The Paul Street Report, 9.15.2022
So, are they really going to get Trump, at long last?
Donald J. Trump, that is. You know, the textbook malignant narcissist and no-so “semi-” fascist ex-president who tried to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election, who has three-fourths of the nation’s Republicans preposterously believing that the last election was “stolen,” who criminally absconded to his Mar a Lago estate with boxes of highly classified national security documents and refused repeated government requests for their return.
The malevolent authoritarian who as president committed the crime of pandemicide, encouraged right-wing militias to occupy state capitols, and who identified with open paramilitary fascists like the Proud Boys, who followed the 2020 election by rampaging through Washington wearing t-shirts that said “6MWE” (meaning “six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust was insufficient”) and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong.”
Yeah, that guy – Donald Trump, the current Republican kingmaker and 2024 presidential front-runner. The orange-hued maniac who claims that if he takes back the White House he will pardon and issue a government apology to the rioters who followed his cue by attacking the US Capitol screaming “hang Mike Pence” and trying to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory on January 6th, 2021. The guy who has used the Big Hitlerian election Lie to fraudulently raise millions of dollars to pay his campaign debts and fund his next bid for power, to be aided and abetted by Trumpist candidates pledged to use their power atop state election offices to nullify popular presidential votes in critical battleground states in 2024.
The Republi-fascist party’s 2024 presidential front-runner who has long championed revanchist civil war and just openly embraced the neo-Nazi Q’Anon cult.
Yes, that fascist lunatic and cult leader.
So they’re going to nail him, the legal net is tightening, the orange malignancy is going down, right?
So I am told by numerous liberal and progressive friends.
I have no idea if they are right, but I hope I can be pardoned for being jaded and cynical about their hopes of seeing Trump get what he deserves. I’ve been hearing that “Trump is going down” for more than six years now, ever since Pussygate, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, both of the Trump impeachments, and numerous other Trump crimes, scandals, and atrocities.
A remotely functioning democracy would have put this deranged criminal behind bars long ago.
“Nobody is above the law,” I am told again and again by online correspondents and liberal talking heads on cable news.
Well before the ongoing US House January 6th committee’s first hearing, it was abundantly clear that Trump had committed at least nine federal felonies in connection with his attempted coup:
+ Willful destruction of government property (18 U.S.C. § 1361 and 18 U.S.C. § 2071)
+ Conspiracy against rights (18 U.S.C. § 241)
+ Depriving state residents of a fair and impartial election process (52 U.S.C. § 20511[2][B])
+ Conspiracy to defraud (18 U.S.C. § 371)
+ Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512)
+ Conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging any duties (18 U.S.C. § 372)
+ Seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C.§ 2384)
+ Coercion of political activity (18 U.S.C. § 610)
+ Interference in Election by Employees of Federal or State Governments (18 U.S.C. § 595)
Trump also committed a bevy of election-related state felonies, many the subject of criminal investigation and potential indictment in Fulton County, Georgia.
And now they’ve got him dead to rights, you’d think, for feloniously absconding to Mar-a-Lago with top secret classified documents and feloniously obstructing government efforts to get them back. For all we know, Trump may be guilty here of espionage and treason, both potentially capital crimes. A liberal friend fantasizes that Trump is headed to the federal Death Row in Terre Haute.
So, like…when does Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Because the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump get prosecuted and convicted? As the organization Citizens for Ethics argued last March, before the warranted FBI Mar a Lago documents search broke the news cycle:
“Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 48 criminal offenses while serving as President of the United States or campaigning for that office…Despite[this] staggering record…he has not been charged with a single criminal offense…Choosing not to pursue accountability for fear of the political criticism or consequences is itself a deeply political act…. If Trump avoids criminal prosecution for these potential offenses because prosecutors are unwilling to pursue meritorious and legally justified cases against him, the message to him and future presidents will be clear: you can commit crimes with impunity…The rule of law is not self-enforcing” (emphasis added).
