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.
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.
ReplyDelete