The idea that Donald Trump would knock over the justice and treasury departments for $1.776 billion, and then, back at his Mar-a-Lago hideout, split the loot with the January 6th Hole in the Capitol Wall Gang is wishful thinking; Trump has only ever thought of himself as the sole victim of the Biden administration’s injustices.
All those patriotic defecators on Nancy Pelosi’s desk were never anything more than MAGA poster children, to make the point that Trump is more Robin Hood than Willy Sutton—that he robbed his own government as if operating on behalf of the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Note that in the original lawsuit (Trump v. Trump), there is no mention of the holy warriors who marched to the sounds of grievance clichés on January 6th—just a lot of hooey about how the leak of Donald Trump’s tax returns over fifteen years caused him $10 billion in damages while in this same period his normal income tax payment was in the range of $750 a year (that’s seven hundred and fifty dollars and no cents).
+++
Had that heist gone as planned (Donny’s Eleven?), Trump would have awarded Trump $10 billion in damages for all the pain and suffering he has had to endure for being outed in the New York Times as a pretender whose Boardwalk Empire was little more than a studio green screen.
Instead, Trump’s lawyers, as always, made a hash of the lawsuit filing—missing that the statute of limitations had run on his claims and that, well, there was something unseemly about an American president robbing his own bank for ten big ones.
Hence, the rushed, overnight “settlement” (Trump paying Trump $1.776 billion instead of the desired $10 billion) and the drawing room fiction that Trump wasn’t in the con game to add more gold embroidery to his toilets but was suing himself so that all the victims of Biden’s “judicial weaponization” could be made whole.
+++
As best I can tell, the only “victims” of the Biden administration’s judicial incompetence were average Americans who wanted Trump held accountable for the many crimes of his first administration plus his many instances of sexual violence.
Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, however, slow-walked the obvious Trump prosecutions, thought from the morning of January 7, 2021 it was clear to every American with a television set that Trump had marched his fascisti to the Capitol to hang the Vice President and disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Plus, there were all those state secrets stashed in the steam room at Mar-a-Lago, easy pickings for any FSB or Mossad agents moonlighting there as club waiters.
Pretty soon, Garland was up against the 2024 presidential election, when it would have looked like vote tampering if he had sent Mafia Don to the big house.
Maybe the legally astute member of Congress, Jamie Raskin, can formulate a class action suit on behalf of all aggrieved Americans, and claim back the purloined $1.776 billion on the grounds that Trump should have been in jail come the 2024 election and not on the lam to spew more hate speech in the guise of campaign rhetoric.
+++
Needless to say, the American people will have no more chance of collecting on Garland’s miscarriages of justice than could Sacco and Vanzetti, for the simple reason that Trump himself will appoint the five henchmen to divide the swag.
Something tells me that the committee might well be more me-time for the likes of family fixers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and that the last thing The Distributors will have in mind is to compensate members of the Trump opposition.
Imagine, too, Trump’s delight and surprise when his hand-picked remittance men decide to reward the long-suffering president with, say, $1 billion for all the emotional anguish he suffered after his minions failed to string up Mike Pence.
+++
As part of Trump’s settlement with himself—onanism elevated to constitutional precedent?—the Department of Justice also agreed to drop all tax audits of Trump, his sons, and their family companies (the great successor corporations to Trump Steaks and Trump University).
Note that Melania wasn’t party to this settlement, an indication that Trump doesn’t hide assets in his wife’s name or perhaps simply that the two parties never speak.
The audit immunity was added at the last minute (after presidential rage?) as an addendum to the bogus settlement (made phony by the fact that the Justice Department is rewarding individuals who were not even plaintiffs in the original complaint and is dispersing funds without congressional authorization).
Whether this papal (self-)indulgence will cover taxes filed in the future isn’t clear, although you can be sure that Trump’s own interpretation of what he granted himself is a self-perpetuating apostolic tax pardon good until the Book of Revelations is realized (to go along with his Supreme Court blessings of eternal immunity from criminal prosecution).
We have no idea of what the audit get-out-of-jail card is worth to Trump today—I have seen estimates of a hundred million dollars, but that seems low—but you can be sure that once it is clear that dealings with the Trump Organization are tax-audit free, there will no shortage of loan sharks, money launderers, arms dealers, payday lenders, and three-card monte dealers lining up to do business with the Capo dei capi (the boss of bosses), whose turf now includes an entire country (not simply a few square blocks around Bay Ridge).
The post The Commander-in-Thief appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
