‘ Bully Don’ still at it
It’s been some month for records, right?
Tom Brady, seventh Super Bowl championship; Donald Trump, second impeachment.
Bling all around! Brady will have seven rings; Trump should get something, too. Maybe a matching set of monitoring anklets.
Brady’s place in history is set. So is Trump’s. The former president would seem to fall into the category of those people who believe the only bad publicity is an obit.
So, don’t expect him to stew much over the place he’s made for himself for the foreseeable future and in the history books.
It was clear from early in his presidency that Trump was not going to make a graceful exit when it was called for.
But not even the most cynical could have foreseen the events of Jan. 6, when he brought us within, however you measure it — minutes or feet, some 58 paces at one point separating the mob from legislators by the calculation of U. S. Rep. Eric Swalwell in his presentation to the jury of U. S. senators — of changing this country forever.
Save for the diversionary tactic of a fast- thinking Capitol police officer here, a chamber door lock that held there, the scamper of United States senators and representatives — and the vice president and family — into secure hideaways in the Capitol, we could have had a disaster.
Well, we actually did have a disaster. But it was so close to being cataclysmic.
I want to believe that members of the rabble, by whatever names they call themselves, would not have actually hanged Vice President Mike Pence, killed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and physically harmed anyone else they stumbled across.
But rewatching the events of Jan. 6 this week as presented by those who are trying to hold Trump accountable for the harm he’s done to this country, that belief is probably pretty naïve.
Had the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol succeeded only in disrupting the formal certification of Joe Biden’s complete, indisputable, court- upheld win on Election Day, we’d have moved into dangerous territory.
With Trump still at the helm and egged on by martial law fans like the presidentially pardoned Michael Flynn, who knows where this would have gone.
Future elections — if Trump deigned to allow them — could be decided by declaration. The winner would be whoever shouted “I Won” the loudest, facts be damned.
And, oh, having the mob behind you would also be a determining factor. Sweet. Way to go, Don. Trump wasn’t right about a lot. But he was right about a couple of things in the run up to the 2016 Republican primaries: “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz and “Little Marco” Rubio, U. S. senators from, respectively, Texas and Florida.
These two guys stood meekly on debate stages in 2016 while “Bully Don” Trump swatted them around.
They apparently enjoyed it, because they’re still sticking by their boy. There’s something Freudian there somewhere.
Some thugs wear leather and carry guns. Some of the thugs in Congress wear Brioni and wield Ivy League degrees.
It’s unlikely that a Senate dominated by little boys who are still scared of the “Bully Don” is going to actually punish Trump.
It’s scary to imagine what a president would have to do to deserve punishment if this sort of reckless behavior is presented — with a straight face — as free speech. Sort of like when John Gotti suggested that maybe Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano was no longer a necessary part of the scene. Free speech.
Free speech, too, I suppose, when Trump started the phony drum beat of voter fraud weeks before the election, knowing full well that he was going down, but gradually creating a parallel universe in which he could say after the election, “See, I told you it was fixed.”
It would be like Tom Brady saying before a Super Bowl, “The only way we can lose is if the refs are crooked.” And should a late penalty call go against him, he could say,
“See, I told you it was fixed.”
The difference is, of course, that Brady didn’t need an excuse: He actually won.