CNN’s Anderson Cooper gets credit for using the straightforward term, “arrested,” on air to describe the former president as cameras caught a glimpse of him having to open the door to the courtroom by himself Tuesday. My best headline award goes to the Daily Mirror of London, “Trump in the Eye of the Stormy,” coming in just ahead of Time magazine’s cover, a visual of a big orange finger print with a yelling Trump mouth in its center and the single word, “Unprecedented.” Both are keepers.
Yesterday’s arraignment of the Orange One marked a huge cultural change for America and the world, for all of us suffering greater or lesser effects of “post-traumatic stress disorder” resulting from the last eight years (since that first walk down the escalator in 2015). His four years in office, of course, were the worst, and the fact that seems so remote, so almost cartoonish, now is a sign of PTSD itself. We have been suffering collectively from a very bad time.
That’s what makes the image from Tuesday, of an unhappy Trump seated in the courtroom surrounded by security personnel, so cathartic. He was trapped there, he was not going to get away. Thank f***ing God!
No, Arraignment Day was not a “sad day for America,” as some allegedly nonpartisan commentators claimed. It was an amazingly wonderful day. This two-bit New York mafia crook who had been allowed to ascend to the presidency of allegedly the greatest democracy on the planet, was willing to sell our nation out to our sworn adversaries and set us on an irreversible course to totalitarian rule. This punk was barely able to contain the fear he was experiencing inside himself facing the proverbial “music” for the first time in his life, with no escape route in sight. That scowl we saw in the courtroom Tuesday was the best he could do to prevent himself from breaking down like a scared child in a flood of howls and tears.
Yes, Tuesday was what he’d spent his entire criminal career of ripping off innocent people and our government to avoid. He would spare no expense to avoid just the situation he’d arrived at Tuesday. Finally at long last, the system caught up to him, no longer thwarted and frustrated by others in high places, like former Attorney General Barr.
Tuesday marked the happy first real break in the floodgates of legal reckoning for this grifter-in-chief.
As Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg stated plainly, the 34 felony charges leveled against Trump are for far more than just buying the silence of a porn star. The media continues to misrepresent the substance of the case in just that way.
No, this case is about trying to illegally rig the outcome of an election, one of the first of many attempts.
Even if there was no salacious element at all, the behavior documented in the indictment reveals a callous and nihilistic attempt to cheat the American people out of a fair election.
Given the equally nihilistic disregard for justice and fairness of so many other people in high places, including but not limited to the Republican Party, he was aided and abetted through the process. It can be argued it dated back to 1987 when Trump came back from a trip to Moscow and the emerging Putin faction there announced he would be its presidential candidate of choice in the U.S.
Up until then, he was just another crooked, and thereby malleable, real estate mogul in New York. But he was then given the national profile of a popular TV show host, and his rise was off and running. He cultivated his fake “tough guy” persona on that show and carried it off with the help of a traditional Mafiosa-style organization, conning enough American voters right into the White House.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was right to focus in her podcast, “Ultra,” on the subject of the book by Bradley W. Hart, “Hitler’s American Friends, the Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.” Trump’s fascist roots go far back in the U.S. Trapping him at last presents our best chance yet to revert it all back to society’s darkest fringes.
