It’s craziness, downright craziness, this New America we live in, old norms tossed away with anything acceptable if, as one example, increasingly cockamamie Democrats can thereby eradicate Donald Trump politically. I almost get it. He’s bad news and always has been, but there are bad things in this world besides Trump, such as coming up with legally and morally amiss means to grab his wealth and squash his presidential reelection bid.
A nation in which officials abuse the legal system is a nation less reliant on law and order than tricks and disorder, which is what we got when the Democrat Letitia James, attorney general of New York, sued Trump for fraud in misleading lenders about how much his assets were worth. The thing is that the banks absolutely knew what they were doing, did not lose a penny and in fact made millions in their loans to this cherished head of a rejuvenating New York City real estate empire and upswinging golf courses.
But none of that halted the attorney general’s legal case exalted by a weird, obviously prejudiced, jury-replacing judge who decided Trump owed the government — the government, not the banks — $454 million in quickly paid cash and the right of government agents to temporarily manage his businesses in return for a supposed kind of financial cheating that never cheated anyone out of anything.
Well, the consequence looked like financial disarray, campaign crashes, a business future far less shining than Trump and his sons had anticipated, and quite likely ego damage except that an appeals court said nope. It reduced the cash payment to $175 million that Trump could easily pay while thus obtaining opportunities to wrestle again with James through appeal courts and maybe make her do the complaining this time out.
He has also just made a deal with his social media company apparently increasing his net worth to maybe $5.6 billion from less than half of that, although good days are not exactly here again. He goes to trial April 15 for supposedly disguising $130,000 in campaign money paid to a sex actress to keep her from doing what she does, talk about their years-old encounter.
Here is nothing new, of course. Here is the way the Democrats and others have dealt with Trump since he first rose from being an attention-grabbing billionaire to a populist demagogue with a reach no one dreamed of.
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At the very start of his own presidency, there was this alleged Russian collusion causing overreaching, confused bureaucrats to disrupt Trump administrative actions for two years despite the fact that nothing like that existed except in the Hillary Clinton campaign. We had two congressional impeachment efforts, including one meant to evict Trump from office when he no longer held office. This ultra-obvious Democratic farce was intended to misuse a constitutional clause saying that those who were evicted could also be prohibited from running again and that assumed congressional literacy.
It’s not that Trump is innocent of multiple and outrageous misdoings but that Democrats are determined to squash him even if it means hitting him with four trials and an absurd 91 felony indictments and thereby imprisoning democracy. The constant stalking of Trump, sometimes with unwarranted help from a suspect judiciary, has gone so far as to help ignite Republican imitation through investigations into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his connections with foreign powers possibly willing to exchange big money for the Washington influence of his father as vice president.
One hope of the moment is that a third-party candidate might offer rescue in November. But one such possibility, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., openly considered a professional football player as his vice presidential running mate before settling on a Silicon Valley attorney, and numerous members of the Kennedy family debased this frequently embarrassing relative. Kennedy won’t even score a field goal.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. ©2024 Tribune Content Agency.