Trump’s Luck

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

I enjoy memes of a mopey and scared Donald Trump in orange prison fatigues, cradling a few belongings on his way to a cell, as much as the next American who has lived through his presidency. But I know — we all do, yes? — there is almost no chance in Old or New Testament hell he’s going to spend a day in the hoosegow for federal crimes; and only a slightly better chance on state charges, either.

Guys like Trump never wind up in ill-fitting jumpsuits and eating off metal trays. (Guys like Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg usually don’t either — unless they start working for guys like Trump. You’d think the lot of them would know this by now.)

Let’s start with the obvious reason why Trump won’t waste away behind bars.

He might be president.

Even if a jury of Trump’s peers (scary, isn’t it, there could be 12 more just like him?) sifts through the tonnage and minutiae of the indictments against him and concludes some or all of them constitute a crime, it probably won’t happen before January 2025. And by then, Trump, who’s leading Biden in many polls, could already be in the White House. By then, he could have already pulled us out of NATO, invited Vladimir Putin to Annapolis to award him the Navy Cross, and shut down The Onion. Should he regain the presidency — and if the gods are smiling, I’ll be in Reykjavik or deep into self-medicating — he will pardon himself. If he’s not convicted and still at trial, he’ll tell his just recently confirmed attorney general, Sidney Powell, to get the Justice Department to drop the case. In 2000, a legal opinion emerged from the then-Clinton Justice Department concluded that a president cannot be prosecuted while he is in office.

This scenario is as much reality as nightmare, as Republicans, who lost their collective minds in 2016 and embraced an unqualified, imbecilic metastatic horror as their presidential standard-bearer and did so again in 2020 — and are on the road to doing so again in 2024 — are apparently incapable of living in a world without bowing like trembling eunuchs to his bloated presence. And unlike January 2021, when Trump was heading out the White House door (with loads of classified documents under his arm) and didn’t use his Get Out of Jail Free Card, he certainly will this time.

As for the state charges against him, there’s a little more hope he’ll wind up in the United States penitentiary at Allenwood, but not much.

As Peter Shane, currently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University and a writer and podcaster about law and the presidency, told me, “The New York case is pretty straightforward, but I doubt he would get more than token prison time, if that. He is, technically speaking, a first offender, and the crime is not super-terrible. In any event, no New York governor will pardon him. Georgia is more interesting because the indictment could turn out to be much, much more serious. Fani Willis [district attorney of Fulton County] is an experienced prosecutor, so my guess is she’ll know what she’s doing. Whether a Republican governor would pardon Trump if convicted — who knows?”

As Shane points out, Trump and Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current GOP governor, are not the best of buds lately. But there’s no guarantee Kemp wouldn’t.

Even if Trump doesn’t win the GOP nomination — and I’ll make you my favorite bet, the Toby Ziegler bet (“All the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets”), that he does — can you imagine any of the current Republican presidential candidates, should they win the presidency, not pardoning him?

There is also the matter of mortality. For all the talk about President Biden’s age, Trump is 77 — and not a particularly healthy 77 at that — and could die before any state or federal entity slaps ankle chains on him, thus robbing us of the pleasure of the mother of all schadenfreude: a defeated, disgraced Donald Trump writing his manifesto or whittling old pieces of wood in his cell.

When then-President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he said, “As a people, we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most destructive foes. Yet to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil in whatever ways evil has operated against us.”

It’s the kind of thing Joe Biden would say.

The 2024 election will be a brawl, and even if Biden wins, even handily, millions of Americans will have voted for Trump. Biden may conclude it is better for the country to move on, to make peace with the mob, and that the only way to do that, to govern with a possible (or probable) GOP Senate and House majority, is to not make Trump a martyr and allow MAGA mobs to serenade him outside the penitentiary — and to pardon him.

Trump, who has already been convicted of sexual abuse and for defaming E. Jean Carroll, fined $2 million for misusing his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests, and forced to pay $25 million for duping Trump University students — not to mention being impeached twice — has never spent a day in jail for any of those offenses.

He won’t for these current ones, either.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman” has just been released. In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2023

Populist.com