Clinton (mostly) right about right-wing conspiracy
When then-first lady Hillary Clinton first mentioned a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — the enemy factions, i.e., Republicans who she said were out to get her husband — she was half-right. They were out to get him. What she didn’t acknowledge was that Bill Clinton had it coming once he’d fouled the people’s house with behavior unbefitting a housebroke dog.
Yet how nearly quaint his relatively boyish escapades seem today, compared with Donald Trump’s X-rated engagement with a porn star while wife Melania was recovering from childbirth. I suppose one could point out that Trump’s brief encounter during a golf tournament happened before he became president, while Clinton abused a young employee in the Oval Office in clear violation of workplace law.
And then one could run to the loo and retch.
Funny, we haven’t heard
Melania blame a vast left-wing conspiracy for trying to get rid of her husband. Perhaps if there were such an operation, she’d sign up. Take a number, honey. But the conspiracy afoot now, as perhaps never before, is vast and right-wing — and the Grand Conspirator is Trump himself. If he said day is night, his followers would put themselves to bed while the sun was shining. Through fakery and fraud he has created a force field around himself that protects him from consequences and lulls supporters into a trance.
If Trump doesn’t like a negative report about him, it’s “fake news.” If he says the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, it must be so. If prosecutors charge him with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, it’s a conspiracy. Even the US Supreme Court seems to have fallen under his spell.
The justices announced Wednesday that they’ll review
Trump’s claim that he is protected from prosecution for actions while he was in office. This means his federal trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results will be postponed possibly through the election. Arguments are scheduled for the week of April 22. At issue is a unanimous ruling from a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that rejected Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution. Let me repeat: unanimous. What happened to no one is above the law, including the president of the United States?
The court’s unsigned order said the justices weren’t “expressing a view on the merits” and would consider only “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
Had Trump gone to trial as originally planned — and if he had been found guilty — voters would know the results before the election. Now that his nomination is all but in the bag, he could conceivably be elected president and then have to face trial — assuming, that is, the high court rules that his presidency does not shield him from prosecution.
The soonest we’ll know could be May or June, when the court adjourns for the summer, after which a criminal trial could take months to get back on the docket. In the meantime, Trump can set aside a case that would have consumed much of his time and kept him away from the campaign trail.
My brain can’t compute what might transpire should Trump be elected and then, while president, sit through a trial. He faces four felony counts related to the alleged plan to overturn the election: conspiracy to obstruct congressional certification of the Biden victory, obstructing a congressional proceeding, conspiring to defraud the United States and conspiracy against rights, i.e., the right to vote.
Based on everything we know from multiple investigations, it seems more likely than not that a jury would find Trump guilty on all counts. The evidence is overwhelming that he watched the protesters breach the Capitol for 187 minutes, ignoring urgent pleas to intervene from advisers, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump’s own daughter Ivanka. By the time he told the crowd to stand down, the first two of five people were dead, both of them protesters who suffered medical emergencies, while Vice President Mike
Pence and dozens of other officials were on the run, and scores of people were wounded. We’re all familiar with the aftermath.
It would seem that the true Teflon candidate, once Clinton’s nickname, is Trump. Teflon T-rump. When he once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still love him, he wasn’t joking. Such an event is unlikely, of course, and surely presidential immunity wouldn’t apply to an act of lethal violence. But what if, as promised last November, a reelected President Trump weaponized the FBI and the Justice Department to punish political opponents? This sounds like a conspiracy to me, the vast implications of which Russian President Vladimir Putin — and today’s Republican Party — would applaud.
God help us.