Before we get down to business, bear with me for a quick tangential rant. Now that Trump has finally, at last, been indicted for trying to end the American experiment, there’s a lot of blather out there about possible defences. It’s all B.S. We can dispense with the First Amendment stuff straight away; Donald isn’t being indicted for incitement to insurrection, so nothing he said at the Ellipse, or indeed anything the mob did in response, is at all relevant to the case at bar, even supposing his vile and seditious ranting was constitutionally protected. The latest charges have nothing whatever to do with political speech, which means Jack Smith decided not to have the argument. That’s it. Only the dum-dums on Fox and Newsmax think different (and all the millions who consume their drivel, of course). More worrying is that lots of reasonable folk (even the Economist, yegods) seem to think that it matters whether Donald actually believed the election was stolen. He didn’t, and they can easily prove he didn’t, but that’s beside the point, and I hope judge and jury understand as much when Trump’s lawyers take the inevitable detour down that mucky road. It doesn’t matter what Donald believed. Look, I can believe that the bank has overstated my Visa balance by a few thousand bucks, and I may even be right, because that certainly wasn’t me buying those industrial 3-D printing machines in Stuttgart last Friday, but once I’ve taken RBC to every court that’ll hear the case, appealed it as far as I can go, and lost all along the way, that’s all she wrote. I’m done. The system doesn’t believe me, and I’ve exhausted my legal remedies. I don’t then have the right to rob the bank. It’s that frigging simple. When Trump, after all those recounts, after 60 odd ludicrous lawsuits, found every legal avenue blocked, he conspired to thwart the peaceful transition of power by unlawful means, and he doesn’t get to do that.
There.
All right, with that nonsense dealt with, on to today’s topic: have we finally got Trump right where we want him? Is he now, please God, irretrievably screwed? Land o’Goshen, have we finally nailed the bastard? It sure can look that way, now that he’s been indicted all over the place, especially since the cases are all so obviously strong. Amazing, isn’t it? Despite everything I’ve been telling you these past two and a half years, this is really happening! You’re not dreaming! I really was wrong! See, swell guy that I am, I admit it. I never thought this day would come. I was, in fact, certain it wouldn’t, and I told all of you to be every bit as pessimistic as I was, just for your own good, you understand. Sorry about that. What can I tell you? In my defence, I maintain that after two years of watching Garland go after the QAnon Shaman and his dim-bulb buddies while Fat Donny teed off daily next to his ex-wife’s grave at Bedminster, it seemed safe to assume that the clown was getting away with everything, as frigging usual. All because Justice simply didn’t have the stones to take a run at him, the spineless, heartbreakingly disappointing cowards. Well, nope! After the masterful performance by the January 6 Committee, God bless ’em every one, Merrick apparently felt compelled to bring in Jack Smith, Mr. Fuck-Around-and-Find-Out himself, and here we are. We’ve got Donald on the stolen documents, and more important, we’ve got him on the coup.
So yeah, hip hip hooray, huzzah and hallelujah, Trump is finally in some deep kimchi, and better still, there’s more where that came from, because Fani Willis is sure as shit going to indict him in Georgia, where she, too, has him dead to rights. There’s that case in New York, too, related to his pre-election hush money payments. Meanwhile, I hope Jack Smith swings back around and slaps him with 500 million individual counts of wire fraud for his miserably mendacious fund-raising grifts – all those sad, low-information MAGA knuckleheads sending him their last 10 bucks to save democracy, hundreds of millions, all of which Donald is using for his own expenses, including something like 40 million in legal fees – and there must be even more crimes we could prosecute. There’s gotta be, actually. Criming is what he does. It’s all he does. A lot of his felonies are probably past their limitation periods by now, all that money laundering for Russian oligarchs, all that bank fraud, the routine tax evasion, etc. – how the slime-wad has managed to skate on literally decades of outrageous tax evasion is beyond me – but there’s still a whole universe of possibilities out there, no two ways about it. Go get him guys!
So this is all great, yes? I’m all excited. You’re all excited. It’s exciting.
Now, here’s why we all need to calm the fuck down and temper our joy by acknowledging some typically unpleasant realities.
First, he’s indicted. Officially accused. That’s all. Nobody’s yet been convicted of anything. Sure, I think the cases are airtight, and probably you do too, but we aren’t going to be sitting on any jury, and you never know what a jury will do. I don’t expect outright acquittals (well, maybe in the Florida documents case), but I do worry mightily about hung juries. It only takes one MAGA maniac to foul everything up, and force Jack Smith to try him all over again, which takes all kinds of time, and that brings us to the next issue.
