One, Two, Three Indictments, You're Out?

Donald Trump, our criminal FPOTUS, remains at bat.

In the introduction to Dirty Rubles, published in May of 2018, I wrote:

Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the support of his voters. I beg to differ. If he did that, there would be irrefutable evidence of a terrible crime, a literal smoking gun, and that would (I like to think) sway the minds of even the most obdurate MAGA apologists.

Trump/Russia, however, is not bang-bang. There is no single smoking gun. Instead, there are thousands of them, firing simultaneously, and the result is a noxious fog that hangs over everything, clouding our view.

Six sentences, two mistakes.

First: as the last three and a half years have made abundantly clear, his MAGA supporters are absolutely going to ride or die with Trump. In the early days of the pandemic, FPOTUS unleashed a Blue State Genocide that wound up disproportionately killing his own people. He lost the election, bigly, and led a coup attempt to overthrow the government—and would have happily sacrificed his own vice president to achieve that result. On the way out the White House door, he made off with boxes and boxes of classified documents—containing top secret information about, among other things, our nuclear capabilities—and showed them to guests at his Palm Beach social club (and, almost certainly, more nefarious actors as well). All of those crimes are unspeakably heinous, orders of magnitude worse than shooting one measly citizen on the front steps of the Met. MAGA doesn’t care. To them, the demagogue can do no wrong. If a million negligent homicides, seditious conspiracy, and espionage don’t move the needle for the Let’s Go Brandon set, nothing ever will.

My second mistake was limiting the scope and scale. It’s not just Trump/Russia but Trump’s entire career that isn’t bang-bang. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of smoking guns.

When politicians become embroiled in a scandal, it’s almost always a single, specific incident that the press, and the American people, can glom onto. Richard Nixon: Watergate. Ted Kennedy: Chappaquiddick. Gary Hart: Monkey Business. Dennis Hastert: serial pedophilia. And so on. It’s one thing, and one thing is easy to name, easy to remember, easy to use by opponents as a means of attack. With Trump, it’s not one thing; it’s everything. He commits so many crimes that we stop focusing on Crime #1 and redirect our attention to newly-committed Crime #2. Lather, rinse, repeat. As his scabrous former campaign chair Steve Bannon might say, it’s a firehose of felonious shit.

What we can’t all seem to process—or, perhaps, don’t want to admit—is that Donald John Trump is a lifelong criminal. In his career, he’s owned “legitimate” businesses, like criminals of his ilk do, but for most of his eight decades on earth, his primary occupation has been “crook.” The press ignored this in 2016, to its great shame and the world’s greater peril. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

Like, remember Trump University? That was the series of branded real estate training courses that a commentator at the National Review—not exactly some leftist outfit—called “a massive scam.” Trump was sued, more than once, for corrupt business practices. One of the suits was “a RICO class action accusing Donald Trump of misrepresenting Trump University ‘to make tens of millions of dollars’ but delivering ‘neither Donald Trump nor a university.’” Trump vowed that he would never settle, but settle he did, to the tune of $25 million. Running a fraudulent operation like that would end the political career of any other presidential candidate. Could you imagine if there were a Hillary Clinton University and it had to pay an eight-figure settlement in a fraud lawsuit? We’d never hear the end of it. With Trump, though, this barely registers. It’s a drop in the crime bucket, a foul ball lost in the stands.

Likewise, Trump’s history of rape and sexual assault—a demonstrable pattern of sick, predatory behavior—is rarely mentioned, as if it exists in some alternate universe. But there are many accusers, and their stories are remarkably similar: without preamble, he just starts kissing and fondling and, if he thinks he can get away with it, more. That’s what happened to Jessica Leeds, who had the misfortune of sitting next to him on a plane; to Rachel Cooks, a model working as a receptionist at Bayrock Group; to Jill Harth, a former Trump business partner; to the former Miss Utah, Temple Taggart; to Natasha Stoynoff, a reporter at People magazine, who was at Mar-a-Lago to write a story about his marriage to Melania; to adult film star Jessica Drake; and, most famously, to E. Jean Carroll. And these are just a handful of examples; there are a lot more.

