The Founders rejected absolute monarchy in 1776. But in 2024, with republican ideals under siege and an autocrat telegraphing his readiness, a demoralized America appears ready to crown a new king.
Donald Trump believes he has absolute immunity from prosecution for anything he did during his presidency; that the President, is, after all, above the law. Many agree with him.
His Republican poodles may think he has immunity or they may not. But Trump’s currency is loyalty—I’m just some Canadian shmoe with no skin in the game, and I know this—and the price for disloyalty, as Liz Cheney will tell you, is banishment and vilification, the end of your career.
Very few Republicans have the thickness of integument to cope with this: Cheney, Kinzinger, Romney, Christie. Yet it’s not as though any elected officials currently kissing his hemline would end up on the street, should they choose the unpopular route of having a little integrity and putting country before self. At the very least, they could get a book deal!
What is this hold he has on them? Why are they so afraid of this sad bully with the urine-colored hair and tendency to rage?
The playbook Project 2025, a publicly available, minutely detailed action plan for destroying the administrative state and investing almost unlimited powers in the President reveals that Trump is a chump. The Federalist Society, author of the action plan. has done what every savvy corporation does: separate the process from any individual. No matter who the next Republican president may be, the plan is the same. They are committed to the plan, loyal to the plan, biding their time.
The MAGA hatters know in their hearts he is the Messiah, avatar of the Second Coming of American exceptionalism, restoring racial and sexual and ideological purity, reaffirming The Family, whose only definition is one man, one woman, one point three children, as the bedrock of society; acknowledging white supremacy entwined with militant Christianity as the law of the land; erasing, figuratively and literally, the illegals, the immigrants, the Jews, the feminists, the commies and socialists, the gays, the perverts, the writers of books, all who threaten the children.
Trump once said he could shoot a gun in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it. But that wasn’t much of a challenge. Instead, like all canny leaders, he delegated. I doubt he would have heard of “stochastic violence”, but that’s what he engaged in, essentially, violence by proxy, that gives plausible deniability to the instigator. He incited an insurrection, during the course of which he got several people murdered (some committed suicide months later), very nearly got the Vice President lynched, and emboldened a lunatic who, seeking to kill Nancy Pelosi at her home, settled for cracking the skull of her elderly husband with a hammer.
Only the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit thought otherwise:
…former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches… We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter…
Seriously. If all POTUS’s had total immunity, why did Gerald Ford pre-emptively pardon the disgraced Richard Nixon? As for Trump’s attorney’s silly claim that without immunity “Every new president would indict the previous president” which obviously has not happened, ever, and their insistence that before being indicted, he would have to be impeached, the three-panel tribunal all but laughed in Trump’s face, saying,
We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power— the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.
Trump immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, and everyone held their breath. And the Supreme Court, knock me over with a mega-yacht, heard the case.
It was an infuriatingly predictable spectacle, with the conservative justices resolutely refusing to stick to the issue at hand, not even once addressing the events of January 6, 2021, namely, whether Trump had immunity against the specific actions taken towards nullifying the 2020 election—which was meant to be the narrow scope of the argument.
Instead, despite fifty-odd pages of cast-iron logic in the DC court’s judgement that total Presidential immunity did not, could not exist, they decided to flirt with the idea.
They cast their worried minds into a future where every President, having no immunity, would, in bad faith, criminalize the behavior of their predecessor in an endless cluster fuck of tearing the nation apart and unscrewing the bolts of democracy. This would happen even though every president up until Trump clearly did not assume immunity from prosecution and yet failed to act against their predecessor. Trump is the first former President to be criminally indicted.
They sent the case back to the appellate court, with the mandate to determine which acts of Trump constituted personal, and which public, the idea being that maybe he’d get immunity for the official duties, but not the private acts, but then again maybe not.
I mean, Trump, you gotta admit, IS entertaining. Life could be pretty dull without a scaffold on the Mall and Melania throwing his dirty laundry out a top floor window onto the Rose Garden every Saturday night. Does anticipating what Joe Biden will do next cause you to race to the bathroom with diarrhea just from launching your social media accounts? I rest my case.
