Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Lawrence: Trump is the only defendant in history to attack a Manhattan D...

Bullfight by Michael North

Bullfight
I am not a fan of bullfights. It’s not a fight. It’s theater with animal cruelty. I’ve never seen one and couldn’t watch live.
Maybe there was a point to them once. Perhaps long ago they were a metaphor for something in Spanish mythology. No idea.
Trump was wounded yesterday. It will enrage him. It will give him purpose. He must be vindicated. No one understands him. Now the world gets to see the worst of toxic masculinity.
He may seem stronger and more popular for awhile. Don’t forget that he has incriminating evidence in his pockets on dozens of people. McCarthy, Meadows, Jordan. MTG and others are just a sideshow now. He can take down the entire leadership of the House. He might.
It seems certain now the Fanni Willis of Georgia will indict him too. The Georgia GOP may attempt to remove her from her position. I hope people go to the streets if they do.
Those indictments will wound Trump further. But they are not enough to vanquish him.
In a bullfight, the great bullfighter let’s the bull tire itself. Waving a cape at it so it will attack. The bull becomes more confused and slows down.
Everyone knows how it goes. We don’t with Trump but time is our friend. The longer he is angry, the more fatigued that he will get.
Slowly he will implicate himself and others. It’s what narcissists do.
The major blow will be when he is indicted for insurrection. I don’t know when that is. That case is massive. We are getting the underlings to testify now. That itself could take months.
My dearest hope is that the Special Counsel indicts members of Congress for their conduct. We do indict members of Congress. All the time in the House.
We need at least two or three Senators to be indicted. Cruz, Lee and Tuberville are my picks. They actively abetted insurrection. I doubt they get to Clarence Thomas and his wife but I can’t rule it out. A boy can dream.
Because the chance here is not to deal with this like it is a bullfight. It’s a chance to deal with it like it’s bringing down a crime family.
It’s not impossible that could happen. It’s too soon to know what the intentions of the Special Counsel are. We have not reached that part of the parallel tree yet.
I was in high school when Nixon went down. We took all the people around him down too. It took years .
This will too.
Trump will fight this on his deathbed.
But others are going down with him. Some by indictment. Some because Trump drags them down with him.
I was not as happy as I thought I would be yesterday. Today I am sad. Sad that this spectacle must happen.
But it must happen. In that regard, it’s not a bullfight. Bullfights aren’t necessary.
It’s a cleansing.
I’ll leave you with this. Other modern democracies have also arrested some of their leaders once they left office. France has most recently.
Prosecuting former leaders is a feature of democracy.
Our founders EXPECTED a tyrant to become President. They built our whole system around it. That Courts were separated from either the elected Congress or the President. That there would be layers of government to distribute power.
That a president could not save someone from conviction in state court and he himself could not be saved should that happen to him or god please soon, her in state court either.
Our system is still working exactly as it was designed to do. Exactly.
The more someone whines about it, the less they understand it or actually want it. You decide which.
Only the first blow has been landed. But, finally it has.
Long way to go. How many go down with him is not knowable yet. Exactly how he goes down isn’t clear yet either.
But unlike in a bullfight, the system is in place to ensure Trump gets to face his accusers and advocate his innocence.
Trump won’t be elected again. DeSantis, his younger brother in a previous life, will step into the spotlight. Aggression mode Ron has his own agenda. Don’t underestimate him now that Trump has been wounded.
More on that another day.
I’m sad we have to go through this but we have to go through this.
It’s not sport or theater. It’s proof we can still be trusted with self-governance.
At least, so far, we are up to the task that our founders hoped we would be when the time came

Onward