Another Trump legal jeopardy blockbuster, give me a break

 By Hal Brown

As recently as 1995 some prisons required inmates to break rocks. Not exactly blocks but close enough for my blog story. 

Click above to enlarge image

Donald Trump, if he ever does end up incarcerated won't be forced to break rocks. He'd be lucky to have time outside to play with his little putter.

Once upon a time in our memories of the 1980's we all had video players and because they dominated the market most of us frequented Blockbuster stores to rent our tapes or DVD's. Now there's only one left in the country and it happens to be in my state of Oregon in the town of Bend. 

The word "blockbuster" means a thing of great power or size, in particular a movie, book, or other product that is a great commercial success: for example: the latest Hollywood blockbuster. In the 1980's and 1990's we had true blockbusters like the Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Terminator, and Die Hard movies and sequels. 

Apropos to Donald Trump, both the book and movie adaption of "All The President's Men" were blockbusters.

This morning I looked at the website Raw Story and this is what I saw:

Click to read article

Not only is this legal setback described as a blockbuster but it is referred to not merely as a big blow to his 2024 run, but a big, big blow.

What , then, is this gargantuan legal setback?

From the article:

A brief from the Department of Justice firmly stating that Donald Trump does not have "absolute immunity" is nothing less than a "blockbuster" and will open the door to a flood of lawsuits to be filed against the former president as he makes his third run for the Oval Office.

That is the opinion of former prosecutor Charles Colemen Jr. during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show" early Saturday morning.

Coleman goes on (my emphasis added):

"A blockbuster," Coleman immediately shot back. "The decision cannot be more important or come at a worse time for Donald Trump. You are talking about someone who is looking forward to 2024 and trying to, as we were just talking about in your last segment, now, another challenge to Joe Biden to be president again, and he has to potentially deal with lawsuits from Capitol police officers as well as Congresspeople who feel like they've put them in danger with his rhetoric around January Six and what happened." " 

This is a big, big blow to Donald Trump and significant news," he added. "Because it opens the proverbial floodgates for lawsuits

Raw Story is my go-to website for breaking news and along with Salon and the OpEd sections of The Washington Post and New York Times, for original opinion. The title of the "blockbuster" article used the words of a legal expert so it was accurate, but reading their story was still a disappointment.

Charles Coleman is a legal analyst on MSNBC. He is a former federal prosecutor and civil rights attorney.  He spent 3 1/2 years as a senior assistant district attorney in the Kings County DA office. He has also served as a senior trial lawyer and civil litigation attorney for the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Reference)

I have no problem with his credentials. What does bother me aside from the words he used being part of the Raw Story title getting my hopes up is that he was really engaging in wishful thinking hyperbole.

I was going to paraphrase the saying about going form one's lips or mouth to God's ears to say from Coleman's mouth to Lady Justice's ears and make an illustration. Then I discovered that both Lady Justice's eyes and ears are covered.

What would I describe as a blockbuster and a big, big legal blow to Trump? 

The first thing that comes to mind is something along the lines of the Nixon White House tapes. But that was then and this is now. Those were audio tapes. Today, considering the nothing burger the Access Hollywood recording was, I wonder if a series of more compelling videos of Trump exposing all of his lies and felonies would be his undoing.

Certainly this could be described as blockbuster news, and I'll accept that this would represent a legal setback. Unfortunately, I'd have to equivocate on making a judgment as to whether this would inevitably lead to Trump deciding to abandon his attempt to be reelected. I'd give it a 50/50 chance.

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I'm still considering joining Truth Social

  By Hal Brown

I was ready to open a Truth Social account and try to post an abridged version of my anti-Trump and anti-DeSantis blog making it into an over-the-top tribute to Trump. I was even going to open a new free blog in an attempt to get Trump to "re-Truth" it. 

