Time to Even the Score Against Trump.
My sister is an attorney with significant experience in criminal law. She also happens to be, like me, a Yellow Dog Democrat. Actually, she’s more partisan than I am, because she has been a poll watcher or canvasser for Obama, Hillary, and Joe.
Yesterday she sent me an email and said that perhaps Trump had a point in saying that he’s been the subject of a witch hunt because, the way she put it, “the others couldn’t have been all that honest.”
When George Washington was President, he formed a private company to build a canal alongside the Potomac Rover so that farm goods could be shipped down to the Chesapeake Bay and thence up and down the East Coast. He also got the Governors of Maryland and Virginia to give this company a complete monopoly over charging tolls for passage through these canals.
The whole scheme collapsed when it turned out to be too expensive to build the canals because the drop through the cataracts on the Potomac River was too deep. But when Martha Washington died and her estate went to probate, she was still holding the company stock.
And everyone on our side has been making such a big deal about Trump trying to build a Moscow hotel?
I happen to agree with my sister’s thought that maybe all the investigations of Trump are more payback noise than anything else. Because if there’s one thing I haven’t been able to figure out about Trump (and if any of my readers have a bright idea in this respect please email me at weisser.mike@gmail.com) is how he could actually believe that he could be a successful politician while violating the single, most important rule in American politics, which is that you always look for ways to make a deal with the other side.
Trump had no choice but to run to the far right in the 2016 primaries because he was competing against opponents who had already established themselves with their base and their donor groups over the years. He then ran against Hillary but most of his rhetorical venom was directed at her, not so much against the party that she represented during the general campaign.
This all changed the day that Trump was inaugurated and made it clear in his inaugural address that anyone who didn’t agree with him was the enemy or worse. And for the entire four years of his tenure, he went out of his way to promote the most uncompromising and confrontational approach to the opposition that anyone has ever seen.
I recall, for example, that Trump held two state dinners in the White House, one for Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, the other for Scott Morrison, the Australian PM. These were the first state dinners ever held in the White House in which not a single member of the Democrat(ic) Paty was invited to attend.
When you get to the point that you hold such petty grudges against members of the opposition party, you are making sure that sooner or later, there will be an effort to even the score. And by the way, Trump should have known this because he was a real estate developer in a city controlled by a Democratic political machine. So, by making donations to various Democratic political campaigns (including Hillary when she ran for Senate) he diligently practiced the art of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’
For all the talk about the power of the so-called Trump ‘base,’ the fact is that he won the general election in 2016 because Hillary unaccountably stopped campaigning after Labor Day; the GOP got wiped in the off-year 2018 campaign; Joe kicked Trump’s ass in 2020 and the GOP barely squeaked out a House majority in the 2022 off-year campaign.
That’s some Trump base.
The reason Trump is being pilloried by various grand juries and prosecutors is because of what happened on January 6th. And I still don’t understand how Trump allowed Rudy Giuliani to talk him into that election ‘fraud’ scheme.
Wasn’t there one single person around Trump who could make him understand that he probably could have avoided all his current legal problems if he had accepted the result of the 2020 election and behaved like a mensch?
I don’t understand it. I really don’t.