This Is Not Checkers: Why Trump’s Post-Election Conduct Is Predictable, And Why He Must Be Stopped.
Trump already knows he cannot win a fair and free election. For possibly the very first time in the history of our Republic — one hundred years after the recognition of women’s right to vote and one hundred fifty years after Black men were enfranchised — we have a sitting president who brazenly collaborated with a foreign power to gain the Nation’s highest elected office.
His seeming dual impotence in both the face of a deadly virus and credibly reported threats of Russian paid assassins killing American troops overseas is painfully undergirded by his open appeals to white supremacy.
These are no longer “dog whistles” or codewords by a president sworn to uphold equal justice under law. Trump’s retweets of golf-carting would be grand dragons and armed Missourians threatening protesters for racial justice is intentional and targeted.
To quote Oliver Holmes: “Even a dog can tell the difference between being tripped over and kicked.” Donald Trump has kicked the shins of Lady Liberty since his first race-based “travel ban.” Since his prevarication and double-speak about the fascists at Charlottesville, Virginia. Since his open willingness to denounce and. subvert the rule of law in his 2017 Oval Office meeting with James Comey — by his sufficiently impeachable request to let Michael Flynn let go.
Lacking the apparent courage to forthrightly confront his own program of corruption, Trump would deploy Attorney General William Barr as the crony who was willing and ready to lie to the Congress and the American people about the substance of the resulting Special Counsel Report; and to redact major damaging portions of it; and then to feed the WH and Trump Barr’s own anti-constitutional doctrine of compleat executive supremacy.
This extra-constitutional hogwash enabled Trump and his lawyers to resist every legitimate effort of the House Committees when acting at the zenith of their own constitutional power — the power of impeachment. The subpoenas issued by the House are still in crucial instances unanswered — including one for former WH counsel Donald McGahn, Esq.
McGahn’s testimony is crucial to proving one of the most serious of the allegations in the second half of the Mueller Report on Trump’s obvious obstruction of justice. The likely evidence of that obstruction far outstrips any previous efforts by Richard Nixon and makes the alleged impeachable conduct of William Clinton look minor league by comparison.
Trump’s conduct, viewed in proper context as a pattern or scheme or plan, an evidentiary concept well understood by every prosecutor, shows us that he will do just exactly as Lead Impeachment Manager Adam Schiff warned: he will do it again. And, as the quintessentially reluctant witness, John Bolton revealed, Trump was doing it the entire time he was facing his impeachment.
What, we must ask, is now contained in those illegally over-classified secret files held by the National Security Council reflecting Trump’s recklessly ill-prepared calls to foreign dictators and potentates? The details will be revealed in time. But the effects are already publicly obvious and open.
Witness if you will the “high five” between Putin and MBS; witness the urgency with which Trump and Barr moved to “dismiss” a case against crony Mike Flynn after an in-court plea of guilty; witness the unceremonious removal of the lead prosecutor in the SDNY who had. named Trump as “Individual-1;” and, witness Trump’s pusillanimous refusal to acknowledge that he knows full well that Russian GRU officers hired Taliban assassins to kill U.S. forces now in harm’s way.
No. Do not expect Trump will take his coming loss with grace or even Nixonian self-pity; instead Trump will squirm and lie and inevitably accuse and blame as he stalls his exit from power.
The blame will vary, perhaps depending on the crucial States which he views denied him (rightfully) an electoral victory — or, which (rightfully) reside in the column for his once falsely accused opponent, Joe Biden.
The targets of accusation will range from a former President who once publicly and gently mocked him and who tried to gently help his ill-fated transition to the entire media who in Trump’s view is his pursuing Javert.
But, he will not leave. He will not concede. He will, using the unfortunate precedent of 2000 and every dirty trick learned from his imprisoned associates. to try once more to steal the election. He will assume that he can get away with it — one more time and thereby change and render unrecognizable the face of democracy.
We must see that he fails.
Albert Turner Goins
