Sunday, June 11, 2023

Indictments? Schmindictments! Trump, the republican party, and the cult pretend it's NBD

#NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump appears to be in very deep trouble, but for him, it's just another day on the campaign trail and at the grift mill -- not to mention yet another golden opportunity to exploit his dual shtick of martyr to the Deep State and fearless warrior for all Americans.

This weekend I finally sat down and read the 49-page indictment that everyone is talking about.
Here's a direct link, one of many available, to the doc so you can read it yourself, if you haven't already. It is at once painfully tedious and stunning. If you don't feel up to reading the whole thing at the moment, here's a summary -- again, one of many available.

Trump, predictably, is using the indictments in
fundraising efforts as well as on the campaign trail. He's treating the whole thing as if it's just a big joke, which, of course, plays well to his audience of fascists and hypnotized cultists. A piece on the WGNTV.com site quotes him making one of his familiar spurious claims about how he's fighting for the rights of all Americans:

“They’ve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people,” Trump alleged, later telling the crowd that, “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”

You probably saw this coming, as it's a constant theme on this blog, but here I go again: Trump's claim is, on a much larger and more dangerous scale of course, reminiscent of serial scammer Kevin Trudeau and his tiresome, very long-time shtick about how he is fighting for all of us -- when in reality both men have always been all about saving their own scaly skins so they can just keep on grifting. No doubt about it, Trump and Trudeau are turds of a feather.

That so many folks are laughing with Trump instead of taking the indictments seriously is more than worrisome. That almost everyone of note in the republican party, even Trump's rivals for the 2024 nomination, all refuse to condemn him --
and in many cases even take his side against the "Deep State" -- is frightening.

At their core, however, I suspect that most of the Trump defenders and even Trump himself aren't laughing on the inside, because they realize that this latest series of indictments is, in fact, a very big deal. Trump of course claims he's innocent, but as for almost everyone else, instead of directly defending Trump's actions or saying that he didn't do it, most of them are busily attacking Biden, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Jack Smith's wife, et al., and making absurd comparisons to the Clintons and even Nixon. It's distraction, obfuscation, gaslighting, which is all they really have, because even they are aware that they cannot defend the indefensible.

But still they refuse to step up and loudly and publicly say that Donald Trump is a criminal who poses a clear and present danger to America and American democracy.


The embedded video leading off this post has been up on YouTube for 6 years (!) and I just learned of it today, via a private Facebook group. Unfortunately it is more pertinent than ever, serving as a poignant reminder of the damage (some of it possibly irreversible) that Trump and Trumpism have done and continue to do.

I honestly believe that American democracy cannot survive another Trump term. Even if the criminal justice system can't necessarily keep him from running, being nominated, or winning, the sane electorate has got to step up and make sure that he never holds public office again.

1 comment:

TH in SoC said...

It is certainly interesting to see the rabid devotion of the Rethuglican Party, the major right-wing media outlets, and the American evangelical church to the cult of Trump. Logic doesn't work on these people, because there is something they want so badly that they are willing to embrace magical thinking and to toss all logical reasoning out the window if it will help them get what they want. And maybe they'll get it - but they will also get consequences. I think of how the infrastructure and institutions of the red states have begun to fall apart. I also think of 2020, when most of the West Coast was either on fire or blanketed with smoke and dangerous levels of carbon monoxide from the fires. Or how about the pandemic that raged out of control because the Rethuglicans refused to admit that COVID-19 was a real danger. Sooner or later, people who insist on living in castles in the sky end up getting evicted from them.