Yesterday I wrote that Trump is, in effect, above the law. My thesis was that fines and the threat of imprisonment have never had any mitigating effect on his behavior in the past, and that he simply ignores verdicts against him. I said that federal indictments wouldn’t negatively impact his plans to become president again, and will actually help him in his lifelong effort to cast himself as a victim, always being treated “unfairly”.
When I wrote that, I didn’t know what was actually in the indictment that had been handed down the previous evening, and suggested that the only real hope for some relief against Trump’s assault on the “rule of law” was that he might be charged under 18 U.S.C. § 2071(b), the penalty for which includes being disqualified from holding public office.
It didn’t happen. The indictment is now unsealed. He was charged with 37 counts of various aspects of mishandling sensitive documents, the penalties for all of which are just fines or possible imprisonment. If you haven’t figured it out yet, GOML is here to guide you: Trump isn’t going to jail for any of this, and anyway none of it will be fully resolved until well after the next election. His tried-and-true strategy of delaying, counter-suing, appealing and exhausting the resources of his pursuers will clearly prevail once more.
If a Democrat is elected, this will all be a side-show of some entertainment value, but no real impact on government (apart from any new MAGA-fueled insurrections, of course). And any Republican who gains the presidency will simply have their Justice Department drop the charges, which they are already claiming to be judicial overreach for what, in their view, is a violation equivalent to failing to return an overdue library book.
The more problematic reality if a Republican won would be that we’d have another Republican administration, with or without Trump, free to pursue all their nutty obsessions. Who knows what would rise to the top of their agenda? A war on libraries? A national dress code? Addressing climate change by deploying the Space Force to get rid of those pesky Jewish space lasers once and for all?
So what is the actual impact of these goings-on? Well, the first thing to note is that none of it will change anyone’s mind about Trump. In this already hyper-polarized environment, these proceedings are just gasoline on the fire.
The big winners? Trump and all the news outlets. Trump wins because he again has the only thing he really values – the limelight. All anybody is talking about now is Trump, Trump, Trump. Perfect bliss for the man-baby! He’s absolutely thrilled with his poll numbers now, which are spiking since the indictment.
And the news outlets win, both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump organizations, because they don’t really care about news at all or even know what it is anymore. The fact that you all know what I mean when I refer to pro- or anti-Trump news organizations is proof that “news” isn’t really what it used to be – objectively curated and reported. All they care about now is ratings because ratings translate to profits, and Trump is, in fact, a ratings machine. You may have already forgotten about the FoxNews/Dominion case, in which it was revealed that Fox knew all along that the “rigged election” story was nonsense, but since their viewers didn’t want to hear that, they promoted lies instead. This is the definition of “News” for profit.
The big losers? All the rest of us.
Get Off My Lawn 