Putin’s Trump: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — All over the district and beyond, there is a growing fantasy in the land among Democrats that Donald Trump is not only going to lose the 2020 election in a massive landslide, but that when he tries to cling to power anyway, he is going to be perp walked out of the White House and arrested, charged and convicted for his crimes and spend the rest of his life in prison.
Alternatively, some think when he loses the election after all the mail in ballots are counted, and all legal challenges are exhausted, he will go crazy and have to be removed from the White House in a straight jacket and transported to a padded room in a psych ward.
These are great fantasies and Trump certainly deserves to be treated like a criminal and/or a crazy man due to his behavior over the past four years while he has been in charge of the federal government’s executive branch. The fact is, however, that no president has ever been charged with crimes after leaving office, even though there are probably a few who deserved it.
Richard Nixon comes to mind, but he was allowed to resign and become irrelevant and pathetic in retirement. True, Trump is doing things even Nixon wouldn’t seriously consider.
Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
Let’s assume for the sake of argument here that Trump is going to lose the 2020 election. All the polls are trending in that direction with only three weeks to go. It’s hard to see how Trump could turn things around now. That would require acting sanely to get a handle on the coronavirus pandemic. Trump doesn’t have it in him.
He still thinks he can keep firing up white males in rural areas to keep him in office, when clearly they are no longer a majority of voters in America. All this talk by Trump and Steve Bannon of an “army” of domestic terrorists “protecting” voting places is just a bunch of talk to try to scare people away from voting.
It’s not going to work.
Heck, one Boogaloo Boy even threatened to kill me a couple of weeks ago. But as a liberal trial lawyer in Asheville, North Carolina told me during a consultation about how to handle it: “They are mostly blustering.” When it comes time to pull the trigger, they will crawl back into their safe little country holes and shut the fuck up.
Even one New York Times columnist on Saturday argued that Trump is a “noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat.”
I’m not in total agreement with this analysis. Trump has been a dangerous authoritarian president, who if he could have fooled enough of the people to win reelection, he could have driven the ship of American democracy over a waterfall the size of Niagara Falls, ruining this country potentially forever and taking the world down with it.
It could still happen, but it’s not looking likely.
One of the lines of reasoning here is that it is the left that controls the streets, not the right, in spite of pictures of right-wing militia members armed with AK-47s in cities here and there. But in the summer of 2018, right here in DC, I witnessed and covered what happened when 10 Neo-Nazis from Charlottesville, Virginia tried to bring their movement to the nation’s capital city. They were drastically outnumbered, and the DC metro cops had to protect them from the counter-protesters.
Neo-Nazis Vastly Outnumbered by Anti-Racist Protesters in DC Rally and March
A lot of what people see on cable news and social media is simply hype. Let’s take away the sensational clickbait and fake news and focus on the facts.
In its continuing series on Trump’s taxes, the New York Times carried more stories this weekend about Trump’s criminality. But if you look at the guarded language used here, even the Times can’t prove criminality, only a suggestion that Trump has abused his office for personal gain.
This is clearly in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But considering the Justice Department prohibition on indicting a sitting president, will this case ever make it into a courtroom in front a jury? I hope so, but doubt it will come to that. I was right about the Mueller report, which stopped short of nailing Trump for his crimes involved in the impeachment investigation. Mueller punted. Chances are prosecutors will punt when it comes to trying Trump in court and putting him in prison.
I could be wrong, of course, but it seems more likely that if Trump simply relinquishes his challenges to the outcome of the election in time to hold an inauguration of a new president by the 20th of January, prosecutors may let Trump escape out the back door to Mar-a-Largo. This will probably be the deal Trump will make with the so-called “deep state” that he and Steven Bannon have been railing against, which in reality is just a bunch of career professional civil service workers who actually run the federal agencies and live mostly in Maryland and Virginia.
Trump has not been hiring new people, running off scientists and only appointing conservative judges to the courts. After Joe Biden is sworn in, he will have to go back and do what President Obama did. Crank up the merit system to hire qualified people to come back and run this government.
Personally I would like to see Trump exiled to Siberia like the tin pot dictators he seems to admire, where he can hang out with his good friend Vladimir Putin on the weekends, or maybe Jeffery Epstein’s pedophile island. Maybe North Korea has a villa Trump can occupy? It may come to exile, if Trump has not made enough profit from his influence as president to pay his back taxes and loans coming due from Deutsch Bank and the Russian Mob.
Chances are his hotels and golf courses are going out of business after he leaves office. He may have to sell them at a loss to pay his back taxes and loans.
It would serve the long arm of justice for Trump to suffer greatly for what life he has left in him. He has put the country through the worst national nightmares in our history.
If there is a hell, Trump will probably end up running the place. More likely he will soon end up as dust in a cemetery somewhere. I hope they install a huge dance floor, because there are a lot of people who will want to dance on his grave as the worst president ever. That includes me.
I agree with loads but he did pull back from a potentially hideous war with Iran. What would Hillary have done and can Biden restrain the neocrats? I am only asking as a Brit who is an admirer of your work. ☮️
Trump talks tough but does nothing. Many Democrats were worried about Hillary as a war hawk. Biden will return to the policies of the Obama administration, and bring back the agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear ambitions. Thanks for reading and sharing.