Hitting Trump's pockets is only the first step
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You won’t like Donald Trump when he gets angry – and right now he is very, very angry. If you were fined the equivalent of more than 400 million dollars for business fraud and other financial crimes, as Trump was by a New York judge on Friday, you would be very angry too.
On his Truth Social disinformation platform, Trump has been raging, claiming that he is a victim of a “witch hunt” by anti-white “racists” who want to destroy him and by extension his MAGA people.
Trump will need much more money from his followers to pay off this mountain of fines, penalties, and legal fees. “[He's] looking at financial ruin and losing the family empire his father built because he’s an inept businessman whose ego is bigger than his ability," Rick Wilson, co-founder of the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project, told me via email, neatly summarize Trump's new reality. "Now he needs to find hundreds of millions of dollars just weeks before he starts his criminal trial where he faces real prison time. Trump’s totally exposed, and he knows it.”
To that point, on Friday, Trump sent out a fundraising email announcing that he will be “addressing the nation!” via a special “President Trump Emergency Broadcast”.
STAND WITH TRUMP
#1 They want to destroy me.
#2 They want me LOCKED AWAY.
#3 THEY WANT ME ERASED FROM EXISTENCE!
After today’s sham ruling by a Democrat judge, the radical left thinks they scored a victory.
They think they can celebrate, but after they see how STRONG you react today, they’ll regret EVER coming after us.
Right here, right now, we need the biggest response in HISTORY!
Before the day is over, I’m calling on ONE MILLION PRO-TRUMP Patriots to chip in and say, I STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP!
Only your action at this moment will leave them reeling.
Only YOU could show them just how big of a mistake they just made.
Please, PLEASE stand with me today.
WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Here, Trump, the master propagandist and political cult leader, conflates his being punished for breaking the law with an attack on his followers. As a dictator in waiting and de facto political crime boss whom his followers love precisely because he will be an instrument or tool for their revenge, rage, retribution, and acts of destruction against those they deem to be “the enemy," Trump is continuing to threaten anybody who believes in the rule of law and democracy.
And while most of the media attention has been on Trump’s more high-profile trials, he is now facing other legal peril as well from civil lawsuits filed against him for his role in the Jan. 6 coup plot and attack on the Capitol, as CNN reports:
Civil lawsuits seeking to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack can move forward after the former president declined to ask the Supreme Court to decide whether he is shielded by presidential immunity.
A federal appeals court in December cleared the way for three lawsuits brought against Trump by Democratic lawmakers and US Capitol Police officers to proceed, unanimously holding that not everything a president does or says while in office is protected from liability.
Trump faced a Thursday deadline to seek the Supreme Court’s review of that decision, but his legal team declined to turn to the high court….
In the civil immunity matter, the plaintiffs in the three underlying lawsuits have all seized on Trump’s speech on January 6, alleging that his words led to the subsequent attack on the Capitol.
The lawmakers claimed in a pair of lawsuits that they were threatened by Trump and others as part of a conspiracy to stop the congressional session that would certify the 2020 presidential election. They argue Trump should bear responsibility for directing the assaults.
The police officers said in their suit that they were hit by chemical sprays and objects attendees threw at them because Trump inspired the crowd.
The unfortunate reality is that Friday’s 355-million-dollar judgment against Donald Trump (and the E. Jean Carroll verdict for more than 80 million dollars before that), as well as his still upcoming criminal and civil trials will only serve to fuel his followers’ fantasies of persecution – which means they will further embrace even more political violence, terrorism, and thuggery as necessary means of self-preservation.
On Friday, a certain cable news network was broadcasting the equivalent of a block party (or as my mother would say, “it was like Christmas in July!”) in how it covered Judge Engoran’s decision against Trump. I found this network’s celebratory and breathless tone to be troubling, as it was representative of a much larger pattern of premature exuberance among the professional centrists, institutionalists, and too many liberals and assorted hope peddlers who have long proclaimed that “the walls have been closing in” on Trump. Recall the embarrassment of “It’s Mueller Time!”? And "We have Trump's tax returns!" Yet, Donald Trump is still walking free, controlling the Republican Party, leading or tied with Biden in the polls, and all the while escalating his threats of violence, “bedlam” and ending the country’s multiracial pluralistic democracy.
There is rich white man’s justice in America and there is justice for everyone else.
As someone who has made a literal career out of understanding how to manipulate the law to his advantage, Friday’s 355-million-dollar ruling against him is just the beginning of what will be a long process of justice and accountability (which itself is dependent on Trump not winning the upcoming election and taking power as a dictator).
In an excellent essay at Salon on Friday, Thomas Moukawsher warns:
And if you think Trump at least faced the music in his New York civil fraud case with Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling ordering Trump to pay $355 million in penalties, think again. The case is far from over. Trump will stall the case, diddle the docket, drag out the appeal, appeal from the appeals court, and, if he becomes cornered resort to another trick he has considerable experience with—he will declare bankruptcy.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but deeply engrained formalism in court plays right into Trump’s hands. When in doubt, judges delay. When there is a claim, however frivolous and intentionally dilatory, it must receive the same slow service as every other claim at the courthouse window. While the idea of due process is the constitutional promise of a meaningful hearing at a meaningful time, too many judges prefer the appearance of fairness that long delays promise but don’t deliver. Too many times, justice delayed is justice denied, but judges in our contemporary system simply aren’t set up to do it any other way, and Trump and other courthouse cognoscenti know how to exploit it.
