The Trump Gang Still Doesn't Shoot Straight.
Last week after the Georgia indictment was unsealed I wrote a column in which I asked how could that bunch of educated, professional people be so friggin’ stupid? They were right out of Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, ‘ - that goddamn dumb.
Did this bunch take one second to wonder whether they were smart enough to leave tracks all over the place and not get caught? Didn’t they know that the prosecutor was a Democrat? Didn’t they know that Georgia was one of the few states which uses the RICO statute to charge people with attempting election fraud?
And now we have the lawyers for this bunch as well as for Trump stealing the classified documents that wound up in the toilet at Mar-a-Lago actually saying that their clients didn’t tell lies about election ‘fraud,’ they were just stating their opinions which is nothing more than a 1st-Amendment ‘right.’ And I saw a one of these attorneys actually making this argument and somehow keeping a straight face!
The cops use the term ‘paintheass’ to describe anyone who commits some stupid, little crime and keeps committing stupid, little crimes. Most of these PTA’s never really figure it out and why they keep committing stupid, little crimes is anyone’s guess. Snatching the old lady’s purse is a typical PTA crime, ditto breaking into a car and either stealing the car or stealing something inside the car.
The cops arrest most of these PTA’s because they know the identity of all the PTA’s in every neighborhood. So, if a couple of car windows are smashed some night on a particular street, just go out and grab the several PTA’s who hang out on that corner and you’ll make a collar and eventually get an afternoon off to show up in court.
The really serious crimes, however, the crimes where someone gets hurt or worse, aren’t committed by PTA’s. Those crimes are committed by assholes. Why are they assholes? Because how else do you explain why some 18-year-old kid broke into the old lady’s apartment while she was sleeping, and after the kid swiped the worthless jewelry, he took a club and whacked the old lady over the head.
Why did the schmuck put a dent into the head of the little old lady who had slept through the entire robbery on her couch? Because he was an asshole, that’s why. And I don’t know a single cop in the United States who couldn’t tell you what I have just explained about the difference between a PTA and an asshole. It’s knowledge which goes with the shield.
The indictment of Trump and all those other jackoffs in Georgia is, however, a unique kettle of fish. Because nobody got hurt, nobody suffered a loss or damage to their property. So, what these putzes did in Georgia doesn’t qualify as the kind of serious crime which merits awarding the perpetrator, or the perp as the cops would say, the asshole designation.
But in certain respects, en toto, what the Trump Gang did in Georgia was as bad as any crime in the asshole category, if not actually worse.
Why do I say that? Because overwhelmingly, violent crimes are usually unthinking, spontaneous events. Two schmucks get into an argument, neither backs down, the words become curses, the curses become shoves, the shove produces a weapon in someone’s hand and guess what? A PTA crime is instantly transformed into an asshole event.
Don’t believe me? Our late friend, the brilliant criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, described this chain of behavior in in his remarkable book, The Subculture of Violence, published back in 1966. His analysis was correct then and hasn’t been challenged since. The only difference is the cops have their own lexicon for describing what Wolfgang said about violent crime.
What happened in Georgia and resulted in Trump’s whole gang taking it up the ass (another cop phrase) however, wasn’t spontaneous or unthinking behavior in the least. We now know that Roger Stone was actively talking to Trump about a ‘stop the steal’ strategy months before January 6th, and there’s no way that Rudy dreamed up the ‘national conspiracy’ narrative just the day before he held that crazy press conference across the street from the porn shop in Philadelphia.
In my previous column about this gang of fools, I suggested that their stupidity reflected the fact that here was a bunch of white people who never imagined they could be held to account by a group of blacks. But in addition to how racism blinded the ability of people like Trump and Rudy and the others to understand what would go down, I think there as something else at work here as well.
What made it so easy for Fani Willis and her staff to build a case against these schmucks was that so much of the evidence was probably gained by simply scanning hard drives and other electronic devices which held all kinds of texts, voicemails, emails and other electronic footprints that could be easily tracked.
I hate to keep saying it, but once again this bunch really is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight because if there’s one thing that none of them seem to understand, Trump being the dumbest of them all in this respect, is when or if you do something which happens to be against the law, don’t make it easy for the cops to build a case.
On the other hand, this bunch was so goddamn dumb, maybe they actually thought that they had every legal right to do what they did. After all, isn’t that what Trump’s so-called 1st-Amendment defense is all about?