In 2023, Trump may do hard time or no time

Barring some kind of major announcement, such as that the 45th president will be appearing on QVC to promote a new line of makeup for the septuagenarian jet set, we’re pretty much done with the surprise elements in the fallout from the Jan.6 narrative. While the House committee is to be commended for its exhaustive investigation, its meticulous presentation, and especially the fact that the most devastating testimony against the insurrectionists was coughed up by Trump administration insiders and their Republican poodles, much of what is concluded in its final report was plainly evident as night fell on Washington, D.C., two years ago this Friday.

From in and around the White House, a truth-averse man who could not accept defeat, either then nor now, summoned his most violent supporters to the city, enraged them at a midday rally, told them to “fight like hell,” and sent them to the US Capitol to stop by any means necessary, including hanging the vice president, the Constitutional counting of electoral votes that is the essence of American democracy — and that man was the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. As committee member Jamie Raskin, D.-Md., finally said when the panel’s 850-some page report was about to drop, “This is not an Agatha Christie novel; we know exactly whodunit.” Probably because it all happened in broad daylight on live national television. It happened despite the pleadings of the president’s own family and his most dogged loyalists to stop the violence, including the frantic texts of Donald Trump Jr., who couldn’t reach his own father except through Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Trump Jr. told the committee he couldn’t remember how he came to be a featured speaker at the Jan. 6 pre-attack pep rally, according to CNN, nor could he remember that something called Turning Point Action paid him and his wife $30,000 each for talking to the crowd (his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, asked for $60,000 to do three minutes).

“My recollection was that we had spoken to them prior to Christmas at an event that we did annually and always got sort of paid for speaking fees to show up,” Trump Jr. said. Imagine for yourself the kind of life where you can’t remember exactly where or when you picked up $30,000 or $60,000 and considered it “sort of” paid.

That’s the kind of life former Trump lieutenant Hope Hicks was lamenting in the latest dump of testimony, the kind of life where you get paid $1.9 million from Fox News then suddenly don’t know where your next Hermès Birkin handbag is coming from.

“In one day (Trump) ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local Proud Boys chapter,” Hicks moaned in a Jan. 6 text to Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff. “We all look like domestic terrorists now.” Instead of just former spokesmodels for domestic terrorists?

Sympathy for Hicks and her cohorts would be in greater supply if Trump’s singular manifestation of narcissistic megalomania had somehow sneaked up on them rather than having been painfully obvious all the years that they worked for him. Similarly, anyone who allowed themselves to be ensnared in the fake electors scheme in pivotal states will be able to locate few sources of empathy, as the number of regular Americans who have conspired to overthrow the government is insufficient to staff a Taco Bell. Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who with fellow Trump lawyer John Eastman conceived and tried to implement the scheme to provide Mike Pence with electors he could substitute for the ones he was supposed to be counting on Jan. 6, wound up invoking his Fifth Amendment right when the committee interviewed him. “I believe my Fifth Amendment privilege covers this entire subject matter in terms of any involvement with the alternate electors,” Chesebro testified, and added this gem upon failing to admit he was the Kenneth Chesebro listed in relevant emails obtained by the committee: “I think I would take the Fifth in terms of authenticating a document that is related to the subject matter as to which I’m taking the Fifth.”

Tribune News Service