The disgraced, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump, facing 81 criminal indictments, has always been a master of projection. As have his acolytes. Hillary Clinton, he insisted in 2016, allegedly stole classified information (she did not), and for that and other reasons, we should “lock her up.” Amoral Trump enablers like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn, and so many more, echoed those charges. Of course, Trump is also charged with spiriting away classified information—no matter how long incompetent pro-Trump Judge Aileen Cannon stalls that trial.
In closing arguments in a New York courtroom on Tuesday, Trump attorney Todd Blanche called the chief witness against him, former Trump toady Michael Cohen, the “GLOAT”—as in “Greatest Liar of All Time.” Cohen is a piker next to his former employer. It was just more Trumpian projection.
Blanche failed, spectacularly. Waiting for a verdict, over the last few days, I watched even legal analysts I respected suggest Trump would get off on at least a few counts. He did not. He was convicted on all 34 felony counts.
Trump is the official GLOAT.
Trump read some words after, but they were not his best words. “This was a disgrace, a rigged trial, a rigged, disgraceful trial,” he said after the verdict. “We didn’t do a thing wrong. I’m an innocent man. Our whole country is rigged right now by the Biden administration. We’re a nation in serious decline!”
It was a gorgeous late-May day in New York. But while accursed journalists like me were waiting for a verdict in only one of of the five criminal court cases against Donald Trump in the last year, I also watched MSNBC introduce a segment on President Joe Biden’s trip to Philadelphia with the chyron, “The Other Campaign.”
Joe Biden is the sitting president, people.
The actual “other” campaign is being waged by a criminal who was sitting in a courtroom where he was ultimately convicted. When we write the history of the end of democracy, well, I’m keeping notes. Good journalism would have been focusing on what Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were doing today, not a quiet jury.
Acting like Biden—the president, a former vice president, a 30-plus-year senator, father of three—is a sideshow, an also-ran, an understudy, perhaps unworthy, is so beneath the competence of journalists, even journalists I admire—I think we’ve all been dumbed down. Or beaten down.
I’ll be honest: I resisted being assigned to this crazy story. But even we at The Nation had to cover it. So why not me? I truly thought he’d be acquitted.
But Trump was convicted. The rule of law prevailed. We have so much more work to do, before November, and we’ll do it. I’m going to go out on the streets of New York right now where I can hear people shouting!
