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.
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| Trump..."a hit job" |
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.
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| Jack Smith - "the law applies 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.
