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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Last week’s decision by Justice Juan M. Merchan to delay Donald J. Trump’s sentencing until November 26th, after the election, is deeply disturbing.
Justice delayed is justice denied for the American electorate who were, to a greater or lesser extent, the victims of Trump’s 34 felony convictions for falsifying with intent business records furthering underlying crimes in the first degree, including paying off porn star Stormy Daniels, to whitewash his public image prior to the 2016 presidential election.
The Ex subsequently distributed a misleading message to his acolytes on his tanking social media site, Truth Social:
“The Manhattan D.A. Witch Hunt has been postponed because everyone realizes that there was NO CASE, I DID NOTHING WRONG! It… should have never been brought. Nothing like this has ever happened in the United States of America—IT IS STRICTLY THIRD WORLD, BANANA REPUBLIC ‘STUFF.’”
However, he is correct in that the recent rulings by the Supreme Court, and now Merchan, have delivered the United States into the realm of front runners for the 2024 Banana Republic Sweepstakes.
In an unrelated conviction earlier this year also proving the creepy cretin’s unsuitability for any public office, Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse, battery and defamation of journalist E. Jean Carroll in a New York civil trial where the jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
Due to the narrow parsing of the definition, Trump may not have been convicted of rape in that case, but any woman who has been pinned down by a powerful man against her will and sexually groped knows better.
And too many other women have described similar situations for this behavior to be an isolated incident – where one moment Trump is bantering with perhaps a bit of sexual innuendo and the next pushes them against a wall and proceeds to cop a feel and otherwise violate them.
Also on Friday, his attorneys tried to convince a federal appeals court to grant the great groper a new trial. Although holding his tongue in court, he later lambasted E. Jean Carroll and other women who have accused him of sexual assault. Statutes of limitation protect the Creep from most other lawsuits.
The same day, former vice president Dick Cheney announced he will be voting for Kamala Harris, pointing out that the previous POTUS “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power... He can never be trusted with power again.”
Who can forget that Trump’s chosen right hand who, in abiding by the law, had his life threatened when the then soon-to-be-Ex turned the MAGA-mob on him in the surreal events of January 6, 2020?
Another criminal act for which justice – for those whose lives were cut short as well as hundreds of others immediately impacted and the American people’s right to live in a democratic society – has been delayed for far too long.
And Merchan’s claim that his ruling to delay the sentencing was to “avoid any appearance” of affecting the Presidential race is at the very least confounding and may cause further waves around the world, creating a tsunami of uncertainty affecting decisions in multiple levels of government and industry.
It puts the leadership of our country on tenterhooks; while there is a precedent of running for the office while incarcerated, no president has ever had to assemble a cabinet or run the country from behind bars.
How can such a felon make effective day-to-day decisions based on the constant flow of information from around the world?
How can those decisions not be shaded by his circumstances?
How secure would such a president be?
How secure would the country be?
And what other mischief would the miscreant-in-chief get up to?
On a side note, would this leave Trump’s new best buddy, the manipulative Elon Musk whose commitment to expanding his sprawling businesses and corporate power is certainly contrary to the best interests of the American people, more firmly in control as the Talking Hand if Trump is elected in November and ends up jailed?
Where he clearly belongs, if all men are truly equal in the eyes of the law and we adhere to the preamble to the Constitution which Abraham Lincoln saluted as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression.”
Merchan’s decision means voters will be left in the dark about whether the former president will face time behind bars until the interregnum when the former “It”-man will have increased opportunities to foment all sorts of chaos.
Voters are being called upon to shape Trump’s sentencing beforehand… or suffer the consequences of the deranged grandiosity of the One Who Was.
How fair is that to them or to the multiple overlapping victims in all his criminal cases?
Or maybe it’s the opportunity Americans need to rule on their real rights – that the People believe lawbreakers belong in jail, not the White House.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
