Saturday, June 01, 2024

Unprecedented thoughts…

With the unanimous thirty four count guilty verdict in Donald Trump’s criminal fraud trial in New York this week,  the media as been stumbling all over itself to find new and novel ways to use  the word  “unprecedented” .   The context of course, being that having a  former President of the United States,  and presumptive  nominee for his party to run to be the next President charged, tried and convicted of multiple felonies  is  something that  we as a nation have never been faced with before.

Yeah ok….  So what.

I mean it, so what.     You know what else is unprecedented?  Having  a former and wannabe again President who is so singularly focused on his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement. So it can be said that everything about  the sad,  sordid  dismal legacy of Donald Trump the political figure has been  outside of what we knew as precedent .

The implication from folks like House Speaker Mike Johnson is clear; The uncharted territory of all this means normal rules, and even laws should not, and must not apply.   Johnson went so far as to suggest that the United States Supreme Court, (which itself is not having a very good week). should ‘weigh in’ on the matter.   The fact that there is absolutely no legal, constitutional or even common-sense basis for such a thing is irrelevant to Johnson because Trump actually being held accountable for crimes he committed is for him and the GOP, too unprecedented.

Trump himself has stayed entirely true to form.   In 2016 when he lost the Iowa Caucuses and the Wisconsin Primary, he claimed both races were “rigged against” him.   When his fake charity and bogus scam university were shut down for blatant violations of the law, he decried the “rigged court decisions”.   When his TV show “The Apprentice” would drop in the ratings he said the Nielsen system is rigged, and when he didn’t get nominated for an Emmy Award claimed it was a vast Hollywood conspiracy to deny him one.

Lastly, Trump was so unable to process his 2020 election loss that he literally tried to have a mob of his supporters overthrow the Government and kill the Vice-President, and to this day still can’t admit the reality of that loss.  Desperately clinging to the lie the election was rigged and stolen from him.

For Trump, life is only fair when he wins.  

Is it any surprise that his only way to deal with the reality of his current situation was to throw daily tantrums  outside the Manhattan Courthouse, overflowing with delusional accusations of corrupt judges and prosecutors, biased jurors and the entire thing  orchestrated from the shadows by the Biden-Harris Campaign.

Because that is what all this is about.   For Donald Trump, having to face reality, devoid of the protection his personal fantasy world has long provided him, is perhaps the most unprecedented thing of all.

That is why Donald Trump desperately wants to be President again, to keep reality at bay. 

Not to DO the job.  He never DID the job.  During his disastrous four years the vast majority of his time was spent, not actually being President, but playing President.  Constant MAGA rallies of the same recycled grievances and dog whistles.  Hours upon hours of “executive time” spent in the White House residence, waiting for  Fox News hosts to say nice things about him so he could retweet it.    And more time spent golfing than the last three Presidents combined.

Not to rehash traumatic recent history, but the last time Trump was in the White House he was so disengaged from the job that by the time he noticed the Covid Pandemic wasn’t going away, the best he could muster was to suggest we all inject bleach into our bodies and shove lightbulbs up our asses.     Trump’s inability to deal with reality cost the lives of over half a million Americans and did trillions of dollars of damage to our economy we are still trying to recover from.

Being convicted of falsifying business records so voters wouldn’t find out he paid off a porn actress to keep quiet bout their hook up is the least unprecedented thing about all this.   

What is really beyond the realm of precedent is that there are people in this country who think returning this delusional, corrupt, incompetent narcissist to power would be a good idea.

The fact that the grand experiment of American Democracy may come to an end, not via the evil our politicians  but through the ignorance of  our own citizens, that... is what I call  unprecedented.



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