He’s baaack.
No, not Michael Myers from “Halloween.” (Although in the cinematic universe, does any franchise ever end if there is a nickel left to be squeezed from it?)
But I digress as I digest. No, it is The Former Guy (TFG) to whom I refer. And like the evil villain in most franchises, the former President (45) keeps reanimating, despite the fact the air seems to be leaking from the balloon HE has floated over our country for the past eight years.
No, what is giving me that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach is that the Trump legal team is once again trying to throw a monkey wrench into the Justice Department’s investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Team Trump is intervening in a subpoena issued to former Vice President Mike Pence by the U.S. Department of Justice. Trump lawyers are trying to claim an executive privilege not even granted to Richard Nixon and his tape recordings while Nixon still occupied the Oval Office, let alone years after 45 so destructively left it and D.C.
In that time, dozens of books about Jan. 6 and the bipartisan January 6th Committee’s report have been published — including a book by Pence himself.
I don’t understand why TFG doesn’t comprehend that much of the nation watched him try to overthrow the government in real time on our huge flat-screen TVs as we sat at home, horrified, at the violent coup we were seeing.
Never before in the nation’s history has one president tried to block another from his legal right to become the next president after the results of a free and fair election.
January 6th, 2021, was that day.
Please, if you are going to leave me a comment that Joe Biden isn’t the current legitimate president … just don’t. That’s simply not true.
What is true is that TFG is the most criminal president we have known in the history of the nation. He should have been impeached for any number of reasons, not the smallest of which is violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution for the foreign money payments that flowed to his company from his now defunct Washington D.C. hotel.
We know it was a criminal enterprise to take advantage of his office since he unloaded the lease for it as soon as he departed for Florida. (If he lost money on the deal, chalk that up to bad management, not how many dollars countries like Saudi Arabia spent there.)
Just ask yourself why the Saudis are holding their 2023 LIV golf events at three Trump National golf resorts this year; and tell me he still isn’t making money off his time in office based on a relationship with them that wasn’t as strong pre-presidency as it was during and post-presidency.
All it took was looking the other way when Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman decided to kidnap a legal U.S. alien resident — Jamal Khashoggi — on foreign soil, torture and dismember him because Khashoggi dared to criticize his former government.
I guess gore for golf is a fair foreign trade exchange, right Greg Norman?
Florida is where I wish TFG would just stay, eating his Big Macs; playing his (whoops, I cheated, too bad!) golf; sitting on the veranda chatting up the rest of the 70-plus crowd who feed off being in his presence. Throwing ketchup onto blank canvases and selling them along with his worthless NFTs.
It is way past time some smart lawyer somewhere — be it Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis here in Georgia, New York City’s D.A. Alvin Bragg, or Special Counsel Jack Smith of the U.S. Justice Department — decides that the greater risk is to not charge TFG himself, and continue to settle for the protective layer of minions he has mobbed up around himself.
I understand holding him to account may be a great danger to the country from his radical fascist fan base; but the greater threat is allowing him back into the White House, holding the nuclear codes in his tiny little hands and stuffing them in the linen closet for a White House maid to find.
Yes, TFG jumped out there first to announce his 2024 candidacy. Yes, we have read his barbs about his purported rival for the Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (or, as 45 would say, “DeSanctimonious”). Yes, he has given a paternal nod to former South Carolina Governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to throw her hat into the 2024 candidate ring as he knows she cannot win, regardless. (So does he talk her into being his VP running mate instead? Possibly.)
Please: there are myriad legal reasons to stop it all from continuing to happen — now.
Meanwhile I am starting to stockpile the Tums to go atop my daily dose of Omeprazole in case 2024 turns into the TFG reflux redux I so dread.
As for my political party, I advise it to get its act together and do what any good Avenger franchise would do … Assemble! On the same page, please, my Democratic amigos and amigas — Rápido!
