Donald Trump Comes Home to New York
Will his arraignment be the start of the Third American Revolution? Or, like so much of Trumpworld, another nothingburger?
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Tuesday, April 4, 2023
The day dawned calm and sunny here in Marathon. The air is clear and the day slowly warming up. Off in the west, though, the sky is a darker shade of blue, the leading edge of a front that is supposed to bring high winds and a red flag warning – indicating higher risk of fires starting and spreading – to the whole region.
Speaking of dangerous vectors of hot air, today is Arraignment Day for former president Donald Trump. He will surrender to authorities in New York City, where he has been indicted on 34 counts related to his hush money payments to sex worker Stormy Daniels to buy her silence in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, which he lost by three million votes. Unless you factor in the vagaries of the Electoral College, in which case he won.
Conservative Media, Inc.’s take on the case is that he is the victim of a “witch hunt” by a “George Soros-funded prosecutor,” and that his indictment is a “travesty” “never before seen in American history.”
But then, we’ve never had anyone quite like Donald Trump live in the White House, have we?
The so-called “lamestream media” will frame the indictments around the porn star payoffs, because who doesn’t like a little sex with their oatmeal in the morning? (I am not trying to start a new kink here.)
It’s important to remember, though, that the porn star payoffs – for which Trump consigliere and fixer Michael Cohen went to prison – were for the express purpose of preventing damaging information about Candidate Trump from coming to light in the weeks before the 2016 election.
This is the through line that runs through so many of Trump’s violations of norms and/or outright crimes: Undermining the integrity of, and public confidence in, our elections.
“Russia, are you listening?” (Turns out it was, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.)
“Zelensky, I’m gonna need some dirt on Hunter or you won’t get the military assistance Congress already approved.” (Impeachment #1)
“Raffensberger, I need you to find me 11,800 votes.” (Atlanta DA Fani Willis)
“And we fight. We fight like hell And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”… “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.” (Impeachment #2; DoJ investigation of the January 6 insurrection)
It’s all about the ballots, baby.
Today will turn into Donald Trump Everywhere, All At Once. His flight from Miami to New York yesterday was covered with the zeal of the infamous white Bronco chase (ask your parents).
(Absolutely nothing — NOTHING! — else is going on in the world right now.)
And the technology that once recorded humankind’s journeys to the moon was enlisted to watch the Trump jet fly into New York.
The Trump arraignment will be formal and by-the-book, which means it will be more boring that Trump and his partisans want it to be. According to Michael Isikoff, there will be no handcuffs and no mug shot, which already means he’s getting special treatment. And although the NYPD is supposedly preparing for violence in the streets, that does not seem to be developing.
(Fellow Texans will recall how then-Governor Rick Perry, indicted for coercion and abuse of power, turned his mug shot into a happy-go-lucky picture worthy of Tinder)
(It’s 10:00 p.m. Do you know where this man is??)
Never Trumper Steve Schmidt put it all into perspective:
Whatever happens on Tuesday it will be tawdry and cheap. Donald Trump will never have a presidential library, and no president will ever hang his portrait in the White House. His arrest on Tuesday will have to suffice. He has achieved his ambition: everyone will be looking at Donald Trump, all at once. Then people will start looking away, one by one. His trials will become tedious and boring. By the time he is standing in a federal courtroom cold and lonely without the glow of a TV camera the show will be over. The suicide charge of a political party demanding Trump — or else — will be soon forgotten as Trump slides into a raging oblivion, where he is forgotten by the media who feasted on him until the end.
In my world, oatmeal and sex would be the norm and this trial- as predicted by Schmidt of all watching Trump only to lose interest, one by one leaving Trump to believe he is forgotten and in a raging oblivion- my own personal kink and state of apotheosis. But I fear this will be another anticlimactic media frenzy where Trump will stimulate more turn on, generating more draw leading me back to the beginning: my oatmeal and sex.
As soon as Ford pardoned Nixon, we had to expect that some future president would expect impunity. It is disturbing that millions of Americans expect their Dear Leader to be above the law.