Under the law, he is innocent. Based on any reasonable, fair-minded examination of Donald Trump's presidential and post-presidential behavior, however, he is revoltingly guilty. And now this appallingly odious little man and his sordid, obsequious allies intend to sunder the nation in defiance of all decency, intelligibility, and crushing evidence.
First came proofs and a public record of his payouts to hush an adulterous affair in criminal violation of campaign laws. Then a civil case of sexual assault, defamation, and a $5 million judgment against him. Now federal prosecutors have brought a case concerning Trump's illicit retention of national security secrets — a violation of the Espionage Act — false statements, conspiracies, obstruction of
justice and, according to one of his lawyers, "several obstruction-based" charges, probably witness tampering.
Still to come are more federal charges centering on his felonious attempts to retain the presidency after losing it — a fake electors scheme, a deadly insurrection — and Georgia state charges focusing on election interference and, again, fake electors.
In response to these Himalayan peaks of manifest corruption, Trump is claiming prosecutorial misconduct; yes up and down the east-coast stretch, the entire judicial system — local, state, federal — is merely out to get him, he says. But more than that, far more hideously than that, he's determined to set fire to the United States, pitting American against American.
So that he can save his political hide and put himself in a place where he's safe from the law: the White House. Trump's inaugural strategy is to organize the sympathetically debauched behind him. This required no laborious coaxing. They leapt into action, with Kevin McCarthy declaring a "dark day"; Jim Jordan offering the variation of a "sad day"; the toadstool Charlie Kirk tweeting that "Every 'Republican' running for President should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support. If you don't, you are part of the problem."
One of Trump's presidential competitors, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, tweeted a better idea: "Donald Trump is the target of an ongoing criminal investigation and he should step aside & put the good of the country above his candidacy." Trump's former attorney general, Bill Barr, has explained why he should step aside: "This is not a case of the DOJ conducting a witch hunt.... This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half.... There is no excuse for what he did here."
Hutchinson is an exception to the rule of monolithic moronity among the Republican primary pack. "This is an affront to every citizen," says candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. "We cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents," Mike Pence, as always, is playing both sides, arguing that while no one is above the law, actually exercising it against Trump is "terribly divisive to the country."
Some of the former president's confederates are thinking proleptically — and with magnificent invention. The host of Real America's Voice, for instance, asserts that a Trump conviction "won’t matter. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says he can’t be president from inside prison. And then once he gets there, he can pardon himself." Now that's using the old noggin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is rousing the Twitter mob, lamenting the Justice Department's cruel asymmetry in the document investigations: indicting Trump and excusing Joe Biden, he says, while making no mention of the two cases' vast differences. And then there are Trump's congressional allies, who "plan to insinuate — with no evidence — that the Justice Department has timed this indictment to distract from House Republicans’ investigations into President Biden's family business affairs."
As for Trump himself, he's been busy posting loads of undifferentiated videos of Fox News guests announcing the Justice Department's onset of the End Times, as well as posting his own shtick: four minutes of repetitious, guttersnipish blabber in which the only thing missing is a rational defense of his documented crimes.
A late-May YouGov poll (B+) found that 63% of Americans agreed that "taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them" are serious crimes. So said 82% of Democrats, 62% of independents, and even 42% of Republicans. That Trump took such documents, there is no question. And the man is on tape admitting he had been powerless to declassify them. Nor is there any doubt about his various obstructions. They were as blatant as those he committed in the Russia Russia Russia case.
It's all catching up to him: the lies, the deceptions, the witness tampering, strong-arming, defamations, sexual assaults, hush monies, election interferences, conspiracies, fake electors, the lethal incitement of an insurrection. There is a deep state, or at least there was. It was burrowed in the bowels of the executive branch. And its name was Trump.
This deepest state of endless, almost immeasurable corruption is not yet dead, for it could again infiltrate the White House. But when 66% of all registered voters agree — as they did in YouGov's polling — that swiping classified documents and obstructing their retrieval are serious crimes, then Trump's odds of triumphing in 2024 are uncommonly slim.