More than 800 individuals have been federally charged in connection with the January 6th Capitol Riot, just not its main instigator, who turned from a nonstop Energizer Bunny of election subversion into a quiet television viewer for three-plus hours while his mob attacked “the citadel of [so-called] American democracy” – the US Capitol – on January 6th. As Congresspersons and his own vice president hid for their lives, Herr Trump poured more fuel on the “Hang Mike Pence” fire with a provocative Tweet, refused to order a timely deployment of the National Guard, and called Republican Senators to convince them not to certify Biden’s clear Electoral College victory. It seems he wanted to be personally present at the riot.
So, like…when exactly does this wannabe fascist strongman “get what’s coming to him”? A vast swath of disproportionately Black and brown poor people is imprisoned in the United States’ giant, globally unmatched mass incarceration state for minor drug and property crimes and violent offenses that pale before Trump’s transgressions. When does the world get to see the man Noam Chomsky once reasonably called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” perp-walked, convicted, sentenced, and warehoused in a federal penitentiary?
I naturally have no idea what’s going to happen to Trump – indictment(s) seem almost unavoidable now – but there is good reason to suspect he will die from “natural causes” (well, too many McDonalds runs) before the much-ballyhooed “rule of law” catches up with him. The old working-class slogan “money talks, bullshit walks” applies here though in this case it might be better to say that “power, fear, and class rule talks.”
Trump behind bars? Don’t hold your breath. It is by no means clear that this nation is capable of imposing justice on the orange fascist maniac.
Why might I be right on this? What are the hang-ups here?
Seven big ones to this writer’s mind:
#1. Ruling class fear of the precedent of a President of the United States being prosecuted and convicted. There’s a longstanding US ruling class gentlemen’s agreement against prosecuting former US presidents (seen in Barack Obama’s revolting “look forward not backwards” decision to leave George W. Bush alone for ordering torture and mass-murderously invading Iraq on totally fraudulent premises) rooted in the cold fact that US presidents are commanders of a giant global empire that regularly commits epic war and other crimes against humanity. As Chomsky has noted more than once, every US president since World War II could legally be hanged under the principles of Nuremberg. Making presidents subject to the rule of law is inherently problematic for the Empire.
At the same time, US elites worry that prosecuting ex-presidents could become normative, sparking political instability of the kind that is fine for them in a “Third World banana republic.” They see such chaos as inappropriate in the great imperial homeland that calls and considers itself the “beacon to world” for orderly (bourgeois) democracy – and as “the world’s policeman.” And if a president can be prosecuted for misdeeds, what about corporate and financial CEOs and investors who can easily be shown to have cheated taxpayers and committed other crimes – like poisoning the natural environment possibly beyond repair – leading to mass misery and death at home as well as abroad?
Trump is a conundrum for the gentleman’s agreement: he did something no president has ever done and whose closest analogy is the Confederacy’s secession from the United States after the election of Abraham Lincoln: he tried to cancel a US presidential election and overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law in the homeland itself. He tried, however sloppily, to stage a domestic coup and establish himself as a de facto dictator in the belly of the imperial beast.
Imposing coups and toppling governments in “Third World” states have long been part of the White House’s job for many decades. Coups at home are something new and altogether different. The Department of Justice, White House, and top Democrats don’t quite know how to handle this.
+2. Fear of turnabout and revenge when and if the Republi-fascists take back Congress and the White House. The Dems in nominal power know very well that the other party – which is now fascist (not just semi-fascist) – will respond to an attempted conviction of Trump by launching vengeful investigations and attempted prosecutions of Joe Biden and other top Democrats on largely trumped-up charges that will be eagerly embraced by the nation’s sizeable Amerikaner minority. Beneath all his recent fascistic policy pledges (including the execution of drug dealers and concentration camps for homeless people), Trump wants to run for president again for two key reasons: to provide cover for avoiding prosecution (by charging those who might indict him with being politically motivated) and to take revenge on his political enemies. Congressman and second Trump impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) might want to explore his options for teaching Constitutional Law in a foreign country.
