This Just In — What would other former presidents do?
Watching just the first couple of days of coverage of the criminal trial of the 45th President it struck me how revealing it is even though we can’t watch the trial on television.
So what’s so remarkable? These are legal proceedings that can be quite technical and tedious at times. Plodding, sloth like, and for the vast majority of us who barely understand what’s going on … straight up, boring.
What’s revealing about that? The 45th president has been through some trials recently and he certainly knew to expect this kind of pace and that he would have to sit in that courtroom every day for the next 6 to 8 weeks.
No, he can’t pull out his phone and play Angry Birds like many of us would want to. He can’t be posting to social media like I know he wants to. He needs to appear that he’s paying close attention to what’s going on and not be disruptive.
Setting aside the improbability of such comparisons, what would Jimmy Carter do? What would Bill Clinton do? What would Barack Obama do?
With a six week trial time frame when your main job is to control yourself and not react or overreact to the proceedings … Wouldn’t you have reading material with you for that time?
It might be too conspicuous to open up a book or a daily newspaper and read it right in front of the judge and jury demonstrating you’re not paying attention to them , but you certainly could be writing.
Six weeks? Those former presidents would have the first draft of a book written at the end of the trial. The 45th president won’t have completed his notes on a game of tic-tac-toe at the end of this trial.
When the 45th president was in office. He would have huge blocks of time (usually throughout the morning) labeled on his schedule as “Executive Time.”
This was the White House’s way of saying the president is watching television – almost always Fox News where he’d get his talking points from the Republican brain trust of Rush Limbaugh.
Never seen carrying briefing books or other reading material, the former president is described by most, who worked with him as an incurious person. When you’re on trial for your freedom and comparing yourself to Nelson Mandela, you’d think he’d at least be carrying a recently published “Bible.”
Not this guy. He’d rather sit at the defense table, scowling for the daily pool photo and sleeping as the morning’s Diet Coke and Adderall have worn off.
After multiple social media posts last weekend that essentially called on supporters to take to the streets on Monday, raising hell, he got nothing. A couple dozen supporters came out. They were peaceful. Just like in the courtroom, it was a snooze fest.
Across the country, thousands of Americans demonstrated on Monday, tangling traffic by blocking bridges. They were passionate. They were peaceful. They were protesting about Gaza and famine.
Now that the march toward criminal accountability is underway, the 45th president (who has nothing on his mind but himself) appears smaller and smaller. He is withering.
This weekend, he will bring his side show to Wilmington. I’ll be at a soccer game in Mebane cheering for my six-year-old grandson. I guarantee I’m going to have a better time than 45.
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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