This Just In – He should have gotten away with all of it, but because of his inability to keep his hands off the hot stove and imagine that a point of view other than his might prevail, the 45th President of the United States is now a criminal defendant.
What a fool.
Let’s start with the case right in front of us. Imagine, for just a moment, that Trump had used his own checkbook to straight up pay people to buy their silence (accept payment, sign a non-disclosure agreement). That would be the end of a story that we would never know because no law would be broken.
In that scenario, it would not be paid for (in part) by the publisher of the National Enquirer. The money would not have been laundered through shell companies to conceal the payments and no tax revenue would have been denied to the governments of New York and the US, because no one would be claiming that this was a business expense. Simple.
In the Georgia election interference case, the January 6th inciting an insurrection case and the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, 45 could have avoided all legal exposure with one, simple change in strategy – a change incredibly obvious and equally impossible for the former president.
He would have to accept that he was legitimately rejected by the voters.
Based on his lifetime of never being held accountable for the long, long list of wrongdoing, in the mind of 45, that rejection is simply not possible.
For this guy, born on third base and convinced he’d hit a triple, never a hungry day in his life, never a moment of anxiety that he’d lose a job … for this guy, it’s winning everything, everywhere, all the time. We who love sports know that this is not possible with fair play. In fair competition, it’s win some, lose some.
So, if 45 had been one to listen to advice that he surely did receive, in November 2020, he would have conceded the election, then moved on to do what I believe he planned to do in 2016 after losing to Hillary Clinton.
He would have established the Trump News Network. It would include every possible platform for generating content. It would swamp the Fox News operation. Not for nothing, the Fox News exposure from defaming Dominion would not have happened. Instead, they’d be competing with the new Trump News operation for low-information viewers.
This would give Trump the vast platform to be the center of constant attention that he surely would find immensely satisfying, but this option was not available to him because his development as a human being was arrested right before the part where you find out that sometimes in tic-tac-toe, you lose.
All of the things that the former guy has done for the last 50 years would have been chalked up to “couldn’t make a case” … including assaulting women, trying to extort the president of Ukraine, directing millions of federal dollars to his businesses while president, repeatedly lying to the American public, making business deals with foreign governments to benefit his businesses and leaking classified information through sheer carelessness.
Those offenses would have been thrown on history’s compost pile and would, over time, melt away. We talk about Trump’s 34-count felony indictment this week as his first, but really it’s the third time the 45th President has been formally accused of committing crimes. The first two impeachments (accusations of crimes) failed to result in a consequence – a political failure. More serious accusations are coming, but what’s in front of us right now is more than serious enough.
If it resulted in conviction and a sentence of only 90 days in jail, just imagine that spectacle. It’s a crying shame that no one taught little Donald that the possibility of losing is all part of competing and that the rules (the law) are essential to fair play and legitimate winning.
(featured image: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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