WHAT THE NEWSPAPER WRITERS  SAY ABOUT TRUMP’S SITUATION

 

                                        …This man may today be in serious Federal trouble

 

It interesting that so many senior columnists have the same attitude toward our former president.

 

“Trump is treating a legal problem as a political one,” says Hayes Brown at MSNBC.COM, and this time, that strategy is likely to fail.  The legal motion his hapless team filed this week was ridiculed by prominent lawyers as “Trumpian Gibberish.”  Meanwhile, a Trump ally released a National Archives letter that made it clear that the FBI had shown the former president “the patience of a saint” as he stonewalled turning over documents for months.  “It’s not theirs, it’s mine.” he reportedly complained to his advisers.   The dangerously exposed former president may well be facing an indictment.

“For liberal Trump haters, seeing the Bad Orange Man in handcuffs, is a porn-like fantasy,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post.  But for walking the 45^th president through this could come at a steep cost.  “Whatever Trump’s flaws, tens of millions of Americans revere him as the only political figure who speaks for them and understands their alienation from the elite establishment.”  To see him hauled into court could “make their estrangement permanent and create more dangerous rifts in our already fractured society.”

“Trump deserves to be prosecuted.” said Damon Linker in The New York Times, but this story will have no “happy endings.”  Letting Trump off the hook for a host of possible crimes would tell him that if he were to win a second term, “he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.”  Still, for a Democratic administration to prosecute a former GOP president and possible 2024 candidate would be “incredibly dangerous,” setting off a cycle of vengeance in which each incoming administration indicts its predecessor.  It would also make Trump “a folk-hero outlaw” to millions.

“Trump’s contempt for the rule of law is so brazen it cannot be ignored,” said Heather Digby Parton in Salon.  “Letting Trump off the hook wouldn’t be like Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon, and leaving a broken and disgraced figure to contemplate hi crimes in solitary obscurity.  Trump remains the de facto leader of his party and if he gets a pass, we might as well declare that he has blanket immunity from criminal prosecution in perpetuity.”

“Letting Trump get away with multiple crimes would not ensure social peace”  said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times.  That’s no longer possible, thanks to Trump.  “Much of the Republican Party has aligned itself against the basic principles of American democracy, and has filled this year’s ballot with election-denying candidates who vow to do whatever is necessary to keep Democrats from winning elections.”  Putting Trump on trial will be fraught with tension.  But there comes a point when “we must act in face of corruption. Lawlessness and contempt for the very foundations of our republic.”

I think all of these writers have told it like it is in regards to dealing with Donald Trump and his followers.  We have a long, difficult road ahead in dealing with the former president.

Copyright G. Ater 2022