+3. Fear of political violence and chaos. The Republi-fascist movement that reached critical mass under Obama and Trump has tens of thousands of heavily armed shock troops, many organized in neo-Brownshirt militias like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys – groups that contain a significant number of current and ex-military and cops. Members of the Republi-fascist base are now regularly harassing, hounding, targeting, doxing, trolling, and otherwise threatening teachers, nurses, doctors, school officials, school board members, elected officials, election officials, public health workers, poll workers, librarians, library board members, judges, district attorneys, rabbis, epidemiologists, immunologists, archivists and other professional and public workers, including even law enforcement officers. There’s also a vast anonymous sea of right-wing not-so lone wolf right-wing terrorists-in-reserve lurking with assault weapons nearby on the dark Web, waiting for the right trigger to slaughter enemies of the great white Fatherland en masse.
Trump’s top apologist in the US Senate, the two-faced viper Lindsey Graham (Rf, SC), recently said that federal prosecution of Trump will lead to “riots in the streets.” The statement was not meant to convey horror at the violence of Trump’s frothing hordes or to warn authorities on the need to prepare for far-right terrorism if Trump is (belatedly) indicted and prosecuted. No, Graham’s comment was intended to send the following message to the Department of Justice and the Fulton County District Attorney: Try to impose the rule of law on our Demented Dear Leader and our thugs will act to impose the rule of force on you. It was a flat-out fascist threat, reminiscent of the racist whites who menaced civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a throwback to proto-fascistic white Redeemer and Jim Crow terrorism – to the long Southern lynching era.
Many in the decision-making classes atop the US certainly fear that imposing the rule of law on the monster Trump could spark mass bloodshed and civil strife that would interfere with business profits as usual while further besmirching the already badly damaged image of the United States – the purported leaders of the “free world” – abroad.
Never mind that NOT prosecuting and convicting Trump will be seen as a bright green light for further right-wing political violence. MAGA-Republican terror draws strength not from its standard bearer’s prosecution but rather from his evil superhero-like impunity. So what if unpunished putsches become training exercises for subsequent more sophisticated attempts to seize authoritarian power?
+4. Mass alienation, apathy, numbing, normalization, and ignorance. Where is the mass pressure for locking up the treacherous narci-fascist Trump? Millions upon millions of US-Americans have been taught and conditioned to turn away from US politics altogether and could not care less to know that and how they are ruled. American “democracy” is delegitimized by domestic corporate and financial oligarchy, with majority public opinion consistently trumped by concentrated wealth and power on one issue after another. This makes the nation’s pretense of popular self-government a bad joke. The endless dollar-drenched, hypocritical, infantile, commercialized, and farcical, simultaneously Orwellian and Huxleyan spectacle that passes for democracy mocks the United States’ proclaimed egalitarian ideals. It helps make politics a much less desirable target of mass focus than commonly destructive, dopamine-delivering distractions and diversions like the National Football League, Netflix, video games, online porn, opioids, Tik-Tok, and Instagram.
To make matters worse, masses of US-Americans have been conditioned by an ongoing onslaught of fascisizing dreadfulness to passively accept and normalize madness and horror. For two-plus decades, it’s been it’s been a steady drumbeat of awful that has made the rise and maddeningly persistent political life of a fascist president and ex-president atop a white nationalist major US party and movement seem like just another form of insanity that we “just have to live through”: the openly partisan Supreme Court theft of the 2000 presidential election on behalf of the moronic messianic militarist George W. Bush; 9/11, a great US-provoked pretext for massive US imperial violence abroad and repression at home; the US War of (“on”) Terror; the criminal and mass-murderous US invasion of Iraq; the racist atrocity that was the federal response to Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Maria (2017); endless and escalating indentured student and consumer debt servitude; absurdly long working hours; the ongoing epidemic of commonly racist mass shootings (Charleston, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Parkland, El Paso, Buffalo, Uvalde and the list goes on) and other forms of gun violence (now the leading cause of child death in “the world’s greatest country”); the ever-deepening capitalist and US-led climate catastrophe (just the biggest issue of our or any time since there’s no democracy and justice on a dead planet); Charlottesville (featuring hordes of US-Amerikaner neo-fascists chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us” and then president Trump claiming there were “good people” among the white-supremacist marchers and terrorists); the lethal Covid-19 epidemic (insanely fanned by Trump); the gruesome racist police murders of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castille Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and thousands of other Black people over the years; Trump’s fascist response to the George Floyd Rebellion; Kyle Rittenhouse’s racist and paramilitary criminality and disgusting exoneration in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the banning of books and the criminalization of teaching real US-American history in “red” (brownshirt) states; the US-Russian proxy war and mass death fest in Ukraine; this summer’s reversal of women’s constitutional abortion rights by the Trump-crafted Christian fascist US Supreme Court. Amidst all this and more terrible to contemplate, the ongoing crisis of corporate-pillaged education and mass culture in neoliberal America means that all but a tiny percentage of the US citizenry lack the historical and political knowledge to know what fascism is past and present.