We know this is Trump’s M.O. because of the testimony of his victims, who all have similar horror stories, and also because he admitted as much to Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape: “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” That wasn’t “locker room talk.” That was the confession of a serial sexual predator.

And I’m not even including the walked-back rape allegation made by Ivana Trump, or the creepy things he’s said about Ivanka. The latter continued while he was in the White House; Donald Trump allegedly harped on the sexiness of his daughter to the point where his chief of staff had to tell him to knock it off. If Bill Clinton had made similar comments about Chelsea, it would be a rightwing talking point until the end of time, and mentioned in the first paragraph of his obituary; with Trump, it was so un-shocking that I literally forgot all about it.

Trump’s is a criminal mind, and it informs everything he does, whether illegal or merely shitty. As I wrote a year and a half ago, in a more novelistic style:

His business ventures almost always failed. Many of his companies went bankrupt. He opened a casino and it went bust. He inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, and he squandered it. He lied to magazines about his fortune. He called reporters posing as a PR guy for himself. He almost singlehandedly ruined a rival pro football league. He announced gifts to charities and then didn’t give over the money.

Banks refused to do business with him, because he routinely did not make good on his commitments. He stiffed contractors. He hired illegal immigrants to work for him and paid them slave wages. His only profitable enterprise was laundering money for his Russian clients. The building that bears his name became a hub of Russian organized crime activity in the United States.

In October of 2018, right after the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner dropped a bombshell of investigative journalism at the New York Times. The reporters found ample evidence of decades-long “dubious tax schemes” that included “instances of outright fraud” perpetrated by Fred Trump that benefited Donald Trump to the tune of almost half a billion dollars “starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.” The special investigation, headlined “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father,” found that:

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

That article was published almost five full years ago. Have there been any meaningful consequences? Has Trump been charged with criminal tax fraud? Have any of his assets been seized by the IRS?

The diligent folks at Just Security have a live document on all of the criminal and civil court cases Trump is involved with. It’s staggering. It’s also nauseating, that the presumptive presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties is bogged down with this much litigation—litigation that exists largely because he is both a criminal and a piece of shit.

In Israel, we are watching in real time as a disgusting crook reassumes office and immediately pushes for more authoritarian power. Because of the vagaries of the parliamentary system—and Netanyahu’s continued occupation of the President’s House is a compelling argument against such a system—it is much harder to get rid of a bad-apple politician in Tel Aviv than it is in Washington. The anti-Bibi protests in Israel are massive, durable, and inspiring. But they have not worked. Will Americans take to the streets if Trump somehow makes it back to the Oval Office? We all know the shameful answer.

For the nation to survive, Trump must not pull a Grover Cleveland and re-take the White House after a term away. As I wrote in Dirty Rubles:

As I write this, a third of the country rightly recognizes Trump as a clear and present danger. A third will defend him no matter what he does, as a matter of blind faith. Whether the middle third is able to call out the naked emperor standing before us may well determine whether the United States survives this unprecedented crisis.

Five years later, I think the numbers don’t divide quite as evenly. Trump’s supporters are loud, and the media covers them like they are a vocal majority, but the truth is that his power is waning. Anti-Trump sentiment was evident in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, all of which Donald lost, either directly or by proxy. There is no reason to believe he will somehow gain popularity as he ungracefully ages, as evidence of still more bad behavior comes to light. But indictments and convictions would help guarantee that outcome. His tactic, the one he’s used to great effect for decades, is to delay. For a guy who has difficulty walking down ramps, Trump is very good at kicking the can down the road.

The first impeachment came, and Trump was acquitted by his fellow Republicans. The second impeachment came, and he was acquitted by his fellow Republicans. The first indictment came, in Manhattan; that trial is set to begin in March. The second indictment came, in Florida; that trial is set to begin in May—six months before the 2024 presidential election.

Trump himself indicated that there will be a third indictment. The Guardian reports that there will be as well. Will this be a case of “One, two, three strikes, you’re out?” Or will he just continue to foul off pitches, as he’s done for years now, extending an at-bat that will last indefinitely?

In other words: Will Donald Trump pay for his crimes? Or will he walk?

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Photo credit: Babe Ruth in Seattle, 1924. (He wasn’t really wearing a MAGA hat).