Oh Boy! No Joy
I have now watched over an hour of news on MSNBC about the indictment of former president Donald Trump by a Manhattan criminal grand jury. It’s been quite a show as I have sequentially watched MSNBC hand this piece of raw journalistic meat around three anchors and a countless number of pundits including presidential scholars, legal analysts, political and campaign analysts in New York, Washington D.C. and Florida. I have watched the Trump jet-cam of the scene of the Trump aircraft sitting on the tarmac in Palm Beach waiting for whatever action it will undergo when Donald Trump will board the plane to fly to New York for his arraignment, which is now being declared to likely happen at the beginning of next week. There is repeated conjecture as to whether he will go through or even should go through the normal arrest processes of being handcuffed, being fingerprinted and being mug-shot before he stands before the bar of the arraignment judge who will unseal the indictment and read the man the indictment against him.
There is fear of civil unrest in multiple venues as the extremists take this dog whistle as simply too loud to ignore. Those people, at the political and societal fringe, are the sort that may well take pride in being arrested and charged with civil disobedience in defense of their idol, the man that stands for everything that they fear and hate about American life today in a world that has left them behind somehow and now is moving past them even further. Those people do not see their actions as Un-American, quite the opposite, they view this all as the most patriotic and American thing they can possibly do. As absurd as that seems to some of us, we must recognize that this act of uprooting their man and their sense of justice, is likely to be met with great passion and no small amount of flamboyant overreaction. I say overreaction because while this is an unprecedented action, there have been countless Federal elected officials as high as the Vice President, cabinet members, state elected officials as high as numerous governors, and a goodly number of foreign heads of state, monarchs and even emperors that have been taken to task and perp-walked to the courthouse for a trial for their charged misdeeds and felonious acts. Hello, Bibi Netanyahu!
Everyone being interviewed is pondering both the outcome of this chapter in the near and not-so-near term, but is also being asked about Donald Trump’s likely state of mind. The salacious moment is such that we all want to be in the room when and where it happens. We are all imagining him with bravado, false or delusional. But we are also all imagining him sharting himself as he heads to the peace of the bathroom where he will be alone in the agony of his own dark existence. This is a special moment for a man who has gotten away with everything in his life and then some, the very man that said himself that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. I think we all know that in his heart of hearts (that is, assuming that what he has inside his chest can be characterized as a normal heart) he is beyond scared of what will become of him. A person his age (76…soon to be 77) can’t help but worry about the future, but someone who has lived out in front of the edge and never had to cede control of his circumstances before must be feeling like a cornered animal like he never has before. We all suspect he has had his moments over the past few decades with bankruptcy courts, impeachment trials and an endless litany of litigations, but this is the first real shit-your-pants moment for him. If convicted, he will need Imodium and then when sentenced he will need several layers of Depends.
What I am finding the most interesting is the reaction of all the pundits who have made their careers out of Donald Trump’s past seven or eight years. He has been a cottage industry for cable news and political authors at yes, an unprecedented level. The irony is so thick it can be cut with a knife, and in more directions than one can easily recount. The reaction that makes me smile the most is the one where the pundit and otherwise super-serious commentator or anchorperson is caught smiling silently, waiting for their turn to add to the pack of dogs mele as they listen to their competitors steal their lines and adjectives, but hearing all of this with great glee for the vindication of people that have been waiting for this moment for many years as this protracted process has dragged on. But when their turn comes, they all feel the need to begin by saying that their is no joy in Mudville this day since the indictment of a former American president is horrible, no matter how deplorable the man might be. Oh, and yeah, let’s not forget that he is fully entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence no matter how much he has denied that dignity and inalienable right to so many others. So, the juxtapositioning of the “Oh boy!” reaction and the “No joy” commentary is a balancing act on full display this day. It is usually then followed by a narrowing of the eyes and some sort of reference that he will now finally know how the rest of us must reap whatever it is that we sow.
But the most interesting thing I have heard this evening is not that Donald Trump was quiet when told about the indictment, that was somewhat to be expected, at least for a moment or two until he regains his composure and unsoils himself. It is not all the Republican political hacks that are reading from the Republican Party playbook saying that Alvin Bragg is the villain here who is fabricating a case against Trump for political gain, that too is Politics 101 ala 2023. What has absolutely amazed me is what Ron DeSantis has done. This man has steadfastly kept himself at arms length of Trump while being careful to never pile on his woes…too much. He did reference his legal problems and caught some shit from the base for doing so and this Harvard Law School-trained Yale man is nothing if not a quick study of what works and doesn’t work. But today, he had a major brain fart when his reaction to the indictment was to preemptively state that he, as governor of Florida, would not be a party to any efforts to uphold any extradition attempts should New York request such assistance.
To begin with, we all know that the chances of Trump holing up at Mar-a-Lago and putting up Waco-like barricades or sneaking out to his plane to try to go on the lam like Carlos Ghosn running from Japan, is non-existent. His ego does not allow him to be a fugitive. If he goes down, it will be done brazenly and there will be no extradition request. But DeSantis somehow decided that it was better to please the base than worry about the critical electorate that still believes in the rule of law. Trump can flaunt the rule of law, but a sitting governor thumbing his nose at the rule of interstate law is damn close to seditious since our federalist nation is founded on certain interdependencies of all of the states. He is smart enough to know that, but he is not astute enough to realize that after working so hard to stay out of harms way of any Trump mud-puddle splash, he just got Trump juice all over himself. I will declare here and now that where Trump may well beat this rap and he might even go on to be the Republican candidate for 2024 (I give that low odds, but they are non-zero odds), Ron DeSantis just shot himself fatally in unnecessary defense of Donald Trump. All I can say about that is, “Oh boy, lots of joy.”