There are so many things to write about, so much that's so awful (look, I'm an optimist, but even my sense of joy has been sorely tested), and I've avoided writing for so long (hey, I was just commiserating with the other writers on strike... heh heh), I hardly know where to begin.
So let's start here: Al Capone.
Of all the strange tangents Trump goes on at his, well, bizarre and frankly kinda tired, rallies, one of the weirdest moments is when compares his situation to that of Chicago's number one gangster. It's usually to suggest that, like Capone, Trump is being nailed on trivial charges, like tax evasion.Of course, what he also like to imply, in so many words, is that, like Capone, he too is a slightly outlaw badass who cannot be contained by the tired rules of conventional laws.
Which, if you think about it, is a kinda weird stance for a former President of the United States.
Seven years on, with an intervening stay in the White House and a violent riot to cap off his term, It's frequently suggested that as a nation, we have become inured to Trump's outrageousness, his breaking of norms, the lack of basic decency. Still, there are moments - "poisoning the blood of our nation", anyone? - where we can still get caught off guard by the breaking of a new norm, a bridge yet again not too far. I'd argue the casual tossed off lines about Capone are themselves a new, and striking low.
Donald Trump faces 91 felony counts in 4 separate indictments, 2 Federal, one each in New York, and in Georgia. That's on top of several civil suits crawling along, and random legal issues like being disqualified from ballots in Colorado and Maine over (apparently serious) suggestions that his running violates Section 3 of the 14th Amendment - the one where if you, like, participated on the wrong side in the Civil War, you can never hold public office again. The kind of thing we never thought we'd need after, you know, the Civil War. In pretty much every case, Trump has followed the time-honored (dishonored?) legal strategy taught to him by Roy Cohn - challenge everything. Bury them in paper. Work the refs. Proclaim your innocence and claim unprecedented mistreatment.
Trump has filed motions to dismiss in all 4 cases - at this point, all are in some stage of stasis or collapse - and the striking thing about them is their sameness: "i didn't do it, if I did do it it wasn't a crime, and if it was a crime, I'm either allowed to do it, or immune from being prosecuted for it." Some have noted that the arguments he makes in one case often suggest problems with another (like claiming to be an "Officer of the United States" in Georgia, except that "Officer of the United States" is why the 14th Amendment would apply to him). The immunity claim is so over the top, it may set new precedent in the Supreme Court, where immunity was roundly tossed in US v Nixon.
But to really contemplate the absurdity of Trump and his Capone via Cohn approach to law (with detours into Watergate era madness), let's just point to one of the cases - the one where Trump took some of the nation's most top secret documents, left them in boxes literally all over Mar A Lago, and refused to return them, to see how his arguments are really hopeless:
- "i didn't do it" - for months, Trump asserted to investigators, the National Archives, and eventually the press, that he had not taken any documents. he insisted he was being treated differently from other former Presidents (leading to the amazing discovery that yes, apparently people can accidentally walk off with secret documents from the White House more than you'd think). Eventually, in another unprecedented moment, the FBI raided Mar A Lago (aka a presidential residence), and discovered the boxes and boxes of documents and other detritus Trump had hoarded and hid.
- "It's not a crime, or I'm allowed to do it" - Trump subsequently insisted that he had "every right" to take the documents under an apparently creative reading of the Presidential Records Act - a Nixon(!)-era law meant to make clear how records should be collected and filed by the Library of Congress. And by creative, I mean the well known "they're mine and you can't have them" doctrine. Amazingly that's not even the issue that may be resolved at trial - the simpler problem is that Trump had highly classified documents, violating the Espionage Act. And that crime, one that's charged out fairly routinely, doesn't require motive or misunderstanding. Just having the documents when and where you shouldn't have is enough.
- Immunity - Astonishingly, even in this, Trump continues to insist that the President is immune from the Espionage Act in some combination of "Executive Privilege" - which Trump aqpparently takes to mean "if I want it, it's my privilege to have it" - and Presidential declassification - a defined process Trump didn't follow, but Trump asserts (often hilariously) "it's declassified if I say so." Just to underline the absurdity of that argument, one of the holdups in the documents trial is that the documents involved are so highly classified, Trump's lawyers have had to scramble to set up a site in Florida secure and limited enough to view them to prepare for trial, so secret they may not be able to be introduced in open court.
And just to be clear... these are not the arguments or defenses of an innocent man. In the trial over falsification of business records that may close The Trump Organization in New York, Trump's lawyers literally maintain that years of fraudulent valuations of Trump properties used in tax and loan filings are a "common practice" in real estate... or in other words, they have literally admitted to the fraud. Case after case, trial after trial... Trump makes guilty man arguments, brazenly waiting for someone to agree that it doesn't matter if he wantonly breaks laws.
And sure that's a lot like Capone... but should it be? Federal crimes are often the simplest of process crimes - like sending false information by mail, or filing a false tax return - for an obvious reason: it's the kind of housekeeping, minor detail that criminals don't think of while committing major crimes. In 2016, when Trump refused to show his tax returns claiming he was "under audit" it's becoming clearer he was half right - his tax returns build so thoroughly on one lie after another that untangling them will indeed take years. Illegality is so familiar to him, innocence passed him by a long, long time ago.
Where to begin... at the very least we should be able to concoct a standard for the Presidency that avoids the commission of massive fraud, theft of documents and fomenting insurrection. Start there. Start somewhere. Trump so thoroughly violates First Principles, it's amazing, seven years on, that we still have him here to kick around. Or yes, to kick us around. Set aside the collapse of the Republicans, the sycophants defending him, the opportunists tied to him... just for a moment. Start here. Donald Trump should not be President ever again, because we have standards. Principles. Something. That's a real fine place to start.
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