The mug shot will be awesome.
Granted, we can probably agree that the historic indictment of a disgraced ex-president – for paying for a porn star’s silence on the eve of an election, to conceal from voters the fact that he cheated on his third wife, then hid the hush bucks as a “legal expense” – seems kinda trivial in the overall scheme of things, like nailing a serial killer for running over a squirrel.
But at bare minimum, the NY grand jury has gifted us the likely opening paragraph of the guy’s future obituary:
Criminal defendant Donald J. Trump, who was ousted from the presidency by a record-high 81 million voters…
Or, in the best of all possible worlds, perhaps this:
Jailed felon Donald J. Trump, a former one-term twice-impeached president who twice lost the popular vote…
No matter what ultimately happens, his legacy is dirt. For a malignant narcissist whose ego is fragile like an eggshell, that’s tantamount to an eternal sentence in hell.
Yeah, the tawdry Stormy Daniels case may seem less than momentous, given his relentless rapes of the rule of law and democracy itself. But we’re talking here about 30+ counts of falsifying business records, as part of an illegal scheme to hide relevant info from voters on the eve of national balloting. That’s what the payments to silence Stormy were explicitly designed to do; in the words of lawyer Michael Cohen, who went to prison for Trump’s perfidies, the hush money was “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
Even if you’re still underwhelmed, remember that in all likelihood the Manhattan indictment is only the end of the beginning – the first dustings of snow in advance of the blizzard. Strap on your hiking boots, because we’ve merely taken the first big step down the accountability trail.
A Georgia DA is weighing criminal charges in connection with Trump’s well-documented efforts to overthrow his statewide ‘16 loss. New York’s state attorney general is probing whether Trump and his organization routinely low-balled their assets and defrauded taxpayers. And the special counsel in Washington is drilling into Trump’s Jan. 6 treason and his theft of classified documents – including the lies he told, even to his own lawyers, while covering up those thefts. Indeed, earlier this month, a federal judge ruled in the documents case that special counsel Jack Smith has made “a prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations.” The wheels of justice are grinding toward the long-awaited day of reckoning.
Grinding is indeed the right word; we will need to be patient. His oft-clownish lawyers will file motion after motion to delay ultimate judgment, and that’s how the system works. In the Manhattan case, for instance, we can assume that the lawyers will ask for a change of venue, arguing (perhaps with good reason) that Trump can’t get a fair jury trial on an urban island where most people (rightfully) despise him.
Meanwhile, amidst all the legal maneuverings in Manhattan, Georgia, and Washington, his benighted team will crank up the noisome MAGA base with the usual crackpot agitprop about how Trump is supposedly being persecuted and victimized yadda yada yadda. This brings to mind the old cliche about lawyers: If you have a good defense, pound the facts; if you have jackshit, pound the table. The saps who love Trump love the pounding.
So I recommend a good pair of earplugs, because in the coming months we will have to withstand an unprecedented cacophony of stupid.
But wait, there’s good news: Trump and his surrogates (including the usual spineless suspects in the GOP) will do their detestable best to try these cases in the press, but at the end of the day they don’t control the narrative and they don’t control events. The prosecutors, starting with Alvin Bragg in New York, couldn’t care less what Trump is fulminating on his keyboard. At this point, it’s the courts that control the events. And Trump lacks the requisite legal muscle to wriggle him free; his favorite lawyer, mobbed-up Roy Cohn, is long dead and gone.
Fingerprints and a mug shot! Hey, it’s a start. The Irish satirist Jonathan Swift warned four centuries ago that “laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” It’s long past time to snare our most notorious insect.