The Road to Damascus

 

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

No, that's not the title of a long-lost Hope and Crosby Road movie.

     A road to Damascus moment is when a person comes across a certain epiphany, generally one that changes their life. It's otherwise known as the Conversion of Paul the Apostle or a "come to Jesus moment".

     Those of us crunching our popcorn and occasionally hitting the button on our air horns as the Trump shit show lurches into its next act may rightfully wonder, "What will it take to wake these people up?!" If there's any one thing the Fulton County 19, as we should call them, have in common, it's an unwillingness or inability to distinguish fact from fiction.

     Look at John Eastman's wild-eyed press conference just minutes after he bonded himself out of a jail in which, just days before, an inmate was found dead with bite marks all over his body. Or Mayor Rudy, when he wasn't time-warping on 9/11, pissing and moaning about how the courts were taking away his right to be a lawyer. Hell, listen to any of them that have been stupid enough to talk to the press, including Trump himself, and you'll immediately be confronted with petulant, butt-hurt criminals who actually think they can try their cases in the court of public opinion. 

    And of course, Trump himself is no closer to reality than the aforementioned with his constant brain seizures on Truth Social or his increasingly frequent appearances on right wing media trying, pathetically, to relitigate an election that was held nearly three years ago. There, however, the resemblance between Trump and his co-defendants ends.

     But, as Chris Hayes asked Michael Cohen on All In tonight, what will take to get these people in Trump's or formerly in Trump's inner orbit to wake up and realize he's hanging them out to dry? Even Cohen, who was once in that tight inner orbit himself until becoming a Never Trumper when he wound up in prison for him, was buggered to give Hayes an answer except to blame plain stupidity.

     However, that was an unsatisfactory answer because not all these people are stupid. Quite a few of them have law degrees (for now). John Eastman has a doctorate. But, as cults teach us time and again, cult members come from all walks of life and a predisposition to cultish behavior is certainly not predicated on intelligence quotient or the lack thereof.

    Jenna Ellis, a traffic lawyer tasked with litigating Trump's 2020 election lies, is one of the few to sound the alarm, publicly asking when "MAGA, Inc" was going to start paying her legal bills and that of her co-defendants. Cohen gave Hayes a more comprehensive, if hardly original, answer: That Donald Trump is only interested in his own survival, without once thinking that perhaps paying their legal bills would be the best way to hedge against them rolling over on him and turning states' evidence.

     But that's not the Donald Trump way. Never has been, never will be.

MAGA: Making Attorneys Ginormously Affluent

As Cohen told Hayes, not that he needed to, Trump infamously doesn't pay his bills and that includes his legal fees. As Trump's fixer recently said, the three people you don't screw over are your doctor, your lawyer and your mechanic. Otherwise, he went on to say, you're going down a hill with no brakes. Trump has this bizarre, puerile belief that you can negotiate, bluff, litigate, chew down or otherwise barter your way out of any debt. He also seems to think that even legal fees are contingent on getting favorable results.

     Any sane adult can tell you that's not how it works. Then again, Donald Trump is neither sane nor an adult. Indeed, every time Trump is sued by one of his former attorneys for unpaid legal fees (like Cohen, for instance), it almost starts to resemble a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, I didn't pay that guy but it'll be different with you. With the inference being, of course, If I get the results I'm looking for.

     Then that guy takes him to court if and when he loses and the same sick, silly shit begins anew. But the amazing thing is that Trump never seems to run out of lawyers who are still willing to work for him. That's because sometimes, he's forced to pay upfront when he comes across a good, hard-nosed attorney like Chris Kise, who, a year ago obviously demanded, and got, $3,000,000 for his legal services.

     Yet, more often than not, he leaves them to twist in the wind. You can ask Rudy and Jenna all about that.

     But the other lunatic ambulance chasers, like Eastman and Sidney Powell, they're the true believers. And they still are. Remember, Eastman has a doctorate and Powell used to be a US Attorney. At least, until the 2020 election, their sanity was not being called into question much less their intelligence. Then, after the election, when the current litigation consisted of just a few loose questions in the media, we began hearing about some batshit insane coup memo and conspiracy theories involving Hugo Chavez's rotting corpse, Italian satellites and time-traveling psychics getting Eureka moments through the air.

     Granted, not all of the Fulton County 19 paint murals with their fecal matter. They all wanted to get paid, sure. Ellis is screaming for that Super PAC money and Rudy was forced to go a Mar a Lago at least once with his jester cap in hand, which Trump must've loved. But, as we know who didn't get paid (they're the ones with GiveSendGo or GoFundMe campaigns), that leaves the question of who is getting paid.

     We know Trump took in a cool quarter of a billion dollars the first year since he left office, the first $100,000,000 coming just that first week. We also know that up to 75% of his Super PAC donations are going straight to his lawyers' pockets, at least the ones still toiling in the trenches. We also know that Trump's Super PAC is trying to claw back a $60,000,000 payment it had made to another one of his Super PACs.

    We're supposed to believe that a guy who infamously doesn't pay his bills has shoved about $200,000,000 into the pockets of his lawyers like a drunken sailor shoving dollar bills in the G strings of exotic dancers at a strip club? Something doesn't smell kosher in the state of Denmark or any other country. Campaign finance laws being as lax and loose as they are, Trump is perfectly allowed to spend any of his political campaign donations on legal fees. He just can't spend it on himself or coordinate with the Super PACs.

     But we all know how fast and loose Trump plays with the law. And, if on the offchance a select handful of lawyers are getting paid and paid handsomely, it would readily explain why they're constantly taking to the airwaves to litigate their cases in the court of public opinion. The more they piss and moan about how unfairly their client is being treated, the more donations that roll in, hence, rolling into their pockets. If we can trust lawyers to be one thing, it's them being the ultimate capitalists.

     Meaning they're taking Trump to the cleaners and leaving him with next to nothing with which to campaign against Biden if on the offchance he gets the GOP nomination. Meaning, the grift is not just Trump fleecing his supporters but his lawyers doing the same thing to line their own bulging, bottomless pockets.