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Tuesday December 20, 2022
Our Screwed-Up Times in a Paragraph
From “How Trump jettisoned restraints at Mar-a-Lago and prompted legal peril” in The Washington Post:
In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House—with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego—with little regard for the law. With this behavior, Trump prompted a criminal investigation into his post-presidential handling of classified documents to compound the ongoing one into his and his allies' efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—which presents potential legal peril and risks hobbling his nascent bid to be elected president again in 2024.
It's the word risks that does it for me. We get his aberrant behavior, his disregard for the rule of law, and the two huge, ongoing criminal investigations against him, and, oh yeah, he's still running for president and we guess all that risks such a run.
I'm not critiquing the writers, by the way. The paragraph perfectly encapsulates our screwed-up times.
The article is long but good. It's Trump in winter. How he's surrounded himself with only the most sycophantic. How they spend much of their time trying to buoy him up. How he has no one to tell him, “You know, that might not be a good idea.” One former aide describes the situation as “sad”—which, remember, with exclamation point, used to be one of Trump's many Twittery catchphrases back in the day. What goes around.
More sad for him, good for us: Yesterday, the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attacks formally recommended criminal prosecution for Trump on four counts: inciting insurrection, obstructing an act of Congress, conspiring to defraud the U.S., and conspiring to make a false statement. It's the first time Congress has recommended criminal prosecution for a U.S. president ever. We'll see what DOJ does now.