Donald Trump's Week in the Shitter

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

On January 20th, ironically President Biden's first anniversary as Chief Executive, the proprietor of this blog had written an article detailing another horrendous week in Trump World entitled, "'Cause You Had a Bad Day Week". It was one in which the SCOTUS denied Trump the Executive Privilege to which he risibly claimed he still owned, even though the Biden administration had denied him that long before. 

     Letitia James, New York's AG, had released a 115 page report detailing some more laughable moments, including Trump lying about the square footage of his Trump Tower penthouse, claiming it was 30,000 sq. ft,. which is roughly the size of his mansion in Westchester County. And so forth and so on. Basically, the only people who wanted to be Donald Trump that week either jump into mud pits for shits and giggles or watch WWII videos on Youtube hoping that one day the Nazis will win.

    This past week, things got even worse for Trump and his henchmen. Rabid lawn gnome Peter Navarro (R-Green Bay Sweep) got subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee, which resulted in the usual vow of non-compliance and, of course, a claim of Executive Privilege (Even though, like Mark Meadows, Navarro had already written about his soft coup, making it readily available for all to read).

 

    Elsewhere, when Ari Melber wasn't gleefully taking apart Navarro on live national television, we learned Rudy Giuliani, after his spectacular debut on The Masked Singer, contacted a Michigan District Attorney and demanded he seize all the voting machines in his county and turn them over to the Trump campaign. The prosecutor, James Rossiter of Antrim County, Michigan, rightly told Hizzoner that he couldn't just wave a magic wand and make it so, reminding the former ambulance chaser that he needed a little detail such as "probable cause".

     Then, the National Archives referred Trump for investigation over the 15 boxes of documents that Trump smuggled out of the White House and into Mar a Lago. Among them were Trump's "love letters" from Kim Jong Un and other classified items marked "top secret". Trump has claimed he was "under no obligation" to turn over the documents (I guess he was too busy getting caught in Mar a Lago's sand and water traps to look up the "Presidential Records Act" on Wikipedia. Ditto for 18 U.S. Code § 2071, which forbids the "Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally" of federal documents). His mouthpieces just scream "Fake news!" or Nancy Pelosi ripping up Trump's speech after his final State of the Union Address.

    Tia Mitchell of the AJC went on CNN today and mentioned the deafening Republican silence over Trump essentially stealing and smuggling into an unsecure location classified documents that he'd spitefully kept away from the incoming Biden administration.

   And speaking of missing documents, try this one on for size: In a throwback to the Nixon administration, January 6 investigators discovered large gaps in the call logs pertaining to calls made from the White House when investigators knew Trump was making phone calls.

    On the classified document front again, we learned from Miles Taylor that Trump used to wave classified documents in the air in front of reporters so he could brag about getting classified information handed to him. As if the president getting classified information was a big secret that Trump also wanted to impart.

A Game of Thrones

We'll never know if the Trump administration and the pasty presidential posterior took up the Guggenheim's offer of an 18 carat gold toilet ironically named "America" by its Italian artist. Yet, considering Trump's generally anal-retentive character and seeming obsession with flushing toilets, it hardly comes as a shock that Trump's stolen White House years would feature the fixture at some point.

     From the quiet but much-feared Maggie Haberman of the NY Times came the news that Trump had at least once clogged the toilets at the White House by flushing official documents. Haberman's book, Confidence Man (coming out on October 4th this year), is apparently the one in a lengthening shelf of books that have come out in the last several years about Trump's "presidency" that he fears the most. People may think Haberman only began following Trump from 2016 but that's not true. When Haberman had the New York beat decades ago,Trump and his development schemes were a big part of that beat.

     As far as the treatment of presidential records go, Trump set the, well, gold standard for disrespect for federal documents and the law protecting them. And as if that wasn't enough, there was the four year-old revelation from Omarosa Manigault Newman that Trump would actually eat documents that he didn't want anyone else to see. She's recently backed up those claims by recalling one incident in which Trump was seen by Newman eating a document he'd just ripped up right after a meeting with Michael Cohen. Now I'm going to slip into second person for a minute and invite you into this sordid story.

 

    Try to picture that visual, people. Donald Trump, sitting in the Oval Office, the same one from which Truman ordered the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the one in which Kennedy had agonized over the Cuban Missile crisis, eating classified documents like a bloated, upholstered orange billy goat. That's the kind of thing that recalls stock footage of wartime spies eating papers even as enemy agents are breaking down the door.

    That's how paranoid Trump was and one can only imagine what Trump was so desperate to keep from the American people and his own government. It makes Nixon's own paranoid behavior in his final hours in the White House look like Jerry Garcia during a marijuana bender. Kind of makes tame by comparison Trump looting the home of the US ambassador to France while he was disparaging our war dead so he wouldn't get his perfect hair soggy, doesn't it? (Note: They were all knockoffs.)

     The bottom line is that we're more aware than ever about the scale and scope of Trump's crimes than we knew a week ago and that will surely pale in comparison to the January 6th Committee's long-awaited report this summer. While virtually ignoring the Covid-19 crisis, he'd spent his remaining couple of months in office moving heaven and earth to steal the 2020 election, launched a riot that eventually left nine people dead (five of them police officers). Trump's crimes are many, they're provable and they're huge.

     That's why it's a daily regret for those of us watching the Justice Department not publicly launching various investigations into Trump. Instead, we're reading the DoJ is representing him in his defamation trial against E. Jean Carroll, thereby ensuring that the DOJ remains, as always, Trump's personal, and free, law firm.