Slip Slidin’ Away
We’re into the first week of the Trump “Hush Money” trial in Manhattan as the jury selection process or “voir dire” is underway. As of yesterday, seven jurors including the foreman have been chosen. That leaves five more regular jurors and six alternates to go. I have predicted for some time that the criminal prosecution process was going to be the great unraveling of the Trump candidacy and perhaps the Trump existence overall. As hard as it has been to keep the faith as every twist and turn of the legal and political system has continued to see Trump prevail, I am prepared to say that there is a 100% chance that he will eventually get his cumuppance. The issue, of course, is all about when that will happen. The sooner it happens, the less the damage that will be inflicted on the nation and our most sacred institutions. It is clear that everyone, starting with Trump himself, agrees with this conclusion and that is what leads to so much energy being expended on pushing off the adjudication of his various criminal and civil cases, whether they be rooted in convictions or judgements. And all the signs of the finality of this process are finally in clear evidence.
It was said by someone who knows Trump very well that he lives in a boiling pot of rage and that his rage is growing by the day as he is feeling less and less in control in a courtroom where he is a seething defendant who feels unfairly put-upon. It is clear that he will eventually blow a fuse and say or do something that will make clear to the most sympathetic observer that he has lost it altogether. This is less about the very human trait of feeling and eventually showing stress and more about putting on display the invincibility of the man. He is, after all, just a man and not a God as he and his followers like to portray him. I think of the Andrew Lloyd Webber play, Evita, where Evita eventually succumbs to nature and the pressure of her unprecedented and vaunted position and falls to earth. The process of anyone coming down to earth, demystifying the deity, is an unmasking process that causes everyone caught up in the reverie of idolatry to take pause and recognize reality. What is clear is that while this process sometimes comes all at once in a moment, it also sometimes starts to happen gradually and that seems to be what is happening to Trump. His falling asleep in court during the first two days of this trial has been very telling. We have all known all along that at almost 78 years old, he, like most men his age, has increasing frailties with one of them being a limit to his energy level. The bully who starts to cry or the tough guy calling his opponent Sleepy Joe is suddenly the old guy who falls asleep during his criminal trial.
Stop and think about it all for a moment. Trump’s namesake organization has been adjudicated a fraudulent enterprise…several times over. He and his sons have been barred from running an organization in New York State for some time. He is liable for as much at $464 million and rising by the day based on interest accrual. His attempt to use a sleezy usurious insurer to issue a reduced $175 million bond to allow him to appeal the judgement is under attack and being reconsidered. He is racking up seemingly endless legal expenses that are draining his and his campaign fund’s resources. He is also adjudicated as a rapist by a civil court and owes almost $91 million in libel damages for which he has also had to post a bond. Yes, he has the appeal process underway for both of those cases, but let us not forget that prior judgements against his organization and his family foundation are already on the record books and final and his loyalists are either in jail or have been to jail or are going to jail.
Yes, he has a SPAC-financed social media company that has a value of $3.5 billion on paper (his interest supposedly worth some $2 billion), but that meme stock has reported itself to have as little business substance as the man himself has and it too flew too close to the sun and has fallen to earth by almost 70% from its highs. He is “locked-up” on his position (how appropriate is that financial term?) for another five months or so and given the size of his position, it is clear that the sales of any of it by him will crater the value of the company and probably leave Trump with additional liability from small shareholders left holding the bag.
Trump has led the ultimate life of excess. He has masterfully learned how to put off the day of reckoning, but we all know that only lasts for so long before it falls apart. I have been predicting that 2024 would be his year of judgement and we are seeing that process begin in earnest. His supporters are growing weary of financing his financial and political shenanigans. No banks will touch him. No real insurers will touch him. More and more politicians are growing weary of blindly supporting and following him. Soon the judicial process will make clear that his approach to avoiding accountability for his inane actions cannot be tolerated any longer. And then the music will stop for Donald Trump. We will all blink in disbelief. There will still be some loyalists standing beside his body as it swings from the gallows. Some will be pictured for posterity as the men holding Mussolini’s hat. Trump will go the way of all wannabe dictators and his name and image will be stripped from all places as we do what people who have made tragic and misguided nods to false idols always do…we distance ourselves from the memory. We will wonder what we, or more realistically, they were thinking. It will all have slip slided away and the sun will rise and a new day will dawn.
In 1975, Paul Simon, the rock poet of our era, wrote a song called Slip Slidin’ Away for an album that he was compiling called Still Crazy After All These Years. But he chose at the last moment not to include the track on that album and held its release for another two years when it was released to great acclaim and declared by Billboard to be “sensitive. thoughtful. melancholic and evocative”. It was a song about adult problems and I think it is more than prophetic that Simon chose to not include it in the original album with a song with a tag line like:
But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
What are the odds that that tune might be ringing in Donald Trump’s ears as he stares around the dingy courtroom in Manhattan and wonders to himself how a guy who had flown so close to the sun could possibly end up in a place like this.
Slip slidin’ away…