I thought that I might get him to start using Ron DeSnoozer as a nickname and then I could take credit for it and direct people to my actual blog. I opened a new dedicated email and that worked for step one of the verification but then in order to complete registering I needed a phone number which they would verify as step two. I tried some fake phone numbers I found online but none of them worked. I wasn't about to give them one of my two real phone numbers. I could still buy a $20 burner phone and try t complete my Truth Social verification with that.

This is how the blog would look under the illustration above.

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I hope President Trump  picks up the nickname Ron DeSooozer for his desperate rival. I think it is the best one yet. 

DeSantis makes the news by being an anti-woke warrior, like he can claim title to being a warrior of any kind, by promulgating one pissant policy after another. 

He stands before podiums with a plethora of cardboard signs and in his dull as dirt style announces his latest executive action.

DeSnoozer needs to stand behind his cardboard signs because he's nothing but a cardboard cutout of himself.

All Donald Trump has to do is be himself whether in a small group, for example showing his compassion in E. Palestine to residents abandoned to breathe in toxic fumes and drink poisoned water by the Biden administration, or he can address huge cheering rally crowds without a teleprompter for more than an hour. 

He never has to remind his audience what his message is with a sign on the podium. All he needs his the dignified presidential seal showing America who the greatest president in modern history is, and who will go down as one of the greatest presidents of all time.

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

Above: Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey

Currently I depend on various websites to report on what Trump posts on his Truth Social platform. For example Raw Story has a story about a particularly unhinged and wack-a-toon post:

Trump obviously hoped to make money from Truth Social.

He also no doubt wanted bragging rights about how many millions of followers he had there compared to when he was on Twitter.

The failure to achieve these goals have turned out to be irrelevant because Trump now has his own megaphone. He totally controls it. While not everything he posts there is widely shared in the media he can throw random shit at the wall and see what sticks in the media.  

Trump isn't on Twitter. Elon Musk, no doubt wanting him to start tweeting again to boost Twitter's statistics, reinstated him. His most recent tweet is from January 8, 2021 when he was supposedly permanently banned.

I doubt Trump would go back to making Twitter tweets because he has an agreement with Truth Social to post there six hours before he posts anywhere else. Not only that, but he would have to admit that Truth Social failed and Elon Musk had more business acumen than he did.

Just as all major media outlets have staff assigned to watching Fox News and keeping up with other right-wing media, and finding tweets to add to articles which are relevant to the subject being covered, they have staff assigned to monitoring Truth Social. It's nice work if you can get it, and can stand watching Tucker Carlson if you're assigned to Fox News, since you can do it from home.  

I could get on Truth Social for free. I could watch Fox News. I could check out all the online right-wing websites. I probably would come up with ideas for what I hope would be an original and perhaps particularly snarky take on something for this blog.

This would mean devoting a lot of time suffering through watching and reading, to put it bluntly, a lot of crap. I am retired and nobody has decided offer to pay me to do this, plus if they did it would have to be lot of money for me to even agree to devote a few hours a day to doing this.

If I joined the platform, aside from writing about Trump's Truth Social posts, I might wile away some time screwing around with Trump by replying to his posts with over-the-top fawning replies dripping with thinly veiling sarcasm aimed at stroking his ego. I wouldn't be critical of him, what's the fun in that? He'd probably never see my posts. All that would accomplish is trying to see if I could get kicked off the platform and that would only get me a subject for one blog.

The fun of flippant fawning would be to try to get Trump to "re-Truth" (his version of a re-tweet) a reply he thinks is complementary to something he posts when in fact it comes from someone who thinks he might be gullible enough to believe I am a member of his cult.

Therefore, here's my decision: 

Sorry, MSNBC, Raw Story, HUFFPOST, Daily Beast, et. al, I'm not going to accept bundles of cash to be one of your work-from-home right-wing media monitors. Besides, I figure most of you are using interns to do this.

Tempted as I am, I won't join Truth Social, and "truth" be told, part of the reason is that I am a little afraid I might enjoy posting there so much I'd become addicted to this useless endeavor.