We are the ones we’ve been waiting for
“The man is mentally unstable,” I told my parents over dinner at their kitchen table in 2016. I could not bring myself to believe that Americans were crazy enough to elect a president as unfit as Donald Trump so obviously was. But H.L. Mencken was right a hundred years ago. I don’t wish to make that mistake again.
Nonetheless, Republican primary results and the drip-drip of bad legal and financial news for Trump and his 2024 campaign seems to indicate he is losing support. Perhaps it is Trump fatigue. Perhaps his small-donor base is tapped out; his fundraising is ebbing. Perhaps Earth 1 is finally breaking through to the least-committed members of the cult.
Trump lately is alternately begging for money and boasting that he doesn’t need any. The Biden-Harris campaign and the DNC are lapping Trump and Team MAGA. If fundraising is a measure of support, Trump’s is slowly sinking. Then again, is still costs nothing to cast a vote, and MAGA minions are busily plotting to steal the fall election. With that caveat….
“It makes me wonder about all those stories telling us how unenthusiastic Democrats are about Biden’s reelection,” writes Eugene Robinson. “I’m starting to think that maybe — hear me out — we should pay less attention to what people say and more to what they actually do.”
The Biden campaign can be excused for a bit of chest-thumping. “If Donald Trump put up these kinds of numbers on ‘The Apprentice,’” communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement, “he’d fire himself.”
At the moment, of course, campaign cash might be the least of Trump’s money concerns. His lawyers told a New York court this week that the former president has been unable to secure a bond that would give him time to appeal a $454 million judgment against him and his company for fraud.
Trump approached more than 30 companies about underwriting the bond, his lawyers said, but all refused to accept real estate as collateral — and real estate is the source of most of Trump’s wealth. The insurance firm Chubb did underwrite a $91 million bond for Trump to appeal a separate civil judgment (for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll) but decided to steer clear of the fraud case.
New York Attorney General Letitia James could theoretically begin seizing Trump’s assets as soon as next week if he is unable to secure and post a bond. It would surely be galling for Trump to lose his gaudy triplex apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where he famously descended the escalator in 2015 to announce he was running for president.
Declaring bankruptcy is the one remedy guaranteed to keep the wolf away from Trump’s lavishly gilded door, but he has reportedly ruled it out. That would likely give him years of breathing room on the massive fines, which Trump should know given his past: He has used bankruptcy six times largely to get out from under his foolish and ruinous foray into the casino business in Atlantic City.
Even so, former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig writes at New York Magazine that the chances of Trump going to trial before the election on any of his pending cases are sinking too. He gives the Manhattan District Attorney’s hush money case a 70 percent chance of going to trial. The other three? Twenty percent or less.
If you are expecting some deus ex machina to end Trump’s reign of error, don’t kid yourself. Pay less attention to what people say and more to what you are actually doing to end it.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for to save the republic.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.