would not certify the “alternate” Trumpnik electors versus the ones that had already been officially certified, which he did not have the constitutional authority to do. In other words: Hang Mike Pence. And he would not have been the last.
If Donald Trump is not incarcerated, he is going to turn the rest of America into a prison.
The main reason Trump got elected the first time is because of a unique set of circumstances that will not happen again. Mainly, Hillary Clinton was his opponent, and even the rest of us who hated Trump still hated her guts. Even people like Bernie Sanders who are more leftist than the rest of us still hated Hillary (for that very reason). And even then she might have won in 2016 if FBI director James Comey hadn’t re-opened an investigation on her just before November. And even THEN she might have pulled through if she hadn’t taken so many “firewall” states for granted.
The people who didn’t vote Democrat because they couldn’t trust that Party now know they can’t keep their guard down as long as Trump can come back. Which leads to the other point, the difference between then and now is that people used to think of Trump as the cocky guy on “reality” TV and Comedy Central roasts who almost had a sense of humor and hung out with all kinds of people. He seemed like the reasonable alternative to the Democrat establishment. (Unless, like me, you’d been following his civilian career long enough to deduce that he was going to do to the country what he did to Atlantic City.) Now we know he’s a megalomaniac child with a skull full of oatmeal.
But precisely for that reason, he appealed to that crowd that had become more and more the majority in the Republican Party, the people who jeered at politically active celebrities and an education system that produced what Rush Limbaugh called “young skulls full of mush” without realizing that they themselves were being conditioned by talk radio and 24-hour “news” to see journalism as emotional entertainment. There was always a divide between the Republican “base” and the people they voted for because they would want to ban abortion or affirmative action or something else, whereas the people they voted for actually knew how Washington worked and saw people who disagreed with them as professional colleagues and not as wartime enemies who had to be destroyed by any means necessary. Just as Christ is the bridge between God and Man, Trump is the bridge between his Party and the base, because he’s the only Republican who can credibly pose as both an elitist and a populist. He’s the only guy who can tell both groups, “I’m one of YOU.”
And that’s his angle. Trump’s going to pull an OJ and try his case in the media and not a court of law.
He’s going to put on the poor, pitiful victim act, and it’s going to work on his marks, like it always does, because they see themselves as poor pitiful victims of… something. The deep state. The globalists. The Lizard People. The Elders of Zion. And he is their “voice”, their “retribution”, certainly their role model. The fun in dysfunctional. The Salieri of secessionists.
And keep in mind, these guys are cornered, and they know they are. Despite all their attempts at jiggering the election system, they lost elections in ruby-red states like Arizona and Georgia. They’re on borrowed time. Their whole “great replacement” sense of the world is that people like them are an endangered species, and socially, if not racially, they are. Not necessarily racially, because even cishet whiteys like me are sick of their shit. But they have that general sense of the world already and now they see their spiritual role model, this guy who has shown them they can indulge their worst selves, finally being called to account and they think, rightly, that if it could happen to him it could happen to ANYbody. Which is the joke. It happens to anybody BUT him. Normally when anybody else commits a crime they get at least investigated, if not punished.
And quit with the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” whining. The same Trumpniks who think their innocent little child is the most persecuted man in history scream like scalded cats when somebody brings up Hunter Biden or other Biden family “scandals”. At the Trump rallies, they still chant “LOCK HER UP!” They don’t object to punishment, they just judge on identity, not facts. I judge by facts, not identity.
If homeboy could have just stayed in retirement like Nixon and let the grownups try to clean up his mess, I don’t think anybody, including me, would care if he got to spend the rest of his life at Mar-a-Lago eating well-done steaks and double scoops of chocolate ice cream every night. But no. Trump’s problem is that he just can’t stop doing crimes. He is compulsive. As I said, Trump commits crimes like other people breathe, which is to say, he does so on reflex, without thinking, and if he ever stopped himself, he might die. And we all know the reason for this. Because this is a little boy who never grew up. And that’s because this is a little boy who clearly never got his ass spanked for bad behavior as a child, because he keeps pushing the envelope because he knows he can. After all, no one has ever stopped him before. When he told Billy Bush “when you’re a star, they let you do it” for once he was telling his truth. When you’re a star, you can grab the Constitution by the pussy. Because you gave the fetus fetishists enough votes to kill Roe v. Wade, and because the heads of the networks think you’re an entertaining buffoon who’s great for ratings.
Since Liddle Donnie Clown Boy went down the escalator in 2015, everyone has acted like he’s the God or High Lord of this Star Trek Mirror Universe we’re living in now, and can’t be stopped by anything, but the fact is, he’s been defeated more than once. And now even people who might otherwise agree with him (like Mitch McConnell) ought to know what the stakes are. If you let a megalomaniac child with a skull full of mush have access to our military secrets again, you might as well not even HAVE a country.
Even if his pet judge tries to stymie the Department of Justice case against him, she’s got an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals over her that has already demonstrated it has no time for her shit. And even if this case doesn’t work out, there’s still the 34 counts against Trump in New York. Not to mention the pending case in Atlanta where Trump is being investigated for ordering the Georgia Secretary of State to just “find” him enough votes to swing the state election.
Again, that’s what happens when you just can’t stop committing crimes.
As someone once said, the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.