Monday, February 19, 2024

An Exemplar, But in a Bad Way

The other day, when Judge Engoron announced the fines in the Trump Corporation fraud case, I couldn't resist taking this manual screen snapshot from All In With Chris Hayes:

I don't remember if I wrote about this back in 2015 or 2016, but it never made sense to me that Donald Trump would want to run for president in any serious way. It seemed obvious he was opening himself up to way too much scrutiny, and at his age (even back then), it was clearly a lot easier to just coast on his celebrity.

Like a rational person, I assumed his clear violations of the rules from Day 1 — under the emoluments clause — would derail him legally. But the courts are both too slow and undermined by the Republican Party and the Federalist Society. He, his family, and other members of the administration acted with impunity throughout their four years. Impeaching him when he finally did something that was clearly far outside the bounds didn't work either. And then he tried a coup after he was voted out of office.

I don't like this game of chicken we're playing now with his many court cases, which may or may not come to trial before there's an election that his hypnotized and/or fascist followers will only consider legitimate if he wins. 

Trump is such an exemplar of everything that can go wrong in this country. 

The only good news is that he was ranked last in the newly released rankings by political scientists who specialize in presidential history. Worse than James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, who have generally held the bottom — and it wasn't close, either.


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