I have been of at least two minds about Trump’s criminal and civil trials and what they mean (or not) for the country’s democracy crisis and the growing reality of a 21st-century American fascist order. Donald Trump should be held responsible under the law for his many crimes against democracy and punished to the maximum extent allowed. This includes a very long prison sentence and being barred from office per the 14th Amendment. However, I am also deeply worried that these civil and criminal trials against Trump for financial fraud, hush money and stealing classified documents are sideshows and distractions from what should be the main focus: putting him and his confederates on trial for the crimes of Jan. 6 and the larger plot to end democracy.
At the American Prospect, the always insightful Harold Meyerson echoes my concerns:
Will no one rid us of these meddlesome prosecutors?
The announcement today that the trial of Donald Trump for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels will begin on March 25th means that the only Trump trial that actually matters—the one in which he’s been charged for inciting the January 6th insurrection to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election—cannot begin until late spring at the earliest.
Numerous polls have shown that a decisive share of voters who currently support Trump’s candidacy would switch their vote or not vote at all if he’s convicted of a crime before Election Day. I think that’s only credible, however, if he’s convicted of his January 6th insurrection offense.
Consider the consequences of his conviction in the other three cases. In the New York trial now set for next month, Trump is accused of shoveling cash to Stormy to ensure she’d shut up about their trysts. This has been all over the media for most of the past decade; I think it only confirms not only what Trump’s critics think of him but what his supporters—who acknowledge he’s a flawed servant of the Almighty—think of him as well.
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There is also the very real if not almost certain possibility and outcome that Donald Trump, a man who publicly admires dictators, tyrants, and other enemies of the United States could sell or otherwise share the country’s vital secrets that he hoarded during his time as president.
At Vox, Abdallah Fayyad outlines this scenario:
But Trump isn’t just one of the country’s richest men, with an estimated net worth in the low billions; he’s also running to serve a second term as president of the United States. And for any candidate for public office — let alone the presidency — being cash-strapped while owing such significant amounts of money could be a serious liability.
“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him….
The fact that he has so many entanglements with big businesses and other nations leaves plenty of room for things to go awry. That’s why a 2020 New York Times exposé uncovering his staggering debt during his first term wasn’t just embarrassing for Trump, who has a tendency to claim he’s richer than he actually is. It also raised fears about how his debt could implicate national security.
As the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division told Time magazine in 2020, “For a person with access to U.S. classified information to be in massive financial debt is a counterintelligence risk because the debt-holder tends to have leverage over the person, and the leverage may be used to encourage actions, such as disclosure of information or influencing policy, that compromise U.S. national security.”
As Trump campaigns for a second term, his personal finances are becoming increasingly relevant, especially now that he has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from the two civil lawsuits.
And with his criminal cases still looming, things could get even worse for him. His debt “makes him prime for corruption and really exploiting his office for his own personal gain,” Canter said.
My greatest worry and anxiety about Trump and his legal saga are that he and the MAGA movement and the Republican fascists and the other “conservatives” need to be resoundingly defeated by the American people at the ballot box — repeatedly. Putting Trump in prison and/or forcing him off the ballot does not accomplish this goal. Moreover, such an outcome may instead fuel a type of neofascist Lost Cause narrative, which in the end will be a Pyrrhic victory for America’s pro-democracy forces.
With that qualifier having been noted, Judge Engoran’s 355-million-dollar judgment against Donald Trump is an important reminder that the fascists and other demagogues and autocrats are just human. People like Donald Trump and his successors and pretenders are not gods or immortals, and they most certainly are not forever. (“the thousand year Reich” only lasted 12 years) Such movements and leaders can be defeated and brought down. Such dangerous leaders and other pathocrats want us to surrender to learned helplessness and be in awe of their power. We must not surrender to it.
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I often wonder what would happen if Donald Trump and the MAGA movement just disappeared one day. Perhaps whoever (or whatever sentience) is running this damned infernal simulation has decided to rewrite it again like we are in the Matrix, or the Mad Titan Thanos snapped his fingers and the Trumpocene is gone, blinked out of existence.
But that would just leave a huge void, as Trump and what he represents and embodies has occupied so much space in our recent history and collective consciousness and experience that even if he is gone the gravity and its pull and impact would still be with us. Trauma is not wished away. What monstrosity will then fill that void? We will be finding out likely sooner than later.
Trump and Trumpism are us, the worst of us "we the Americans" — no matter how many people want to deny that fact because it frightens and unsettles them. As I have told many people during these last seven years, look in the mirror and you will see some of Donald Trump and Trumpism staring right back at you. Ultimately, Donald Trump is not the problem; he is a symbol of much larger forces and problems in American society and life. 400-million-dollar plus judgments, prison sentences, and/or elections will not solve those deep cultural and institutional problems. They can, however, be a start —if we the Americans are willing to do the hard work that comes afterwards.
