The Bigly, Boy-Child Criminal

One of the truly mind-numbing exercises the news media has been going through in the wake of the Grifter-in-Chief’s latest indictment, is the handwringing and mystified discussions of why he did it. Why would he have kept the documents in the first place, and why wouldn’t he give them back when the National Archives asked for them? It’s truly stupefying to see anchors from every network asking what is, for all intents and purposes, a rhetorical question. The bottom line is that Donald Trump is a five-year-old, which means he hasn’t been to school yet, barely knows how to read, is emotionally stunted, and has learned only one mode of behavior that he has used his entire life, that of the schoolyard bully. So, in that context, going to the trouble of attempting to parse the motivation of a kindergartener seems laughable. The answer is every bit as simplistic as the man himself. Donald Trump has one, and only one, motivation for everything he does: money. He is a greedy, narcissistic, sociopath who cares for no one and nothing else but himself. He wants what he wants, demands what he wants, takes what he wants, and cries like a five-year-old if he can’t have it. Who else, other than a five-year-old, would have spent the last three years whining that he was the real winner of an election he lost by seven million votes because someone else stole it from him? You can’t reason with a toddler, just like you can’t reason with someone who has the mind of a toddler. Donald Trump is a toddler.

The only interesting commentary that has emerged in the last few days has come, not surprisingly, from Michael Cohen, who appeared on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC program over the weekend. Says Cohen,

          In the indictment, five-hundred documents. That’s only, Rev, the five-hundred documents that they
          know of. I said on your show a long time ago, they need to play like a Where’s Waldo game and go
          to every single location that Donald has been to, his kid’s houses, his golf courses, where ever he
          went. You need to follow the Donald trail because, I am certain, knowing what he does, there must
          be files someplace over there. (Cohen)

Again, there’s no mystery here. Trump wants to make as much money as he can by abusing his position, this time as President of the United States. The only thing that would be surprising about his behavior at this point, is if he hasn’t already sold information, to the Saudis, the Chinese, or to his buddies Putin and Kim Jong Un. He’s corruption incarnate—not because he’s evil, but because he’s a five-year-old. He has no impulse control, no sense of delayed gratification, and to be perfectly frank he doesn’t even know the difference between right and wrong. He will lie, cheat, and steal to get what he wants and is so delusional that he truly believes his own warped sense of morality.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the man himself. In a recent interview with Sean Hannity a few months ago Trump made it crystal clear exactly why he took the documents. According to the failed former president, “This is the Presidential Records Act. I have the right to take stuff. Do you know that they ended up paying Richard Nixon, I think, $18 million for what he had?” And there it is. Everything is a payday for Trump. The Nixon case, as with everything else in Trump’s mind, is completely backward. The Presidential Records Act was passed precisely because Nixon didn’t want to hand over the Oval Office tapes he made, and so Congress set about rectifying that situation by making all Presidential records the property of the U.S. and not the president. However, since that act didn’t go into effect until after Nixon had resigned, the courts agreed that he was entitled to compensation for records that had traditionally belonged to the President and that he assumed belonged to him. Trump’s false claims about the Presidential Records Act, on the other hand, are like information from a kid giving a book report who hasn’t read the book. What he claims the act says, to no one’s surprise, is the exact opposite of what the act really says, that no president has the right to keep documents from his administration. Instead, they belong to the people, and are curated by the National Archives on our behalf.

Unless someone with a lot more brains than the previous presidential moron, actually figures out a way to really overthrow the government and install him- or herself as dictator, Trump will be forever immortalized by history as the worst president in the history of the United States—by a wide, wide margin. Despite his copious lies to the contrary, he did only three things as president: played golf, gave a trillion in tax cuts to the rich, and committed crimes, abusing his office to make as much money as possible for himself. And he’s no different now than he was in office. Every action to hold him accountable for his crimes is followed up immediately by the breathless grifting of his base to fill his coffers with money they can ill afford to give. With any luck, the wheels will finally come off the travelling con-man wagon that he’s been using to keep himself afloat financially. Approximately no one, give or take one person, showed up in support of his arraignment in New York a month ago, and a similar crowd is shaping up not to turn out in Miami for his first federal indictment. At this point the plethora of so-called “witch hunts” against him are utterly comical, and it’s difficult to believe as he lists them out one after another on his Troth Senchal posts, that even he doesn’t realize they can’t ALL be fake. So, it’s time—long past time—to do the only thing that can be done with a bratty five-year-old who won’t behave, and put him in a time out . . . a long time out . . . in federal prison.