Editorials & Other Articles

Uncle Joe

(58,386 posts) Wed May 30, 2018, 05:01 PM May 2018

Donald Trump is scared of the Mueller investigation. As a D.C. outsider, he's right to be afraid.

He has been involved in over 1,300 lawsuits in the last 18 years, including one over a fraudulent university that was still ongoing during the campaign. Over a dozen women have accused him of sexual assault or misconduct, including an ex-wife who once used the word "rape." His businesses have repeatedly declared bankruptcy, including on a casino. He has told an average of 6.5 lies per day since taking office, for a total of over 3,001. You could add another 50 items here without wandering into the realm of the trivial, and the Trump train is still going, despite the rails being left at least a dozen voting districts back. (All of which he won by the way; you should see the electoral map. It's very beautiful.)

But it's not Trump who is most beholden to his legacy of succeeding — or at least not utterly failing — despite his own best efforts. It's the press that daily invokes the idea of Trump as a dangerous animal who, when cornered, fights back twice as hard and is thus impossible to beat. (This framing always comes heavy with allusions to Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon.)

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They can't, of course, make that case easily: Ted Cruz lies just as unashamedly but with bigger words. Marco Rubio doesn't pay his bills, is the kept pet of a billionaire and doles out sinecures to his family. Scott Walker tries not to hold elections when Republicans can lose them, is comically beholden to the Koch Brothers and once seriously entertained building a Canadian border wall. Chris Christie has Bridgegate. Jeb Bush liked Betsy DeVos before Trump did and already works with people who fudge charter school data. When Rand Paul inherited Papa Ron's liberty movement, he inherited a lot of white nationalists with it. Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Tom Price, Mick Mulvaney and Jeff Sessions were all Republicans in good standing until Trump gave the press a reason to look under the rocks.

(snip)

A cornered animal becomes more fierce because it knows it's in a position where it has likelier than not come to its end. Trump isn't lashing out because he can't stop counterpunching and masterfully changing the narrative. Unlike the rest of us, he's had a tickle at the back of his brain, an anticipation of what is possible in a world where we have not savvily and cynically foreclosed on the idea of the nation choosing, at its founders intended, to bring parts of itself to justice. It is not silly to demand that we realize a dream so unlikely that it clearly daily haunts the dumbest chief executive in American history: After a long list of extraordinarily deserving, very very beautiful, very very talented runners-up — from Jefferson Davis, to Warren Harding, to Richard Nixon, to Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush — Donald Trump can become the first president from the United States to die in prison.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/donald-trump-scared-mueller-investigation-d-c-outsider-he-s-ncna877681