Donald Trump is, in fact, above the law

I’m writing this the morning after a federal grand jury indicted Trump on a number of counts of something or other, apparently related to violation of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. Another brilliant “first” for the man-baby! The charges are connected to the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, and the penalty for violating the Espionage Act is theoretically up to 10 years per count, although past violators have received much less.

Details of the charges will be known at some point, but it doesn’t really matter. The case will be tried in Florida, and if you think a Florida jury is going to put Trump in jail for five minutes, I know of a fantastic digital “investment” you’re sure to be interested in.

Without jail time, any other outcome is a victory for Trump, whatever the verdict.

Even if the impossible happened and he was sentenced to jail, he would never serve time because he would be president or dead by the time the tsunami of appeals he would file had been adjudicated. Also, becoming president would give him the ability to pardon himself, as he has already claimed the power to do, or simply instruct his Justice Department to drop the case. If some other Republican was president, say Pence or DeSantis or even Christie or Haley, that president would also pardon him. They have already gone on record as saying the indictment is inappropriate to begin with, and, as a glimpse into the near future, have all voiced support in one form or another for pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists.

And penalties other than jail, such as fines, are a joke. First of all, Trump started fund-raising off the indictment news five minutes after it hit, so if he ever did pay a fine, it wouldn’t be with his own money. And, of course, any payment would be explained as a convenience settlement of a nuisance case, rather than any admission of guilt. This is how the Bragg indictments for falsifying business records in New York will finally play out, months or years from now, in the unlikely event Bragg actually wins in court.

Secondly, he typically just refuses to pay fines, like so many other debts he’s incurred, knowing that no one will enforce payment. Who is going to knock on his door and turn out his pockets? Clarence Thomas? Trump has proven himself to be above the law simply by ignoring it.

This is how it is already working in the E. Jean Carroll rape case that Trump just “lost” in New York. Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, but, importantly, was not found guilty of raping her, and was fined a bit less than $5 million. So what does he do? The very next day he goes on CNN and defames her some more, repeating that her story is “fake”, etc., the very defamation he just got convicted of the day before!

And as for the $5 million? Carroll will never see a nickel of it. First of all his lawyers have already petitioned the court to reduce the fine to a couple of hundred thousand (which he will also refuse to pay), and have further moved to toss the whole case out. Their argument is that he couldn’t be guilty of defaming her by saying the rape story was fake since, in fact, rape was not proved at trial.

So what’s her next move – what can she do to stop the nightmare? She’s going to sue him again, this time asking for $10 million in damages. She will incur an additional metric shit-ton of legal fees, and even if she “wins” she will still be out of pocket. Trump doesn’t even pay his own lawyers, so there is no way he’ll pay hers. And then there’s the emotional cost of the aggravation and exhaustion incurred by dedicating the rest of her life to trying to get Trump to admit to anything at all.

It’s just another case of what we’ve been saying for years: Trump’s epitaph will be “Often caught, never punished”. He emerges from this stronger in the eyes of his adoring cult, a victim of headline grabbers and book floggers who are always trying to benefit from the glory of having been close to Trump, or as Trump would have it, making up a story about being close to him. And, after all, the only thing he was found “guilty” of was what he’s been bragging about doing for years, i.e. grabbing them by the you-know-what. Nothing to see here, folks, but the never-ending witch hunt. The unending persecution of Donald Trump is The Crime of the Century.

Trump is above the law. He actually revels in suing and being sued and has been involved in close to five thousand court actions in his career. You can indict him, impeach him, or whatever you want to do. He simply loves fighting, and never pays a price for it.

So is there any hope for the “justice” that many of us would like to see? Not really. Resistance is pretty much futile. I will throw out one remote possibility for you today, though. I’m not holding my breath and you shouldn’t either, but here goes.

Although threats of jail time and fines are worthless, there is one penalty that might make a difference and to which he might have some exposure. I’m talking about subsection (b) of 18 U.S.C. § 2071, which says that any custodian of a public record who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys (any record) shall be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” (Bolding is mine)

Wouldn’t you feel just a little bit better about the whole years-long clown show if somehow this could come to pass?