How In The Hell Is This Even Real?

34 felony counts, more than 11,000 documents, a recording of attempted election fraud, found liable for sexual assault, yet he's going to be President again?

November 22, 2024

Seriously though.

What in the hell?

Just read this:

Additional classified materials were found at an off-site office, a storage unit and at Mar-a-Lago, Howell wrote, noting Trump’s lawyers found a box with four documents that included classified materials in a Mar-a-Lago closet.

An empty folder and a “mostly empty folder marked ‘Classified Evening Summary’” was found in Trump’s bedroom at Mar-a-Lago, Howell noted, remarking, “No excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.”

Howell’s ruling also asserts Trump purposely obstructed the government’s investigation after it subpoenaed him to turn over all the remaining classified documents in his possession, saying the government “sufficiently demonstrated” Trump violated the obstruction statute by showing he “intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents bearing classification markings” from his attorneys.

And then read this:

Trump asked Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won this state."

"What I knew is that we didn't have any votes to find," Raffensperger said. "That was an accurate count that had been certified."

Trump suggested Raffensperger could be subject to criminal liability for his role in the matter.

Schiff pointed to a tweet from pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood from a few weeks before the phone call, saying that Trump gave Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp "every chance to get it right.

Oh and finally, this:

As he later summed it up in August, when he dismissed Trump's countersuit: "It accordingly is the 'truth,' as relevant here, that Mr. Trump digitally raped Ms. Carroll."

Please keep in mind that all three stories are about the same person, a person who has just been re-elected to be the President of the United States of America.

So…what the hell?

As I was penning this article, I received word that sentencing in Trump’s criminal trial has been canceled indefinitely. This is the case where Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records.

Now I am not a lawyer and I have no formal legal training so I’m not going to attempt to break down what’s legal and what isn’t, mostly because I don’t think the law has much to do with it.

If this were merely a matter of the law then Trump would have been held accountable long before he was ever in office.

This story from 2016 included hundreds of contractors who said Trump stiffed on paying them over the years. In the 1970’s Trump’s employees would mark lease applications with a “C” if the applicant was African-American. After, Trump failed to report this had happened to casino regulators, which could have prevented him from getting or maintaining his casino license.

So here we are, with a career criminal who has suffered almost zero consequences for his litany of documented, provable criminal behavior assuming the highest office in the land and presumably eager to engage in far more. After all, who is going to stop him?

Certainly not Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for AG. Certainly not a Supreme Court who has ruled that Presidents can’t be held criminally accountable for “official acts” (whatever that even means). Certainly not an electorate who put him back in office despite all of this information being readily available for anyone to look at.

I think the premise that this is all due to MAGA being a cult-like structure and Christian Nationalism being a unified force for the right-wing of American politics and a large media conglomerate from Fox News to Jordan Peterson and X (formerly Twitter) misses one key thing:

All of these forces together see themselves as being counter-culture. They hold up Trump not only as their leader but as a symbol they can rally around which is anti-establishment. I know, it doesn’t make sense to me either given that Trump is a real estate developer, Vance is a venture capitalist, and Musk is literally the richest man in the world. Fox News paid a $787 million fine for parroting Trump’s election fraud lies, then went right on lying for him in ways they couldn’t be held financially liable for.

This theme that Trump is somehow going to hold the powerful to account has been there since the beginning. Qanon, possibly the dumbest movement to ever exist, held the premise that Trump was the beacon of normalcy in a sea of sexual perversion. At any moment, they claimed, he would be throwing open the doors and exposing a vast network of child sex trafficking that was hovering just below the surface of our society. All the while completely ignoring that Trump spent over a decade as the best friend of an actual convicted child sex trafficker.

No, the real enemy is an establishment of Liberal elite who want evil things, like children to eat lunch at school and trans people to exist and everyone to have healthcare. The absolute horror.

However, you can’t deny it worked. Trump is the counter-culture hero of a large segment of Americans. Large enough that they propelled him back to the Presidency despite all we’ve covered here.

It would be shocking if it weren’t so incredibly on-brand.