The Paradox in Prosecuting Trump: Legal Initiatives Against Trump Have Made Him Stronger.
(How Trump resists prosecution and its parallels to Hitlerian antisemitism as set forth by Hannah Arendt)
By
David Gottfried
The menace that is Donald Trump does not abate. Indeed, it seems to grow stronger. Paradoxically, the more prosecutors and investigators try to nail him, the better he seems to get at evading them.
The Trumpian nightmare reminds of some of what Hannah Arendt discussed in her masterpiece, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” She said that the wrath of Hitlerian mobs morphed into genocidal pathos because the mobs concluded that Jewish money could not defend the Jews. This realization kindled a febrile desire to light the holocaustal flames. I think that the prosecutions of Trump which have already failed gave the Trumpers greater contempt for the law as they see it as a dyspeptic schoolmarm who can nag but never nab. The democrats in congress, and the lawyers in court, all seem too weak and gentlemanly for their tastes, and they can’t wait to ram them down into the ground.
For quite some time, various arms of the government have been investigating Trump for a multitude of flagrant, odious crimes:
A) In 2016, the FBI investigated Trump for his ongoing collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election;
B) After Trump won the 2016 election, Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump’s collusion with Russia to sabotage the 2016 election and obstruct justice;
C) The Department of Justices is investigating the Trump-instigated insurrection of January 6, 2021;
D) Congress investigated whether Trump undermined American foreign policy to bolster his political power (Phone conversations clearly show that Trump refused to send arms to Ukraine unless Ukraine gave him dirt on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son);
E) Congress is investigating whether Trump fomented the insurrection of January 6, 2021;
F) The State of Georgia is trying to determine if Trump unlawfully coerced election officials when he commanded them to find additional votes;
G) The State of New York is investigating Trump’s evasion of taxes and his policy of providing flagrantly different valuations of his assets to different parties (As one might suspect, the valuations that Trump gave to State and Federal taxing authorities was substantially lower than valuations given to prospective creditors and putative business partners; and
H) The Department of Justice is investigating Trump’s unlawful removal and theft of Top-Secret documents and his transfer of the documents to the dictator's palace in South Florida.
The investigations showed, among other things, that many Trump officials lied to law enforcement authorities when they denied consulting with officials of the Russian government, and many Trump associates have been convicted of felonies. For example, Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, was convicted in connection with his unlawful receipt of over one million dollars in goods paid for by the Russian government. Manafort clearly knew that his receipt of these goods, for helping Trump win the 2016 election, was unlawful because Russia and Manafort tried to camouflage Manafort’s enrichment. Russia never wrote a single check which named Manafort as the payee. Instead, Russia gave money to the firms which gave Manafort goods. For example, one men’s clothing outlet in New York City got about one million dollars, from Russia, to deck Manafort out in a wardrobe that was massive, opulent and nothing short of princely. I don’t think Zsa Zsa Gabor or Jackie Kennedy had wardrobes as expensive as Manafort’s.
Nevertheless, Trump, the evil eye at the center of the storm, has never suffered any indictments. He remains relatively unscathed. Of course, most informed Americans know he is as guilty as sin, but most Americans are not informed. They don’t remember the particulars of the various charges and investigations. They only know one thing: Trump, like the covid virus, is an elusive tricky target, and try as they might, Trump’s antagonists always come up empty-handed.
Sure, the data establishing his guilt is always mounting ever higher, but the great mass of Americans haven’t the foggiest idea of what is going on. There are just too many investigations and facts to keep track of. No matter what the evidence shows, a substantial minority of the public are his obedient servants and sycophants. This is readily demonstrated by the numerous Republican primaries in which almost every single brave republican who opposed Trump has been excommunicated from the GOP fold. Indeed, Liz Cheney, the bravest Republican since Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who was the first Republican to stand up to Senator Joe Mc Carthy, was defeated in her recent Republican primary by a margin of more than two to one.
Of course, many Trump antagonists are always pulling their punches. Not surprisingly, some of the biggest softies are Democrats. For example, the Obama justice department, for reasons I have never been able to decipher, implicitly told the American people, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton was dirtier than Trump. In 2016, the Justice Department was suspiciously selective about which investigations it made public:
A) The Justice Department frankly said that it was investigating Hillary Clinton
B) Although the Justice Department was also investigating Trump for his collusion with Russia, the Justice Department kept mum about its investigation of Trump
C) RESULT: The American people concluded that Hillary Clinton was the villain.
