Crime and (No) Punishment
("Offenses-The Talk of the Town") (The New Yorker, April 3, 2023 edition)
I am the last person to be an apologist for Donald Trump. I have spent years railing against his myriad overwhelming deficiencies which have stained the very fabric of our democracy. Many of my letters attacking the worst of his actions have found their way into publication.
That being said, I believe we fool ourselves if we are confident that his various transgressions now being analyzed and dissected will lead to any result that satisfies our desire for his long overdue day of reckoning. Crime and punishment appear to be mutually exclusive concepts when it comes to this Don.
Everything he does is couched in plausible deniability. In regard to the Stormy Daniels very expensive one night stand, Michael Cohen is an unreliable key witness in a highly questionable prosecution of an act, though despicable, is but a very debatable crime. As to finding the 11,780 votes in the Peach state, follow his prior statements, in that very conversation in which he repeatedly indicated that everyone knows the Dems stole many, many more votes than needed to overturn the results in Georgia. The Mar-a-Lago heist was nothing but Trump being Trump, taking anything not nailed down, but with absolutely no intention of selling State secrets. And Trump's actions on January 6th, though an abomination, were not unequivocally intended as a call to insurrection but possibly something less. While he is a walking, talking obstruction of justice, preventing any of these investigations from moving forward without repeated speed bumps, the various actions for which he is being pursued are somewhat “malleable” and thus difficult to state with any measure of confidence that he will be found legally, criminally, accountable.
Even as I write these words, it makes me horribly uncomfortable and in seeming contradiction with my own intractable opinion of this morally and intellectually bankrupt man. But better we face the truth head on than live under the fantasy that one day Donald Trump will wear a prison uniform matching the color of his face.