+5. The degree of difficulty in carrying out a prosecution and conviction of Trump. Beyond tapping and advancing the poisoning of the hearts and minds of millions of angry and deluded MAGAts, Trump helped significantly poison the federal judiciary by appointing droves of far-right Federalist Society ideologues to the courts. He has recently succeeded in monkey-wrenching the Justice Department’s belated investigation of his classified document theft and obstruction by winning an openly idiotic “special master” delay from an unqualified Federalist Society judge he and his party appointed to a US District Court. The Department of Justice may have to appeal the decision to the US Court of Appeals, where 6 of the 11 justices were appointed by the orange malignancy. The next Court after that is of course the Christian Fascist Supreme Court, where half of the nation’s preposterously six-judge right wing majority has been installed by Trump and his party. Many revanchist “justices” in the federal courts system dream of getting appointed to the highest bench in the land (and world) in a second Trump administration. That means doing the beast’s bidding while he continues to mock the rule of law in his ongoing reign of impunity.
The US Founders’ beloved “checks and balances” don’t mean much when partisan politics and loyalty to a major party’s Dear Leader infect the branches of government that are supposed to be checking and balancing each other. At the same time, how are federal and state prosecutors supposed to find a jury ready to deliver the 12-0 verdict required for the conviction of the orange menace in a country where perhaps 30% or more of the populace is captive to the madness of the Q’Anonized party of Trump, DeSantis, Abbot, Taylor-Greene, Gosar, Carlson, and Mastriano?
+7. Many Democrats seem to want Trump around for the next presidential election. In a broadened reprise of the ill-fated Hillary Clinton campaign’s “Pied Piper” strategy of promoting the supposedly more beatable Trump as the Republican’s presidential nominee 2015-16, moreover, Democrats, are investing heavily in the most horrific “MAGA Republicans” – “the brownshirts of the Trump movement” as one Democratic strategist puts it – running in the 2022 Republi-fascist primaries. How’s that for a commitment to democracy? How’s that for an admission that the dismal, corporate-captive Democrats have little in the way of a positive program to offer the people? As Chris Smith writes in Vanity Fair:
“What’s connecting and driving the playing-with-fire strategy is a pervasive pessimism. For all the sound logic of maneuvering to run against a weaker opponent, there’s also a dispiriting sense that without some nutjob or menacing villain on the other side, Democratic candidates can’t win on their own. ‘I watch focus groups, and Democratic voters are totally checked out and depressed,’ one [Democratic] strategist says. ‘They’re just so sick of everyone involved in politics. Yes, the Supreme Court’s Roe decision enraged them. But some of that ire is directed at their own party: Why the fuck did you guys not codify this when you had the chance? Instead of righteous indignation, it’s more like righteous resignation. So anything that would light a fire under Democrats in November is welcome’” (emphasis added).
Anything…like the fascist monster Trump being the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2024. As Smith ads:
“Including—and especially—Trump making it official, sooner rather than later, that he’s running in 2024. ‘It would be a giant gift to everyone in the party, from Biden on down, to have that guy out there,’ another top Democratic consultant says. Trump has hardly kept his intentions a secret, but the reality of him as a threat, the thinking goes, would shift the conversation away from inflation and toward the existential threat to democracy.”
Hey: what could go wrong?
For these and other reasons, it is by no means clear that Trump will ever see the inside of a prison cell. We’d have to have a remotely functioning democracy to make that happen.
Don’t get me wrong. I hope I’m wrong about this. I enjoy imagining Trump in a prison yard, surrounded by Secret Service agents while negotiating conflicts between inmate gangs like Aryan Brotherhood, Aryan Circle, and European Kindred.
I’m just not holding my breath waiting for this to happen.