From the very start, investigations against Trump never had the decisiveness of a fist; instead, the feds could only muster a flaccid, floundering hand. In this regard, the anti-Trumpers recalled the Jews of Germany who tried, harder than any of Europe’s Jews, to fit in with, and appease, the German, gentile majority. Indeed, for a time German Jews did not call themselves Jews for fear that such a blunt profession of faith might seem offensive; instead, they called themselves “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.”
In 2017, when Robert Mueller launched his investigation of Trump’s collaboration with Russia to deform the 2016 election, many Democrats thought they had finally found their white knight. However, the Mueller investigation, supposedly, concluded that Trump was neither innocent nor guilty of obstructing justice and that he did not collude with Russia to warp the 2016 election.
However, consider this passage from pages 6 and 7 of the Mueller report:
“Separately, on August 2, 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in New York City with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a “backdoor” way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump’s assent to succeed (were he to be elected President). They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting. Fall 2016. (Footnote 1)”
Russia used the information, provided by Manafort, in designing its scheme to use social media to alienate Clinton supporters. Among other things, the internal polling data that Trump gave the Russians showed that a lot of black support for Clinton was soft and irresolute. The Russians then designed ads on Facebook, ostensibly posted by African Americans in the United States, to tarnish Hillary. Russia succeeded and this was apparent even before the polls closed in Michigan because it was readily apparent that voter turnout in black neighborhoods in Detroit had nosedived.
The endless investigations, which never go anywhere, lead people to conclude that Trump’s antagonists either don’t have a valid case, or suffer from a sort of ineptitude or impotence and hence are not deserving of our respect, are simply a tribe of malcontented whiners and perennial dissenters, and that the legal system, and democracy itself, is a boring, tedious affair of never ending questions, investigations and no results, and that the Trumpian, fascistic way of doing things, concisely expressed by Rudy Guiliani when he said to the Trump Rioters, on January 6, 2021, “let’s have trial by combat,” makes for a more decisive and manly way of making political decisions.
This bears a frightening and uncanny similarity to what Hannah Arendt said about the causes of Hitlerian antisemitism in Europe. In her opus, “On the origins of totalitarianism,” she said that European antisemitism, which had existed since the onset of Christianity and its teaching that the Jews killed Jesus, reached a furious, febrile pitch of exterminatory madness in the Hitler years because anti semites believed that Jewish wealth, in the final analysis, was a paper tiger.
Although Eastern European Jews were, for the most part, poverty stricken, Jews, in Western and Central Europe, made amazing gains since the French Revolution and Napolean’s conquests, which led to the emancipation of the Jews in Western and Central Europe. After the end of the 18th century, when Jews became free to compete in the civil life of France, Germany and other Western and Central European nations, Jews swiftly saw their fortunes rise, and from the French Revolution, until the advent of Hitler, Jewish income, wealth and status skyrocketed.
However, in the Hitler era, anti semites concluded that Jewish wealth had distinct limitations. It did not translate into political power, and Jews could be eliminated, through murders and pogroms, upon the whim of any vodka-aroused mob. This was especially evident in Eastern Europe at the end of World War One.
After World War One, all of Russia was convulsed by a civil war pitting Red Russians (communists) against White Russians (anti-communists). The White Russians believed that the Jews were sympathetic to the communists and about half a million Jews were slaughtered, by the white Russians, between 1918 and about 1922. This showed that no matter how grand the Jews might have appeared, they were still, essentially, defenseless. That the most seminal thinkers of Europe were three Jews, Einstein, Freud and Marx, was of no consequence. When the rough and ribald yokels were in a sour mood, they could easily torch a Jewish shtetl (small town) and desecrate a Jewish cemetery.
Jewish wealth may have built lavish mansions, but those mansions were a hollow shell surrounding a people that was seemingly alone and bereft of physical defenses. The antisemitic hordes could not wait to scale those mansion walls and devour their prey.
Somehow, progressive lawyers and arms of government which have sought to vindicate that which is right and establish Trump’s guilt, are reminding me, more and more, of what Arendt called the impotence of Jewish money in Europe. Just as Jewish stature could not stop the locomotives sending Jews to the death and concentration camps of the Third Reich, American legal expertise seems so exasperatingly unable to put Trump in his place. And the more Trump’s guilt seems incontestable, the harder it is to convict him of anything. Every time Trump evades the law, people have less respect for the law, and Trump’s power to evade the law becomes even greater. This dynamic is the road to Berlin on the Potomac.