It may be too late. Smith obviously wants to get the trial going in D.C. so he can get a verdict before the election, but even if delay tactics and a hung jury don’t prevent that, there’ll be the inevitable appeals, all the way up to SCOTUS. No way all of that winds up before the vote, and if Trump wins, he just orders the Justice Department to abandon the case, and he’s off the hook even if it’s held that he can’t pardon himself (and with this Supreme Court, who knows?). Donald might even have a good argument here. Justice has already convinced itself that legally, you can’t indict a sitting president. If that’s true, and their logic on that is sound (he’s too busy and important, the only constitutional remedy is impeachment, and all that other legal hogwash), then how in the hell can you nevertheless try to convict him on appeal? Even if Trump couldn’t get them to drop it entirely, which don’t bet on it, they might – indeed will, if they hew to their own legal advice – feel compelled on their own to put the whole thing on hold, at least while he’s in office.
But wait, you say, Fani Willis is going to be indicting Orange Mussolini under Georgia law. Even if Trump gets elected, he lacks authority to do anything to halt that prosecution, (except, of course, litigate, asserting that the Justice Department logic applies at the State level too), and neither he, nor any other hypothetical Republican who somehow gets the nomination and wins the White House, can pardon him on State charges either. Right. Neither can the Governor, surprisingly, owing to peculiarities of Georgia law and the established criteria under which a pardon may be granted. There might still be a way for the Republican executive to intervene, sadly: take Fani Willis off the case and install somebody who’ll throw sand in the gears or maybe even drop the charges, a maneuver that the Georgia legislature just passed a new law to permit.
Even absent such political interference, and supposing Ms. Willis is both permitted by the courts to carry on and gets a conviction, it’s still not a great bet that it can happen before the election, and anyway, once again, interminable years of appeals will follow. What then? If Trump is President, yet the courts allow the appeals to run their unsuccessful course, can he then be hauled kicking and screaming out of the White House on the authority of a State government? The Justice Department doesn’t think so, and while there’s nothing in their internal memorandum that binds anybody in Georgia, or New York for that matter, the question remains: can a sitting President actually be imprisoned? If he’s somehow convicted of something at the State level after he gains office, do consequences have to wait until he’s out of office again, which remember, if he wins, he likely never will be?
It’s hard to wrap your mind around, isn’t it? I just can’t see how you can reconcile prison with the duties and responsibilities of the Presidency, which, remember, is not constitutionally forfeited even if Donald is clapped in irons and thrown into a small dark cell. I can’t make it work. It’s hard enough figuring out how to put a former President in the Big House. The problems when dealing with the current President would be utterly unprecedented, and practically insurmountable. How does he govern? If he can’t fulfil his duties while incarcerated (and how could he?), doesn’t that mean that he can’t be imprisoned? God only knows how it might shake out. I’m not even sure what they’d do if the insane American political process spat out the frigging Unabomber as President-elect. He’d be President, all nice and legal. Nothing in the craptacular Constitution says that life without parole in the joint is any bar to being the Commander-in-Chief. Ted Kaczynski would therefore need to fulfill the duties of his office. How? He can’t visit the Situation Room in San Q, can he? What, they build him a new one inside of C Block? The Joint Chiefs schlepp over there to meet him inside the walls? Maybe they try to do everything by Zoom call? Or what?
Don’t think it can’t come to that. Hey, look on the bright side, at least Ted Kacynski is no longer with us. So there’s that.
Sigh. You can see what a mess we’re in if Donald gets himself elected. There are so many angles to play, so many chains of possibilities to work through, and nobody knows the answers to what are turning out to be crucial constitutional questions. The issues have never been adjudicated. They might not have to be, if the GOP hadn’t, for all practical purposes, struck that impeachment stuff right out of the Constitution, but they did, so far as Fat Donny’s concerned. It’s a dead letter. No escape hatch there. You can forget the 25th Amendment, too. Trump’s cabinet cronies sure as hell won’t be invoking that one. No, if Donald wins in 2024, we’ll have sailed ourselves right off the map, and into the “here be dragons” white space.
Well then, you exclaim in increasing desperation, that’s still OK because he can’t possibly win the 2024 election, in which case he’s comprehensively fucked and yay! We’re still all right! No way he does better than he did in 2020, especially now that he’s a criminal coup plotter and an adjudicated rapist to boot! Not possible!! Right?
