Donald Trump’s former criminal playground finally nabs him.
The presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States is a convicted felon.
Roll that around your brain for a moment.
Never has this happened before in a republic over 240 years old.
Was it Confucius who said, “May you live in interesting times?”
Donald Trump makes sure of that.
For the former embattled president, despite a penchant for alluding justice time and again, this was inevitable. Like his being impeached, twice, another presidential first. Once he became president, no one from NYC who knew the Donald believed he could get through four years as the country’s chief executive without doing something illegal. I mean, it’s his thing.
For decades beginning in earnest in the 1980s, breaking the law and flouting it with court-clogging counter-lawsuits, media-humping bluster, and blaming everything and everyone else but himself was the foundational principle of the Trump playbook in and around the Big Apple. IE: not paying contractors, repeatedly and openly cheating on his three wives, developing that interesting hair configuration, and calling up the NY Post pretending to be someone else praising Trump as a genius.
Earlier this year Trump’s business was found guilty of and fined $355 million for years of financial fraud, the first chink in his armor. This ignoring of legal norms is nothing special, really, no matter where you live. The rich trampling on laws that would send us all away for a long time is part of the fun for them, and like most privileged effete frighteningly illiterate and deeply sociopathic children of the rich, Trump believes laws are for the great unwashed. There’s “the law” and then there’s “Trump’s law.” This is what he would like to do on a national level should he win back the presidency in a few months, and what he rehearsed in the weeks after he was defeated in the 2020 election – denied it happened, made a big stink, riled up people who were pissed it happened (supporters he suckered into thinking he was infallible), and then perpetuated an “event” wherein violence, death, and destruction ensued. All of it to soothe his fragile, rich kid ego.
More on what’s ahead if he is re-elected in a moment – let’s deal with the convicted felon.
Trump’s four-decades-plus uninterrupted parade of malfeasance and mendacity ended in this conviction on a mind-numbing 34 guilty counts delivered by twelve jurors of his peers, fair and square. Despite his rich kid whaaaa! bitching (“It’s cold in here!”), he was granted lawyers, a presumption of innocence, and more leeway than any other American would get, especially for a domestic terrorist who tried to upend the constitution by trying to stop the ratification of our vote while serving in its highest office. This wide-ranging fairness granted him is something he felt should have been denied the infamous Central Park Five in 1989 when Trump took out a full-page ad in the NY Times with the headline, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY” proclaiming their guilt before a single piece of evidence was presented; turns out those railroaded Black kids never raped anyone and were exonerated in 2002 with not only refuting evidence but a confession from the actual rapist. Learning this, Trump, living in Trump Reality, still believed they were guilty. He knew nothing of the case. They were guilty. Period.
Fast forward: “I lost the election? No, I didn’t.“
For the past four years, amidst lawsuits, recounts, cable TV blather, and riots, people were living in the rich kid’s infallible fantasy. Now Donald Trump is the pick of the former law-and-order, family values, personal responsibility, socially conservative Republican Party to run for president again, meaning everyone running down ballot as a Republican must wear the shame of a criminal at the top of their ticket, despite the crocodile-tears whining from shills like Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, J.D. Vance, and the Speaker of the House.
Trump may lose in November. He may win. He will still be a convicted felon.
A criminal could lead this country. A man who cannot vote in most states, own a gun, or have anything to do with the military might be commander-in-chief.
That part is up to us, and so, we discuss November.
When we make our choice this fall, this is what we know for certain: Everything and everyone Trump comes in contact with is either destroyed personally or financially, humiliated publicly, or goes to jail. Ignominious defeat awaits. Ask the people who were left holding debt after his six (!) bankruptcies. Ask those lawyers and sycophants who went to bat for the fake elector schemes or the scores of people doing time for picking up his damaged mantle on January 6. Ask the USFL, which Trump infiltrated by owning the NJ Generals before muscling into the commissioner’s office and summarily tanking the league within months. Ask those who went to the scuttled Trump University or all those Trump-related “charities” that were determined in courts of law to be fraudulent fronts for money laundering.
All the usual schemes over decades of sauntering through public life as Teflon Don were on display these past weeks in downtown New York, stripped bare of the myths Trump perpetuated. However, it is always the same: Trump, the con man and now a convicted criminal, finds new ways to profit from his bullshit. Within seconds of the conviction, he crowed about his innocence like every other sad sack felon, but then strategically pivoted to fund-raising while painting his plight as somehow a commentary on the death of America.
Yeah, America is fucked. Actually, no, it’s not – you’re fucked. I’m doing fine. My 401K is blossoming, crime is down everywhere, so is inflation, gas prices, and the GDP, and wages are up. I’m doing A-ok, pal. For one, I’m not a convicted felon, and I assume neither is anyone reading this.
Don’t let the scoundrel drag you into his mess. Did you fuck a porn star while your wife was nursing your newly born son? Did you pay her off after the Access Hollywood tape revealed that you sexually assault women as a personal philosophy a month before the 2016 election? Did you falsify documents to hide those payments as campaign contributions to get elected?
America didn’t do any of that. Donald Trump did. He was convicted for it. Not us.
When Ted Cruz called yesterday a “dark day in America,” he is implicating you in the actions of one man’s fucked. The feckless Cruz, who in a sad twist to his bootlicking was noted in the trial as Trump and the National Enquirer accused his father in planning the assassination of JFK, is glad to be part of fucked. That is his phobia – he can leave the rest of us out of it. America is not in bed with criminals, but Cruz is, and the Republican Party is.
The Republican Party – another thing Trump has wrecked – is in shambles. Trump’s daughter-in-law is running the RNC, and a dozen party chairs in states across the country are dead broke. All the candidates Trump has endorsed since his 2020 loss have been defeated, even in ruby red states. He’s done to the GOP what he did to Atlantic City and the USFL and everything else he runs into the ground. He ran Roe v Wade into the ground. He almost ran America into the ground for four years! He left us sick, dying, mired in recession and debt, a laughingstock of the world. He wants to finish the job, but we decide that – not him.
A convicted felon is the Republican presumptive nominee aiming to be the chief executive of this nation, your nation, not a de facto Trump Enterprise bolstered by religious lunatics who have conjured Project 2025 in which America turns into a Christian Fascist White Supremacy stronghold that will treat women as nothing more than baby containers, brown people are deported, and all enemies are eradicated, including a free press, the State Department, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Right now, that sounds like a “them problem,” so let’s not make it ours in 2025. One man’s misery, his own prison of misdeeds, are not ours.
Let’s avoid hitching America’s wagon to fucked.
It took over 40 years of civil suits, pay-off settlements, fines, expulsions, and bankruptcies for New York City to topple its demon rich, spoiled brat. Don’t let America suffer for that long, because after 2020, if you think Trump is leaving office once he’s in, you really are stupid. This November we need to end this once and for all. When Trump’s three other trials – for far more egregious felonies – finally begin, then we’ll see if he wins or loses. Only then will we find out if he walks free or rots in prison as an enemy of the state.
Or… we could put him in charge of America.
Your call.
