(Dobbs) Ignoring Serious Crimes, Investing More Money
Trump's disciples have suspended critical thinking and good sense.
Whether it’s from the headline yesterday afternoon on FoxNews.com….
…. or the headline at The New York Times….
…. Donald Trump has now been indicted in a federal court for high crimes, not misdemeanors. The charges against him are conspiracy to defraud the government of the United States of America— the government he once led— plus conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy to deprive citizens of their civil rights, which are supposed to be protected by federal law and the Constitution. Tomorrow, we shall see the scandalous specter of a former president of the United States officially fingerprinted, booked, and charged with these felonies, all in connection with two of the most seditious crimes a president could commit: an effort to subvert the will of the voters and overturn a legal election and, when that didn’t work, exploiting the violence during the attack on the Capitol to achieve his aim.
If you read the charges and the explanations behind them, it’s hard not to conclude that the prosecutor, Jack Smith, has proof to convict Donald Trump. What you’ll see is, after losing the 2020 election, Trump did everything he could to cling to power. He was not delusional about claiming he had won the election. His own advisors were telling him he had lost. He was lying and knew he was lying. When Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to help him overturn the election results on January 6th and Pence refused, Trump told him, “You’re too honest.” Trump knew what he was doing. He knew all of it.
Of course this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so yesterday’s criminal indictment against a former American president is not the first. Just last month he was indicted in a different federal court for illegally moving top secret national security documents to his home in Mar-a-Lago, and for subsequently obstructing the government’s investigators trying to recover them. In an almost minor additional case, the district attorney in Manhattan has charged Trump in connection with hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to hide his relationship with her. For good measure his company, the Trump Organization, goes to trial in three months in New York, accused of illegally overvaluing assets by billions of dollars. And everyone sees yet another indictment on the horizon in Georgia, where Trump lost to Biden in 2020, for pressuring authorities to overturn that outcome.
Legally the ex-president is in a heap of trouble. But politically, not so much. And this is where those of us who have been hoping against hope that all the charges against Donald Trump eventually will wear down his supporters have to accept that we have been knocking our heads against a brick wall.
In an exhaustive New York Times/Siena College poll just released, Trump is still the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination and an even-odds pick to beat Joe Biden in 2024. Among likely Republican voters, the poll says, “Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party.” Even more astonishing to those of us who can see what a scam artist Trump is, 43-percent of Republicans have a “very favorable opinion” of him.
A week or so ago I read an article that tried to explain how— after his degrading profanity was heard in the Access Hollywood tapes, after maligning women and mocking the disabled, after being caught in a documented 30,000+ lies over his four-year term— this can still be the case. It was one pro-Trump evangelical preacher who said it all. “We don’t support Donald Trump for his piety. We support him for his policies.”
There was a time of course, long, long ago, when such an utter lack of piety would sink anyone seeking the highest office in the land. There was a time when Republicans wouldn’t tolerate criminal behavior by their own standard bearer in the Oval Office. In 1974, it was Republican leaders who traveled to the White House to tell Richard Nixon, beset by the scandal of Watergate, that he had to go. Two days later, he did.
Donald Trump even doesn’t have the morals of Richard Nixon.
His reaction yesterday when the indictments were announced? He made a comparison to “Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.”
So Trump has no morals and has no shame. Nothing— nothing— compares to the genocidal schemes of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Certainly not indictments against a former president whose alleged crimes are on public display. For Trump to compare his legal travails to the lethal tactics of the Nazis is a disgrace. And proof that his ego has no bounds.
And, almost no one in the leadership of today’s Republican Party has the spine of those leaders four decades ago. Even now, most of them rally around their standard bearer. The inflammatory chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, wrote on X (the former Twitter) after the indictments were publicized, “When you drain the swamp, the swamp fights back. President Trump did nothing wrong!” Speaker Kevin McCarthy endeavored to distract attention from the accusations against Trump by claiming on X that the indictments are actually an effort to “distract” from the scandal of Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
What they all know but pretend to ignore is, it wasn’t the Biden administration that decided to bring Trump to trial. It was a grand jury. Fellow citizens. A jury of his peers.
Although characteristically Trump will fight to delay this trial as he fights to delay all trials, there’s a chance that it will end up being the first in which he must defend himself. Which probably means tens of millions more in legal costs. According to a federal report filed just yesterday, his “Save America” committee already has spent more than $40-million on legal fees just since the start of this year.
What’s predictable at this point is, he will fundraise on this newest indictment as he has fundraised on the ones before now and his loyal supporters will open their wallets and foot the bill. They have not only suspended critical thinking, they have suspended good sense.
Former ally and now low-odds presidential rival Chris Christie had a sardonic idea yesterday about raising the money: sell Trump Tower. What’s inexplicable is, Trump probably won’t have to. He will go instead to his faithful followers and ask them to pay. If history is any guide, they will.
Over more than 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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Well summed, Greg. I think the one thing that might break through his cult’s allegiance to his lies is an open, public trial on which some respected Maga adherents publicly acknowledge he did these crimes and that was beyond the pale.
Can Jack Smith save us from "end of Empire?" When such a large number of Americans can be bamboozled into following this charlatan, forgiving him any disgrace, we have to worry about our future as a Republic. Ben Franklin worried too.