Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. Because his Apprentice show had given him an undeserved reputation for business savvy (which is belied by his many bankruptcies and fraud convictions) and because he was so entertaining, TV stations rushed to give him millions of dollars worth of free coverage during his candidacy. That, plus racism in reaction to the Obama presidency and misogyny towards Hillary, not to mention Russian hacking of the DNC and Jim Comey’s blather about the Hillary’s email investigation while remaining silent about investigating Russia’s involvement in the Trump campaign, all saddled this country with a dictator wanna-be who is bringing us to the brink of civil war.
His superpower has been to commit crimes, insults, offenses, and horrors so constantly that nobody has the time or energy to investigate and prosecute him for any single one of them. It’s like fighter planes of old that ejected a cloud of metallic chaff to muddy up the skies as camouflage. His superpower, plus the dubious doctrine of absolute presidential immunity, has protected him so far from criminal prosecutions worth decades of prison and millions of dollars in fines.
Now that he is out of office, The Big Lie notwithstanding, he is as subject to prosecution as every other citizen. Even Senator Mitch McConnell has said so.
Last weekend, President Biden achieved passage in the Senate of landmark legislation to address climate change, health care, and the deficit. We should have had a few days at least to bask in this achievement, but no. Instead, all the news channels spent the day covering the fact that the Department of Justice obtained a search warrant and seized more boxes of government documents, including highly classified ones, from Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ did this quietly, but T himself complained publicly about the search. At least the San Francisco Chronicle put news of the search on page 8, which is all that most Trump news deserves.
Now, T is the subject of so many federal and state criminal investigations that it was not immediately clear which of his many crimes the judge who issued the warrant found probable cause to believe he had committed. It seems to have been his many failures to keep public records safe and private, and his failure to deliver boxes of them when requested, and even subpoenaed, by the National Archives after his term.
I hate news about Trump. When his voice comes across my TV, I leap to mash the mute button. But this news about the search and its results makes me very happy. I rejoice at signs that he may finally be held accountable for some of his many offenses. While president, he believed that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue with impunity. Now that he’s a private citizen, it’s time for him to pay for his crimes.
Not the least of which are refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, pressuring states where he lost to ‘find’ votes for him, choosing slates of fake electors and sending their names to Congress, and firing up a mob of armed supporters and sending them to the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the validly elected President.
That occasion, January 6 of 2021, also trumped good news that we should have been enjoying for weeks. On January 5, Georgia elected two Democratic senators, giving the Democrats the slimmest possible majority in the Senate, and kicking Mitch McConnell out of the majority leader’s seat. This victory has enabled the passage of much-needed pieces of legislation, including the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the ‘once in a generation overhaul of climate and healthcare policy’ that we should be celebrating this week. Instead, we are transfixed with this investigation of T’s cavalier (at best; possibly even corrupt) treatment of public records and classified documents (which, incidentally, has probably harmed our national security far more than any of Hillary Clinton’s alleged missteps with email).
So, yeah, the DOJ has never searched the home of a former president before, but we have never before had a former president who has so far gotten away with so much crime and wrongdoing.
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