ABOVE THE LAW?

 Former president Donald Trump’s reckless comments to one of his typically self-aggrandizing rallies—it’s never about the Nation he was supposed to have served but, rather, tried to place at his own service, it’s always about him because, clearly, he thinks he’s the most important being in the universe—make it crystal clear that he believes himself to be above the law.

Trump..."a hit job"

It was in Columbus, Georgia, before a rally throng of two thousand supporters that Trump made his first comments on the thirty-seven felony count indictment unsealed at the end of the week. As usual, he sought to make out something strictly about his misdeeds, criminal behavior, presidential misconduct and contempt for the law to be a national cause. The first thing he did was tell his most fervent and blindly loyal supporters that this wasn’t about him. It was about them.

In a rabble-rousing diatribe, Trump told members of his base, “In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you, and I'm just standing in their way.” He also called the case against him “a political hit job,” and sought, in his typical ad hominem fashion to belittle his accuser, calling Special Counsel Smith “a deranged lunatic”, “a psycho” and “a Trump-hater.” He also made light of commonness of Jack Smith’s name, quipping, “What was his name before he changed it?”

This has been Trump’s message from the outset, when he first announced his candidacy for the presidency in June of 2015. Since then he has conned his followers with the message that anyone calling him out on his misdeeds is merely a hater who is accusing him falsely, that it’s all a rigged system, and suggesting that he is “the only one who can fix it.”

It is easy to fool people who want desperately to believe that their own view that everything is going to hell in a handcart is not just a perception, but a hard and fast fact. It is not a hard sell when the victims of a con are willing ones, who want to believe the con. In fact, that is precisely what con artists have always done—encouraged their victims to believe what they would like to believe in, as a means of getting the upper hand and taking advantage of their naivety.

Trump, experienced grifter that he has been throughout his long and infamous business career, is surely not above lying to make his grift stick. Indeed, even in a profession like politics where lying, deceit and subterfuge are practically synonymous with the term “politician”, it would be hard to find a single political figure—and particularly president—in the history of the United States who has lied as consistently about practically everything as Donald J. Trump has.

This is not an unfair or unwarranted charge, considering that fact-checkers in every serious medium one can think of mutually and consistently caught Trump in blatant lies or misleading statements to the public at least thirty thousand times over the course of his four-year presidency. But again, conning a person or group of persons isn’t hard if they are more than willing believers in the grift.

Trump is often touted in even the liberal media as “a master of deception” or as a “spin genius”. But the truth is that he’s not really a good liar at all, nor would his grifts work on even the most mildly skeptical of marks. His lies are laced with holes and wouldn’t hold water with a keen-minded ten-year-old. What makes his lies stick is the willingness of his base to accept him as The Owner of the Truth.

So what’s his secret? The secret of his success in pulling the wool over the eyes of a frighteningly large segment of the American population is that he is always preaching to the choir. In doing so, if he has had any stroke of genius at all, it lies in his having convinced a certain rather large demographic in US society that he is “the only one telling them the truth.” He has successfully and incredibly convinced his followers that everybody is lying to them but him—the media, the government, the courts, even the US intelligence community and the FBI. He has entranced them to the point that he has become the arbiter of their “truth”. He is the judge of what is truth and what’s false. He is the “outsider”, the avenging angel, the only leader who can make right everything that is wrong in their lives.

But what happened during the four years when he was president and nothing substantially changed in the lives of those followers and when basically everything he had promised them during his campaign was laid naked as a bald-faced lie? Grift Two is what happened. He blamed the opposition, traitors in his own party and administration, lying liberal journalists and, above all, “the deep state”.

Suddenly, his followers were his defenders, his liberating army, his enforcers, ready and willing to overthrow democracy—while convinced they were defending it from the “rigged system”—by violent means. That’s how the insurrection of January Sixth 2021 happened. The date deserves capitalizing because it is a major event in our history that will surely be studied in the future. How it is studied—whether as the blackest day in US democracy, or as the day a glorious populist revolution began—will depend on whether or not US democracy and our founding liberal traditions survive the Trump Era. Especially when the hierarchy of the Republican Party, few of whom have swallowed the Trump con, but instead have become his shills in detriment to the Nation but in favor of their own political expediencies, have become his accomplices in duping “the base”.

In this struggle between—dare I say it? —good and evil (or at least between the rule of law and abject lawlessness), the federal indictment of Donald Trump this past week is a turning point, a line drawn in the sand, basically, an all-out last-ditch effort to keep authoritarianism from taking root in the United States of America. This will be the test of whether a felon, if convicted in a court of law, of the serious crimes with which he is charged, is subject to the law, even if he is a former president and a highly popular public figure.

It is worth pointing out that the case doesn’t involve a lone felony count that could be open to misinterpretation. Rather, the special counsel in charge, Jack Smith, has carefully constructed a well-documented and meticulously vetted list of no fewer than thirty-seven federal crimes directly linked to the former president. If he can prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt in a federal court, Trump could be facing the possibility of prison for the rest of his life. And considering the seriousness of some of these crimes—especially gross violations of the Espionage Act that might well have compromised not only US national security, but also the security of our foreign allies—if Trump is proven guilty, the punishment must fit the crime, if justice is to be served.

Jack Smith - "the law applies to everyone."

Smith is pushing for a speedy initiation of legal action so as to avoid any appearance of an attempt to disrupt the 2024 election process in which, thanks to the GOP’s self-serving acquiescence, Trump promises to be a frontrunner. But Smith also vows to be thorough in proving his charges beyond the shadow of a doubt, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.”

In a perfect world, there would be no way that Trump’s defense could complain that they are arguing their case before a hostile court. The venue is in ruby-red Florida and the judge, Aileen Cannon, is a 2020 Trump appointee to the federal bench, who has been criticized in the past for going out of her way to favor Trump in earlier court action involving the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Furthermore, jurors in Florida apparently have a well-established history of siding with elected officials against the prosecution.

In other words, in a veritable litmus test for democracy, equality and the rule of law, if Smith proves unquestionably the felony charges his investigation is bringing against Trump and achieves a guilty verdict, Trump’s punishment must fit the crime. Any other outcome would mean that in the United States, fame and authoritarian populist power are above the law. And US democracy will have been permanently degraded and undermined.