Even republicans who had once seemed to have heard of the enlightenment, have become positively antedeluvian. Lindsay Graham, who in 2000 supported John Mc Cain in the republican presidential primaries and seemed to think truthfulness was a good thing, has erupted with operatic idiocy, claiming that if Trump is indicted, “There will be riots in the streets.” This bizarre outburst reeks with Hitlerian contempt for legal processes and justice. He is saying that he does not care if legal processes find Trump is guilty because the brute forces of his confederates will show their contempt for legal processes and gleefully steal whatever they want. It is akin to the Hitlerian mobs lynching due process and reasoned discourse and directing a pack of wolves toward Jews hiding in cellars in Warsaw.
The Neanderthal rants of Lindsay Grahams are accompanied by recent judicial determinations that suggest that even the judiciary might be ready to chuck the law.
(Actually, this is nothing new. The judiciary very frequently twists and mars the law with unjustifiable contortions. For example, although the 14th amendment was designed to protect the freed slaves, until FDR threatened to pack the Court with more liberal judges, the 14th amendment was usually invoked only to annul and void statutes designed to protect workers, provide for maximum hours legislation and regulate the economy on the grounds that such statutes violated the due process rights of corporations. Although the due process clause was enacted to protect people, the Supreme Court ruled that for purposes of the 14th amendment, corporations are people too,)
For example, recent court decisions, regarding Trump’s confiscation of top-secret documents, are inexplicable and alarming. Although an affidavit, in support of a search warrant, is generally never released before an indictment is rendered, the Court ruled that in this case the affidavit in support of the search warrant of Mara Lago would be released. And today, September 5, 2022, the Court also ruled that a special master would be chosen to review the materials seized by law enforcement and that NONE of those documents could be used in any investigation until the Special Master completes its report. (And when will the Special Master finish his work ? Will it be after the election when the Republicans may take control of the House of Representative and the House tries to abort all investigations.)
Although informed people know that Trump must be stopped and must not be allowed to assume the helm of power in the 2024 election, far too many Americans are still solidly behind Trump, and his support might be hardening.
Only a minority of Americans support Trump, but Hitler seized control of Germany with only 37 percent of the vote, and Trump stooges are assuming power in statewide offices, in battleground states, to ensure that the votes will be counted the way Trump wants. In Arizona, Trump’s ally, Mark Finchem, won the republican primary for Secretary of State; in Nevada, Jim Marchant, a loyal Trumpist, is the republican nominee for Secretary of State; Trump-idolizer Kristina Karamo is the Republican pick in Michigan; and in Pennsylvania, trump-worshipper Doug Mastriano in the GOP pick for Governor. (In Pa., the governor picks the state official charged with tabulating and/or certifying the votes.)
I am not contending that these investigations and embryonic prosecutions should come to a halt. What I am saying is, for G-d’s sake, get it right. Fight like a soldier moving in for the kill. Trump’s liberty must be annulled, and his balls must be broken. However, everything I am hearing makes me grievously ill because all the reports suggest that our investigatory agencies are in the mood to do more whimpering than withering prosecution.
For example, the headline in today’s New York Times suggests that all investigations against Trump may be temporarily stopped because of the 60-day rule. The so-called 60-day rule provides that federal law enforcement authorities should suspend all prosecutions, 60 days before an election, if such activity may influence an election. On closer examination, we find that if the Feds eased up on Trump because of this so-called rule, they would probably be guilty of obstructing justice to aid Trump.
First, the rule is neither codified in a statute or a part of the common law. It is a custom that the Feds are free to abandon. Second, Trump is not on the ballot. Third, this seems like a sneaky trick to exonerate Trump: Why would they want to halt investigations until after the November election ? Are they waiting for a possible Republican takeover of the House of Representatives so they can enact a statute or resolution which will halt or seriously stymie all investigations against Trump.
All of this softness, on the part of Democrats, makes the Trumpers have even more contempt for democracy, and more intent on moving in for the kill, just as the softness of diplomatic, scholarly Jews made Hitler’s legions have even more contempt for Judaism and more intent on wiping us out.
Footnotes:
1) Pages 6 and 7 of the Mueller report, emphasis supplied, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6953307/LEOPOLD-FOIA-Mueller-Report-unredacted-Roger-Stone.pdf
Paul, thank you for your compliments
Wunkerful, I am glad you also agree that Trump is an essentially undemocratic, or even anti democratic, force
There is one aspect of Trump's malevolence that actually gives him more popularity. He is responsible for so many rotten deeds that today, in 2022, most people don't remember the rotten shit he pulled in 2016 and 2017. And so many americans are such first class dunces that by 2024 many Americans will have forgotten that he organized a Hitlerite putsch to prevent Biden from becoming president.
I hope the good guys win, for everybody's sake. Another good read, David!