And nobody can deny that it has worked like a charm…
Remember that purportedly incriminating call on which he was caught telling the president of Ukraine, “you need to do me a favor, though”? Or the far more incriminating one on which he was caught telling Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have”?
Yet he walked away from both scot-free.
That might explain why he keeps incriminating himself like this:
Donald Trump’s incendiary call at a Texas rally for his backers to ready massive protests against ‘radical, vicious, racist prosecutors’ could constitute obstruction of justice or other crimes and backfire legally on Trump, say former federal prosecutors. … Legal experts were astonished at Trump’s strong hints that if he runs and wins a second term in 2024, he would pardon many of those charged for attacking the Capitol on 6 January last year in hopes of thwarting Biden’s certification by Congress.
(The Guardian February 7, 2022)
But it’s self-evident that there’s method to the madness of Trump appearing to blather against self-interest. I think it’s a perverse, Trumpian form of reverse psychology that says the more overt you are in talking about your crimes (and racism), the less likely people are to think you are a criminal (or a racist).
After all, the normal mind would think nobody is that stupid to be so overtly incriminating or racist. But the effect would be to normalize your crimes and racism.
Exhibit A, of course, is Trump realizing early on that the more he publicly humiliates white men like Ted Cruz, the more loyal they become to him. Exhibit B is the wildfire of Jim Crow 2.0 legislation he has Republicans spreading across the country, which is aimed at suppressing the voting rights of Black folks.
But, with all due respect to the prosecutors at the Department of Justice, I remain convinced that the prosecutors most likely to finally bring Trump to justice are New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – both of whom I hailed in “Impeachment 2.0 Verdict: Republicans Condemn Trump but Condone His Crimes,” February 13, 2021.
Meanwhile:
The Washington Post reported on Monday that the Archives was forced to seize ‘multiple boxes’ of White House records Trump stole off to Palm Beach with instead of turning them over to the Archives, a apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. The records, which the Archives reportedly retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last month, included letters from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — correspondence Trump has referred to as ‘love letters.’
(The Rolling Stone, February 7, 2022)
Most reports focused today on the willful way Trump incriminated himself by routinely ripping up documents in violation of that Act. But who knew Trump’s homosexual tendencies were such that he’d try to steal Kim’s “love letters” for sentimental keepsake…
Related commentaries:
Mueller report… Jim Crow 2.0… Trump pardons…
Ted Cruz… James and Willis… Trump and Kim in love … or not…