Er, well, ummmm…listen, honestly I’d like to think so, indeed I often do talk myself into thinking so, but in recurring moments of quiet introspective terror I have to admit that I just don’t know. Remember, his defeat in 2020 was much more of a near run thing than losing by 8 million votes would suggest, owing to the distortions imposed by the utterly ridiculous Electoral College (gee, thanks again, revered Founders!). Most of those 8 million Biden votes didn’t matter. What mattered were the frighteningly narrow vote margins in a handful of swing states, increments of mere thousands, not millions. It could easily have gone the other way, and it could again. Remember too that the United States is a democracy in which the popular vote loser can still win the election. It’s happened twice this century. The second time got us Donald.
The odds of Trump regaining power – pretty much an extinction level event for western civilization – are, sadly and horrifyingly, bolstered by what can only be called the sheer, ignorant idiocy of a large swath of the American electorate. No word of exaggeration, these MAGA chowderheads don’t know anything about anything, and aren’t even minimally capable of thinking critically about the farcically implausible horse shit Rupert Murdoch keeps shovelling into their living rooms all the live-long day, every day. They think Trump did a wonderful job. They think he built the wall. They think when Donny was at the helm, the economy boomed like never before, while he brought back coal, and revived manufacturing, and made the Chinese (or was it the Japanese?) pay all those tariffs. And how about that Infrastructure Week thing, eh? Another triumph! They think January 6 never even happened, or if it did it was a false flag operation, or was thoroughly justified because, as everyone knows, the election was stolen (or “stollen” if they read Trump’s deranged missives on goddam Truth Social). They think the current prosecutions are an unjust, politically motivated output of the nefarious Deep State, a secretive cabal of nameless tyrannical bureaucrats that only Donald can vanquish, which is another great reason to put him back behind the Resolute Desk, from where he can finish up with his lamentably interrupted swamp-draining project. They think Biden’s exertions to quell the pandemic were evil, because vaccines don’t work, or give you heart attacks, or are full of microchip trackers put there by Bill Gates or maybe George Soros. They think that the way COVID ripped through their country like wildfire had nothing to do with Trump’s criminally negligent mismanagement, any more than it had anything to do with their own refusal to get vaccinated. Freedom! USA! USA! Hell, they’re sitting there enjoying the 30th straight day of 110 degree temperatures, and still believe that climate change is a liberal lie.
They also think Biden, who’s doing a terrific job, considering, is an abject failure. Worst President ever, so Let’s go Brandon. They think their now booming economy is actually tanking. They don’t know that unemployment is at near-historic lows, that real wages are rising, that now, for real, manufacturing is roaring back, that inflation is back under control – it doesn’t even register that gas prices, the holy of holies, are down – and have no idea who they’d have to thank for it if they ever clued in. They think that crime rates are going up, that inflation is running rampant, that Biden is weak on the world stage while Donald was strong, and myriad other pernicious falsehoods. Whatever’s true, they believe the opposite, basically. They’re further convinced that Biden leads a crime family and is the most corrupt President in history, while his poor beleaguered son Hunter has something to do with something or other that’s really important and downright evil, just like Jim Jordan tells them.
So let’s just cut the crap. These people are morons. Hand to God, 25% of them think the Sun goes around the Earth, and 10% are at least open to the claim that the Earth is flat, polling results that actually get worse if you restrict the sample to young people. A population as deeply misguided as America’s is perfectly capable of electing Donald again. Moreover, some of them – I’m betting a great many of them – are nihilistic enough to vote for Trump even if they don’t believe all the bullshit, just because it’s such glorious fun to watch Donald smash things and stick it to the libs.
Right now, the polls have Trump and Biden running neck and neck. That could change as current events start to sink in, supposing they even can anymore, but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage, except – oh yeah – I have to. And since I’m up here north of the border, I don’t even get my one stinking vote. Neither does anybody in Ukraine, or in any of America’s other allies, which about now seems entirely unfair.
Trump is running to save his own ass, and the shot clock is running down. All things considered, there’s a chance, I think a good chance, that Donald still skates, just as he always has. Finally, and too damned late, those responsible for preserving the rule of law have trained their big guns on the orange monster, but they’ve set themselves up for a longer shot than was necessary. They didn’t move fast enough, and now Trump has a chance to squirm out from under. In that case there’s no corner of this planet remote enough, nor any hole deep enough, for anyone, anyone in the whole world, to shelter from the terrible consequences.
the needlefish 