The Impossible Client
The pressure on Trump is mounting. When will he crack? And if he does, how many will still follow him down?
My take on all the ongoing trials and official investigations involving Donald J. Trump is that Defendant Trump will continue to probe the line laid down by Judge Merchan in a courtroom in Manhattan over a week ago. Trump’s still talking, assigning coarse and stupid nicknames to Jack Smith and Fani Willis. Trump can’t keep his mouth shut about his judicial tormentors any more than he can stop telling lies. He will test the limits until a judge, perhaps Merchan, pushes back. Then the game will really heat up. Trump’s stuck-pig-bellowing -- what he considers language -- about the deep state/communists/Marxists/pedophile radical left Democrats will increase in volume, intensity and incendiary intent. Will anyone be surprised if Trump essentially forces a judge to hold him in contempt?
The way I’ve come to terms with the Trump Era, to survive it psychologically, is to frame it the way I think Trump does, as if his multi-pronged legal predicament is just a plot twist in a long-running reality TV show. That’s the world Trump knows, the world that matches his intellect and that of his core supporters. Politics is reduced to spectator sport, win at all costs, no compromise or surrender. It’s the mantra of the Old Confederacy, who lost the battle but won the war. Trump is the spearhead, not the cause, of making white supremacy acceptable again. His world is full of aggrandized characters (none larger than him), clear villains, good against evil, us against them. Repeated propaganda works. Half of adults in the US read at a 6th grade level, which may explain why they believe Trump is the precise opposite of what he is. Trump stokes his hardcore base and feeds it frequently with new tales of wonder. Got to keep the story moving, the stakes on the uptick and the money flowing in.
I still can’t believe the American public fell for Trump. I find it baffling. On road trips through northern California, southern Oregon, and western Washington, I saw Trump flags and banners, yard signs, bumper stickers, and always wondered how these folks convinced themselves that Trump wasn’t personally awful and utterly unqualified to hold public office. Trump doesn’t hide who he is, and perhaps this is what some people admire about him. He was always full of shit, juvenile ideas, absurd boasts about the size and dimensions of his this & that, and overt racism; he was a flashy showman and such a lousy business person that most US banks wouldn’t deal with Trump after his run of failures in the 80’s and early 90’s. But Trump always made for good TV, and he knew the medium and how to use it to keep himself in the spotlight. Pithy slogans and juvenile playground taunts made good soundbites and grabbed media attention; Trump reduced all of America’s problems to simple nonsense like Build The Wall and Lock Her Up.
I mistakenly gave my fellow citizens more credit than they deserved; I thought they’d see through Trump, if not the first time, at least in 2020, but Trump got 74 million votes in his losing bid to install himself as President for Life.
Without the Electoral College, an 18th century relic designed to prevent too much democracy, Trump would never have made it to the White House. We forget that he lost to Hillary Clinton by more than three million votes in 2016, and by seven million to Biden four years later. Trump’s not that popular in a lot of America. He’s popular in a league of red states where collectively they have a structural majority at the federal level because each state has two elected US Senators irregardless of the population of the state. Montana has a tiny population and two senate seats, California, with 35 million population, has two senate seats. This structural disadvantage serves to protect a minority.
The source of Trump’s absolute grip on the Republican Party is the cowardice of congressional Republicans. They surrendered the GOP to Trump and now, like fleas on a deranged dog, are afraid to jump clear and take their chances.
Have you noticed of late that Trump’ speech sounds slurred and his late night all-caps tweets (full of misspelled words), dispatched from his bunker at Mar-A-Lago are more deeply mad? As the legal screws turn and the pressure on Trump mounts, his mental disorder becomes more evident. No sane person can keep up with the avalanche of provable lies that seep and spew from this pathetic man. Trump doesn’t model “normal” behavior, he models abnormal behavior.
The Trump narrative stars, of course, Donald Trump, playing himself as a heroic, genuine man-of-the-real-people (white, Christian, gun lovers and gay haters), who stand against the Biden-corrupted American state, a cage match like nothing ever seen in WWE. Like an aggrieved wrestler, Trump can’t resist the urge to attack, because this is a war, World War III. The ratings must be huge…
Being hauled off to jail could pay dividends in terms of grifting and media attention. Imagine the visuals, the drama of the arrest and the outrage in conservative circles, the howling about politically-motivated persecution, Trump in handcuffs, Donny Junior frothing at the mouth. Think of the spectacle. This is the game of chicken that Trump lives for, his way of flipping the bird at the “system” and reinforcing his belief that in America, he alone is above the law.
That’s my way of looking at it. It’s more complicated, of course, but with Trump, because he’s an empty man, what matters is cunning, not intellectual depth. The stuff Trump sends out on his little social media platform is incoherent, mounting evidence that Trump’s about as rational as a 5th grader.
I try to imagine the legal bills Trump’s racking up every day. How many lawyers is he paying to represent him on all the fronts he faces? What is the hourly rate of the most and least expensive? No wonder Trump needs to run an endless bag job, he needs a steady supply of cash from the Trump base of twenty-five to thirty million Americans because he always spends other people’s money before spending his own. He bombards the base with emails, texts, Robo-calls, letters and direct mail pieces. How big is the money operation, and how many people does it take to run that side of the house? Grift on this scale requires infrastructure, administration, and coordination.
Trump’s legal bills multiple like hamsters, day in and day out. Like the echo of the slots in Trump’s casino before it went bankrupt, it’s a steady beat of ker-ching, ker-ching, ker-ching. My guess is that most of the lawyers billing Trump will be paid only a fraction of what they bill. From the first-string at the top of the table to the boilerplate mechanics at the bottom, every firm and individual will be stiffed. It’s the Trump way. Why does anyone take Trump on to begin with? Isn’t it always a losing bet? Or is there a different kind of currency in use here? What’s the incentive to represent a man who is practically indefensible, who implicates himself almost every time he opens his mouth or sends out a tweet? Is it a deeply held belief that every citizen deserves the best legal defense? Is it for a turn in the bright lights on the cable show circuit? Fame is irresistible to some. Celebrity. Notoriety. Or is it a perverse, masochistic challenge of defending an indefensible man?
The pressure on Trump is mounting. When will he crack? And if he does, how many will still follow him down?