As the walls close in, the unraveling goes on apace. With more legal, criminal, political and financial dangers looming daily, the cheap gangster and wannabe dictator who's never met a hustle he didn't like is doing the only things he knows how to do: threaten, bully, whine, lie, dodge and whip up his dimwit fans. His minions are going down: Both Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani, having just lost their respective legal battles, must testify before a Georgia grand jury about their dodgy efforts to "find" more votes last election to flip the state; Rudy has been deemed not just a witness but a "target" of the investigation, and subpoenas have already gone out to his fellow "attorneys." Having already tried and for now failed to overthrow the government, his debts are coming due: Flimsy Trump businesses are said to carry $900 million in debt due by 2024; much of it may have been paid off thanks to moneyed, "morality-agnostic" friends, but he's still reportedly broke-ass enough to constitute a security risk possibly worthy of Espionage Act charges when it comes to stashing a closetful of classified materials - including nuclear, so what me worry? - at his trashy home.
He's disputed the "classified" moniker with multiple, ludicrous claims - the documents are "privileged," he already "declassified" them by waving his teeny stubby fingers over them though he's had no power (thank God) for 18 months - but even John Bolton says when someone "concocts lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation," and yes, times are strange enough we're quoting John Bolton. And the lies and bluffs keep coming. He huffed the FBI even took his passports! - inexplicably, three - though they say they didn't, and "respectfully" demanded on Truth Social (sic) they return all his totally innocent documents "by order of social media," which alas isn't a thing. He's continued fanning the ugly flames with tirades against a mean, corrupt FBI, and re-tweeting deranged invectives from QAnoners, which might be why another crackpot was just arrested for threatening to "slaughter" FBI agents. And, ever-persecuted, he's bleated: It's unfair, it's fake news, it's always rigged, it's the deep state, RINOS, racism, radical Dems, Obama's fault and besides Joe Biden is old. Wallowing grievance, thy name is.
Unsettlingly, it's a re-play of the lies and self-pity that led to the carnage of Jan. 6. "We now know the narrative," says one legal expert. "We now see how it plays out. (It) is very serious, and it is very dangerous." It is also "a pivotal moment" in which reliance on the rule of law may be erased by "violence that refuses to accept it." For those who "want to see that orange motherfucker behind bars," argues the Rude Pundit, prosecuting Trump isn't "for some abstract concept" of the law, but for the powerful people who got away with crimes - Bush, Cheney, fat cats who blew up the economy, Trump ad nauseum - as we got "the false promise that forgiveness would temper their behavior, only to see that forgiveness shit on and tossed back at those who did the forgiving." "We have to know there is a limit," he writes. "We have to know that in a nation that incarcerates more (mostly poor) people than any other, (that) tolerates mass murder on a daily basis, (that) allows for lies to become policy...In a nation as fucked as this nation is, something fucking matters, and that something has to be the very foundational idea that a president isn't above the law." It didn't age well, but the last one even pledged that.
