(Dobbs) Finally Closing In On Donald Trump
If he had nothing to hide, he'd have nothing to fear.
Donald Trump has just had a bad week. A very bad week. Heaven knows he deserves it.
The attorney general of New York State and the D.A. in Fulton County, Georgia, took steps this week to prosecute Trump for a range of crimes from financial fraud to criminal disruption of an election. The Supreme Court repudiated his plea to keep secret some White House documents that will shed light on his role in the January 6th insurrection, siding 8-1 against him. The website Politico revealed that Trump actually entertained a frightening proposal to use the Pentagon to preserve his presidency. And the January 6th committee in Congress, although only releasing data in dribs and drabs, showed that it’s assembling enough evidence eventually to publicly indict the former president for supporting, and encouraging, a coup against the United States of America.
These people coming for Donald Trump are neither foolish nor naive. They’re collecting incriminating testimony and damning documentation about everything from the way he ran his business to the way he ran his White House. If it’s usually true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, then Trump has smoke swirling above him, below him, all around him.
So yes, Donald Trump has just had a very bad week and deserves that much and more, because if you count back to the day in 2015 when he swaggered off his Trump Tower escalator to declare that he was running for President, he has put us through 343 bad weeks.
Remember Trump boasting on that ominously fateful day that he and only he could “beat” China and Japan, that he would replace Obamacare with “something much better for everybody,” that he would rebuild the nation’s infrastructure because “nobody can do that like me,” that he’d be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” and that he’d stop Mexicans at the American border because “they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists?” (That’s also when he said he’d build a “great great wall… and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”)
It’s been 343 bad weeks for us, bad weeks of big lies, boorish behavior, and whether virtuous or not, broken promises. Moreover, sorry to say, we haven’t seen the last bad week. But this one, Mr. Trump, is for you.
Of course some of Donald Trump’s most fervent followers say it’s all political, that Trump’s a target because his rivals hate him. Fair enough, there’s some truth to that. But people on the right hated Barack Obama, yet they didn’t have ammunition to shoot down his presidency. People on the left hated George W. Bush, but they didn’t have it either. Unlike Trump, they didn’t give their rivals material to prosecute them for everything from financial to sexual to seditious misconduct. Because there wasn’t any.
Let alone to impeach them. Donald Trump was impeached twice. Once again, it’s fair to say there were political motives behind it each time, but his accusers, with a handful of Republicans in concurrence the second time, made a strong case for impeachment. It was only thanks to the regressive rules of Congress that with just a minority of support, Trump survived.
Naturally, his narcissism compels Trump to keep lying about all this. By his account, the whole thing’s still a witch hunt. After the Georgia district attorney announced on Thursday her bid for a special grand jury to investigate Trump’s post-election call to Georgia’s secretary of state to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes,” the former president had the gall to release a statement asserting that “my phone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia was perfect, perhaps even more so than my call with the Ukrainian President, if that’s possible.”
On the face of it Mr. Trump, no it’s not.
What we saw this week was not a single political rival, pressing a single explosive issue, going after Donald Trump. What we saw was a convergence of charges closing in on him. I’ve always said that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Donald Trump is hiding a lifetime of defrauding and deceiving and double-dealing everything in his path and everybody in his orbit. So he’s got plenty to fear and maybe, after this one week, maybe the danger he personally poses to our democracy will begin to die, or at least to diminish.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
I would love to see Trump's entire family behind bars, they deserve nothing less.
You are right, Greg. However, I am to the point where I won't legitimize him by even talking about him. Trump who . . .?