These witch hunts could take a few lessons in effectiveness from Arthur Miller. They are not quite cutting it. Example: The January 6th Committee meticulously researched the genesis and the events of the insurrection, showing without a shadow of doubt that it was clearly orchestrated by Trump and carried out by his most vicious MAGA supporters.
This meticulous research was then woven into a brilliant concept by the fearless Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, ground zero of the plot to return Trump illegitimately to power: Trump and his henchpeople would be charged as racketeers, a vast network engaged in one giant criminal conspiracy to thwart the election results and rewrite history.
The indictment was a thrilling read. This, we thought for sure, this would be Trump’s comeuppance, and Fani Willis his nemesis—except her brilliance turned to arrogance and she hired as a prosecutor a man she’d been dating.
Oh, my Fani! as surely he must have exclaimed at least once. Remember? Not just no actual conflict of interest, but even the appearance of conflict of interest… No one gets this anymore. An initial attempt to remove her from the case failed. But, if at first you don’t succeed…
Delay, delay, delay. That’s all they have to do, take the already deliberately slow wheels of justice, and let them grind harder, slower, more cautiously…
The State of Georgia, where Trump would be standing trial as the actual mastermind of an actual conspiracy—yes, actual conspiracies exist, often identified by, let’s say, dozens of emails and recorded phone conversations of people saying, “Hey, guys—let’s form a racketeering conspiracy to nullify an election!”— is now set on a second attempt to remove Fani Willis, our intrepid what-was-she-thinking, healthy-libido’d DA, thereby ensuring that no trial will happen before the election, clearing the way for a possible Trump victory.
Once safely back in the White House for his first day of dictatorship, free from the inconvenience of being exposed as a traitor, he’ll get to pardon, well, himself, then all those other traitors, the insurrectionists currently serving time, so they can stalk the night with their assault weapons primed to kill and their bellies full of vengeance. Fun!
But, wait, there’s the stolen documents case, that matter of his pilfering, after his presidency had finished, top secret, classified documents by the hundreds, which he used to line the ballrooms, bathrooms and bedrooms of Mar-a-Lago. Like a kid showing off the finest cat’s-eye marble on the block, he shared privileged information with golf club cronies, foreign representatives, friends, employees, maybe even a hooker or two, compromising the US, its agents and probably the entire world, just because the President can do anything.
You or I, we’d already be sleeping on boiled sheets and enjoying our status as personal bitch to some tattooed lifer in a for-profit prison, had we but taken even one of these documents.
Luckily, Trump’s pet judge, Aileen Cannon, has bungled the pretrial preparation, eating up huge amounts of time and sowing anxiety and confusion until, a couple of days ago, she could finally throw up her hands and say,
“Overwhelm! Must postpone this trial! I’ve created way too many issues to deal with before the election. Does anyone mind if I lie down in a dark room? Wake me up after, I’d say, indefinitely. Does indefinitely work for you?”
Well, you can certainly understand where she’s coming from!
Even the Hush Money trial is like a refresher in how impervious Trump is to criticism, shame, or truth. He sleeps. He farts. He snarls. Judge Juan Merchan forbids him to talk about the jurors. Trump immediately posts about the jurors on Truth Social. Merchan tells him he’s a naughty boy and if he does it again….! Trump goes out and does it again.
Now Merchan plays hardball. Trump will go to jail if he does this one more time…! And fines Trump $9,000 total for breaching the gag order nine times. Nine times!
This time Merchan really, really, cross his heart means business, and then some. Trump is going to go to jail definitely, absolutely if he breaks the gag order, but not until after this set of violations, just so we can be sure he knows what he’s forbidden to do, that he keeps doing anyway. But mark my words—!
Merchan’s gag order on Trump specifically forbids him to speak about Michael Cohen, a key witness, and Merchan’s own daughter. Trump complies, except he gets the entire Republican Congress, in matching shiny blue suits and red ties, to line up outside the courthouse for the press and, like obedient poodles, smear Michael Cohen and Merchan’s daughter on Trump’s behalf, a brazen violation of the gag order. They also vilify the entire US system of justice as hopelessly corrupt, biased and engaged in politics. But just you wait... one of these days, Alice…!
