NOVEMBER 23, 2020 – Recently I read the opinion tweeted by actor Edward Norton: there’s a method to Trump’s post-election madness. According to Norton, who’s no “hulking” slouch, Trump’s refusal to concede and his attempts to disrupt and destroy are designed for negotiating leverage against the certainty of prosecution and probability of prison.
I’m not buying Norton’s theory.
If we know anything about Trump it’s that he’s an intellectual midget without scruples. He has no ability to analyze, no capacity for strategy, no interest in policy, good or bad. He can’t focus long enough to plan anything beyond his next cheeseburger or mulligan. He knows not right from wrong but prizes baseless adoration and self-defined “winning” at any cost. He’s addicted to pyrite, repelled by refinement, and bereft of imagination. He’s concerned more about his skin color than he is about saving his skin. He neither knows nor cares what the law permits and what the law condemns. He abuses legal process and deploys a nut-job like Giuliani as fangs—not brains—on a leash.
I wish it weren’t so. I wish Trump were smart, humble, contrite, law-regarding, concerned about someone besides his sorry self—or at least himself. I wish that at least some faint moral compass occupied a corner of his soul. I wish he knew enough about right from wrong that he in fact had some fear of prosecution and punishment; fear over which the adults in the room (or clubhouse) could negotiate an accelerated “good riddance”—some grand bargain involving broad immunity from prosecution (coupled with an assignment to the public coffers of any and all remuneration from book deals and appearances) in exchange for what all Americans should expect of an out-going president: cooperation with his successor.
But such a deal can’t be expected from a person as impoverished of heart, mind, and soul as Trump, who never thinks or feels a thing outside his own hot, toxic breath.
Instead, what we get is more of the same—scorched earth in retribution for exposure of the man’s abject failure; by his solid “loser” status confirmed by a margin of over six million votes, double the popular votes by which he was defeated the first time around. There won’t be “millions” at his second inauguration because there won’t be a second inauguration.
No, Trump isn’t executing an elaborate plan to leverage his way out of prosecution. He doesn’t understand crime as crime and therefore, can’t imagine himself being charged, then convicted. If a person can’t grasp right from wrong and denies all responsibility for his failures, then within his own distorted universe, such a person is self-immunized from prosecution. If he’s immune from prosecution, in his mind, conviction and sentencing are impossibilities. No, the end of publicity threatens Trump far more than the start of prison.
The wrecking ball won’t stop until the cable is cut on Inauguration Day, and until then, tragically, America will suffer more bashing. May that be taken into full account when history imposes sentence on Trump.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
