He Could Fire a Gun in the Middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and Wound Democracy and No One Would Care

     "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," said the Bard in Macbeth.

     The problem is, while it can be applied to Trump, it can also apply to the Never Trumpers, the January 6th Committee and even yours truly, in short, anyone who has ever waded into the fetid, roiling swamp that Trump was supposed to have drained.

     Because, really, at this point, one has to ask, What was it all about? All these people, with all their frightening powers, Congressmen, Senators, judges, investigators and prosecutors have come no closer to putting Trump in an orange jumpsuit than the day he sleazed into office after the stolen 2016 election.

     He tried to extort the president of Ukraine. Republicans sprung him. He tried to overthrow the government on January 6th. Republicans sprung him again. He illegally stole Top Secret classified documents and took them his glorified beach house in south Florida. The pertinent agencies played footsie with him. He made untold millions off the presidency. Emoluments Clause? What's that?

     And the January 6 Committee had just held its last hearing before the midterms, maybe ever, and what has changed? Nothing. The Select Committee has subpoena and investigatory powers only, not prosecutorial powers. They are a legislative body, not a judicial one. They'd legally compelled his testimony at the very end of the hearing. But only the DOJ can legally follow up on that and Dan Scavino and Mark Meadows can tell you about how frightening referred criminal charges to the DOJ are.

     In response, Trump did the usual thing- Play quid quo pro- I'll testify but only if it's broadcast live. If you or I were ever subpoenaed, there would be no wiggle room. We wouldn't get to negotiate the terms. With Trump, they'd feel compelled to negotiate with the biggest anti-American terrorist the world has ever seen since Osama bin laden.

     Just as the DOJ and NARA felt they needed to do him over the missing documents.

     But Americans watching this play out in ultra slow motion are rightly wondering, What's the end game here? Will it culminate in the greatest PPV in TV history as Trump gets frog-marched out of Mar a Lago. Or will it all end with a soft Whoopie cushion fart resulting in no significant fines and no jail time?

     Because Republican scum were dick-slapped into submission by Trump and helped him evade accountability not once but twice, he still has Secret Service protection that would make even arresting him problematic, at best.

     So, it's no wonder that we're seeing articles like Lucian Truscott IV's in Salon today.

     Among other things, Truscott wrote,

The Department of Justice is amassing evidence of crimes that could end up with Trump being indicted. A conviction could send him to prison. And here's the thing: Forty percent of the country is apparently just fine with all that. They will try to vote him back into office if he decides to run for president again. Given that Trump may end up convicted of a felony that could bar him from holding any federal office, the words "constitutional crisis" come to mind. 

     That's a lot to unpack there, so let me help you understand the implication of what he'd written: The more egregious Trump's crimes, and the more they're exposed, the greater his approval ratings. 538 discovered that, "Trump's average approval rating was at 42.7 percent at the beginning of the hearings early in the summer. It stood at 40.4 percent when the hearings ended on Thursday."
      We saw the same thing with Pinochet on his death and even Stalin's aproval rating went up recently in Russia. In other words, Trump could stand in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, shoot and grievously wound democracy and many of us wouldn't care. Because that's precisely what he'd done on January 6th.

     And Truscott is rightly alarmed because he knows as well as anyone that, despite the most disastrous four year administration in history, 8,000,000 more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. And, noting this, with his characteristic bluntness, Truscott ended his article with, "We're fucked."