Wissot: Trump deserves his demise
In his inaugural presidential address, John Fitzgerald Kennedy challenged his fellow citizens to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” If our first official grifter president recaptures the White House in 2024 (God forbid), his second shot at giving an inaugural address might begin with, “Ask not what Donald Trump can do for you, ask what you can do for Donald Trump.”
The Donald will be spending a great deal of his free time in civil and criminal courts. Please don’t feel sorry for him. He worked extremely hard to get charged with multiple crimes in multiple states for multiple reasons. Full credit should be given to him if the charges lead to convictions. He will have earned them. To Trump, the legal armageddon he faces is another fake “witch-hunt.” If it is all a witch hunt and he’s being targeted as the “bitch witch,” then he should draw comfort from the fact that witches are no longer burned at the stake. A cozy jail cell nicely furnished in decor favored by white-collar criminals is how witches are torched today.
Trump constantly whines that he’s being treated unfairly. He’s right. What he’s missing is that he deserves to be treated unfairly. He has shown himself to be a slam dunk, first ballot, Hall of Fame bulvan (Yiddish for boorish and brutish). Equal treatment under the law is a myth, not a fact. Rich people get treated better than poor people; white people get treated better than Black people; gracious people get treated better than obnoxious people. It’s the way the world works, even though that may fly in the face of how we think it should work.
I believe in karma, cosmic justice, and comeuppance. The ex-president has over the years trashed and bashed journalists, judges, district attorneys, the FBI, for doing their jobs. People are only human and we shouldn’t be surprised if some of them in those institutions have their knives out for him. I acknowledge that two wrongs don’t make a right, but who’s counting?
The real victims of the chaos this ex-president has caused are the schmucks, schlemiels, schlubs and schlimazels who believed a pathological liar was telling them the truth.
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They include the poor pathetic souls who bought the baloney that the 2020 election was stolen and that they had a patriotic duty to follow their president’s orders to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to “stop the count.”
Those loyal to Trump became victims when they closed their eyes to a “seeing is believing” test for truth and opened them to a” believing is seeing” standard for separating fact from fiction. The people who followed Trump down the rabbit hole of “alternative facts” had faith in him. In “Trump We Trust” was their mistaken mantra.
Placing your faith in Jesus is good; placing it in an unsavory con artist is not. When it comes to cults, our sympathies should go out to the cult followers, not the cult leaders. I feel compassion for the people who drank the Kool-Aid at Jonestown, not Jim Jones. I feel heartbroken for the women and children who burned to death in the Waco standoff, not David Koresh (nor the ATF agents who brutally botched the operation). I feel pity for the duped lemmings who out of wanton ignorance committed treason on Jan. 6, not Donald Trump.
Texas Republicans claim that the legal evidence being assembled to indict and convict Trump is politically motivated to prevent him from running next year. That’s ridiculous. Making sure Trump is on the ballot in 2024 is a top priority for Democrats. He’s a one-trick pony and a stone-cold loser.
Ever since he won the 2016 election, the biggest political upset in American history, his stock has plummeted. He is responsible for Republicans losing ground to Democrats in the last three election cycles. Trump has become a good luck charm for Democrats and kryptonite for Republicans. If he runs against Joe Biden, it will be the president’s admittedly flawed record up against Trump’s rap sheet. Presidential elections aren’t about good versus bad; they’re about bad versus worse. In that regard, Trump has an iron-clad lock on worse.
A vital component of the Republican base is the religious right whose extremely restrictive views on abortion are out of step with the majority of voters. Republican fortunes rose because the religious right fully supported Trump and now are falling as fast as it took Jack and Jill to come tumbling down the hill. The party can’t win in 2024 with both albatrosses hanging around its neck but would be committing hari-kari by trying to win without them.
Republicans have no choice but to nominate Trump. Hell hath no fury as Donald Trump scorned. Should he be denied the nomination, bet the house on his running as a third-party candidate destroying any chance the Republicans might have of winning. A revenge-minded Trump would be laser-focused on beating the Republican nominee and punishing the party for its disloyalty. Defeating Biden would be less of a priority than preventing another politician from replacing him as the GOP’s Don Corleone.
A majority of Americans think that the criminal investigations of Trump are fair. Deranged liberals like me would like to see him convicted at a bare minimum for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. While convicting Trump would prove that nobody, even an ex-president, is above the law, there are better ways to punish him. Allowing him to sink into irrelevancy would be a good example. For a man with messianic tendencies, he once thanked a conspiracy theorist for referring to him as “the second coming of God.” The fall from heaven on high to oblivion down low would be devastating. He would prefer prison to anonymity. Whatever fate awaits him, let’s not shed a tear for a man who soiled his bed and now must lie in it.
Jay Wissot is a resident of Denver and Vail. Email him at jayhwissot@mac.com