But Trump doesn’t go to jail. He will never go to jail, because Merchan is like one of those dog owners who talks to their pet in complete sentences when it shits on the carpet, so it keeps shitting on the carpet.
How does he get away with it, over and over and over? It’s not illegal to be an asshole, but Trump embellishes his assholiness with crimes, misdemeanours and illegal shenanigans that are so blatant, it’s not possible to pretend we haven’t seen. He makes sure we see.
He’ll say all the documents are returned while standing beside another thousand documents. He’s been heard a thousand times in the recording of the phone call to Georgia asking for eleven thousand more votes. He doesn’t care and his followers don’t either. He’s a rebel, a regular guy, he’s “refreshing,” like a bucket of ice-cold puke over your head first thing in the morning.
He does exactly what he wants, says exactly what he wants, defies court orders, lies to our faces when he knows we know he’s lying.
Trump’s a rapist. He sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman thirty years ago, a chance meeting turned nightmare. Terrified of how he might retaliate, and with a high profile career at stake, she didn’t go to the police.
But in 2017, he added defamation to his crimes, insult to injury. Using a window of opportunity which set aside limitations of time, she took him to court, where a jury of his peers found him guilty of both the sexual assault and the defamation; after which he left the courtroom and literally within minutes defamed her again. And E Jean Carroll, gutsy as hell at eighty years old, sued him again, and won.
He’s a classic woman hater who had a sleazy, not extremely consensual one-night stand with a porn actress—to whom, by the way, he said that “she reminded him of his daughter”—while his third wife was pregnant with their child; a compulsive liar, a vicious, proud racist, a fraudster, an at least four-times bankrupt, a man who hobnobbed with Russian thugs who helped him secure real estate deals in Moscow and take down Hillary Clinton. He heaps praise on Putin, a marauding psychotic who is systematically murdering the people of Ukraine, has his eye on Poland and Estonia, and hints he will nuke Paris—and this is the man who wants to be President again.
What am I saying? He’s convinced his loyal followers that he still IS President! And some Americans, and not just Republicans, still worry and fret that he’s being persecuted. We’re trying to put a former President in jail! How can we be so cruel?
Of course it’s politics! It’s politics that he was charged to begin with, a final, but too-late, rising to the task of calling out corruption and defiance of the rule of law that, with criminal due process requiring certainty “beyond a reasonable doubt” should have happened through the more subjective, fuzzy parameters of impeachment ‘s high crimes and misdemeanours.
For sexual assault, which took place when Trump was just citizen Trump, it took the fearlessness of an eighty-year-old woman with a ruined life, someone who, for an unguarded moment saw her chance encounter with Trump as merely a cordial meeting with a fellow traveler, to bring him to justice in a private action (who knows how many other women, not fortunate enough to have wealth, reputation and membership in the New York A-list, still suffer in silence?).
It’s politics that the Supreme Court has disingenuously injected doubt into an issue that should be clear-cut: Attempting to replace legitimate electors with fakes, to deny voters their right to have their votes counted, to importune Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find more votes”, are not “official acts”.
He has owned you completely, body and soul. He is above the law, you said that’s not possible, but somehow he has achieved lift-off. He is about to escape from the juggernaut of documented, illustrated, checked, balanced, i-dotted, t-crossed evidence and all because he said “fake news” one trillion times, then turned around and gave America the secret handshake, which looks a lot like flipping the bird.
He is the monarchy you rejected come back to haunt you, King George in cargo shorts under his cloak trimmed with ermine, a MAGA cap for a crown; he’s the Clown Prince, the heir to the gold-plated bidet surrounded by blueprints of the Kremlin; He is King Donald the First of Mar-a-Lago, Duke of Teflon! ALL HAIL!
He’s grabbed America, in fact, by the p*ssy, and, just like he said—it seems America just lets him.
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