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SAY WHAT? - So news has it some old white crook, carnival barker and GOP pol who's been arrested more often than he's been elected just got hauled into court in Miami for stealing copious top-secret government documents, lying about it and hoarding them "like a deranged squirrel," most cringingly in a pimped-out bathroom at his trashy golf club. The attendant circus, both cheesy and chilling, featured a small crowd of "MAGA misfits." It felt very old. Dear God, isn't it time to cancel this show?
The 49-page indictment of a buffoonish president, ghastly human being and longtime national security threat charged him with willfully holding onto government documents outlining U.S. nuclear secrets, military vulnerabilities and possible defense plans in violation of the Espionage Act, and repeatedly conspiring to obstruct justice. Reading "like a Coen brothers script," it also reveals a petty, stupid, insecure narcissist so clueless he's recorded trying to fill the big hole at his hollow center by showing off to rich strangers the country's covert plans to attack Iran if needed as tokens of what a big shot he once was, telling his attorneys, "I don't want anybody looking through my boxes," and, when faced with multiple subpoenas seeking his child-like "bad documents," asking, "Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?" Having committed so many crimes he's been compared to the multi-felonious Homer Simpson, he proved no match for Jack Smith who, not there to play, let the damning, detailed indictment speak for itself. Announcing the charges, Smith simply said, "We have one set of laws, and they apply to everyone."
Still, Trump raged and lied: Smith was a "thug" and "Radical Right Lunatic" who "planted information in the boxes," also "Clinton socks," "election interference," and "This is like Stalinist whatever" by Biden's "corrupt DOJ," though it's actually by a jury of ordinary Americans. "SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!" he declaimed as a complicit GOP stayed silent, babbled in defense - Rep. Byron Donalds said it's all good 'cause "there are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago" - or unconscionably, irresponsibly ranted about "a war phase" in "spy-speak." Given the rhetoric, law enforcement prepped armed cops to handle a MAGA crowd of 50,000; given the heat and reality that MAGA is loud but dwindling, perhaps a few hundred flag-draped cultists turned up. Among them: an Uncle Sam on a hoverboard singing Rocket Man, a couple of white women wearing "Blacks For Trump" t-shirts, a Cuban father/son - "Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president" - and a guy flaunting a pig's head on a pike - "Sometimes you just have to be bold" - blustering, "This corruption will not stand. We're all just enjoying this beautiful moment before we win again.”
In the end, there was a muted perp walk, the jubilant report, "Trump is under arrest and in federal custody," the news Jack Smith, front-row through the proceedings, stared him down without a peep from the perp. But nobody saw it thanks to a news blackout in the courtroom, part of DOJ treatment deemed "too soft to be described as 'kid gloves'...more like 'carried about while in a tub of body temperature Jell-O.'" Despite a repoued not guilty plea, there was no mug shot, no bail, no travel restrictions for a guy with a private plane charged with violating the Espionage Act who got a pass on almost 200 of the 300 documents he stole. And there was all that breathless coverage, "more statesman than fugitive": The helicopter footage of the creeping motorcade, the attorney "yelling alternative facts," the Fox pundits pivoting to the fiction of Biden's bribery scheme and Hunter's starting the Ukraine War, "ruling the news cycle, but none of the downsides of public humiliation, sitting in court and taking his medicine (in) a court of law, the last redoubt where evidence, facts and truth are still the bottom line."
But he was soon back courting Hispanic voters at a restaurant where he stopped "to hug his Cuban people." The grim defendant in the sketches faded, the fake populist beamed, the cameras clicked, the "customers," reportedly fans he bused in, sang "Happy Birthday." "Some birthday," he said. (Some pig). Then he flew to Bedminster for a speech: "The 2023 version of the Gettysburg Address, surely." For many, what lingered was the image of that tacky, secret-stashed bathroom, what The Rude Pundit calls "some trailer park shit" with its fake marble, whorehouse chandelier, "Dollar General chic" shower curtain - as with all things Trump, "just some gold paint on a pile of shit," embarrassing and dangerous. "The nation should be ashamed it allowed his election," he writes, "it allowed him to roam free for so long, it didn't rise up and vomit him out." As his motorcade neared the courtroom, a protester in an inmate costume with a "LOCK HIM UP" sign jumped out and was led away by police. Dominic Santana came to the U.S. from Cuba as a child, ran a New York eatery for years and retired in Miami. "A fellow New-Yorker can spot a rat a mile away,” he said. "Frankly, he should’ve been locked up ages ago.”
(Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: [email protected]. This article was first featured in CommonDreams.org.)
