Poor, Poor Pitiful Donald Trump - Rob Horowitz
Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Poor, Poor Pitiful Donald Trump - Rob Horowitz
The public has been treated to an especially large dose of the former president’s amped-up whining over the past month or so. It was the central feature of his nearly daily media availabilities conducted in front of the Manhattan courthouse location of his recently concluded trial. In the wake of his conviction this past Thursday on all 34 felony counts, Mr. Trump is sounding even more like an ineloquent King Lear.
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After hearing all the evidence, a jury of his peers found the former president guilty of deliberately falsifying business records to hide an illegal scheme to prevent information that he believed would be damaging from surfacing before the 2016 election. Since the verdict, Mr. Trump has referred to himself as a “political prisoner” proclaimed that “people should have a little sorrow for him” “called our nation a “fascist state” due to the verdict, and repeatedly stated that the trial was “rigged.” On Sunday’s Fox and Friends, he strongly implied that if he was given a prison sentence, there would be violence. “I think it would be tough for the public to take,” the former president told the show’s hosts. “You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”
Mr. Trump has also enlisted his MAGA allies, those under consideration to be vice president and state and local Republican officials to trash the verdict and the judicial system, falsely saying that Joe Biden is behind it all. These New York state charges were brought by the Manhattan DA based on an investigation that began well before Joe Biden was president. Additionally, Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from this same scheme in which the sentencing judge said that his actions were directed by Donald Trump. Those federal charges were brought by Trump’s Justice Department—not Biden’s.
The extent to which Donald Trump has made embracing his supposed mistreatment and victimhood a litmus test for Republicans can be seen in the fierce criticism of Larry Hogan. The current Republican candidate for US Senate in Maryland and popular two-term former governor’s apparently unpardonable sin was tweeting a statement in advance of the verdict that in the pre-Trump days would be seen as unremarkable, simple common sense. “Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process,” tweeted Hogan. “At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
The response of top Trump campaign official Cris LaCiivita to this anodyne tweet: “You just ended your campaign.” This sentiment was echoed by Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and RNC Co-Chair, Lara Trump on Sunday’s CNN State of the Union. She told Casey Hunt that based on that statement, Hogan “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and quite frankly, anybody in America,” and refused to reaffirm support for his candidacy.
Donald Trump’s calling an outcome “rigged’ when it doesn’t go his way, of course, is a long-playing record. When he was nominated for an Emmy 3 years in a row as the host of The Apprentice and never won, for instance, he called the Emmys rigged. In a far more serious matter, Donald Trump still insists he won the 2020 presidential election, refusing to this day to acknowledge Joe Biden is the duly elected president, despite all the evidence to the contrary and losing more than 60 court cases.
As his self-inflicted legal troubles have mounted, however, his claims have grown increasingly unhinged and unmoored from reality. The most troubling recent example was the former president falsely claiming that President Biden had authorized his assassination in advance of the search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. In a fundraising appeal, Mr. Trump asserted that Biden was “locked and loaded and ready to take me out.” In an all-caps screed on Truth Social, he proclaimed that, Biden's DOJ "AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
The absurd basis for Trump’s reckless, dangerous and untruthful assertions was a willful misinterpretation of a recently unsealed policy memo in his misuse of classified documents case. The memo’s purpose is the exact opposite of what the former president and some of his allies asserted: to limit the use of force. It’s routinely included in search warrants executed by the FBI, including the one executed for a documents’ search at the Biden residence.
Polls taken since his guilty verdict show that most Americans still aren’t buying Mr. Trump’s victim act and have a different view of his recent conviction. Fifty-four percent of voters approve of the guilty verdict, according to a Morning Consult poll. Among the so-called double-haters--people with negative views of both Trump and Biden-who many analysts believe are the most important swing group in the electorate, 65% say the verdict was correct and 67% say Trump should end his presidential campaign, according to an ABC News/Ipsos Poll.
Great leaders accept responsibility for their mistakes and through self-reflection learn and grow from them. They take a hard and critical look in the mirror, keeping their focus on serving others not themselves. The only time Donald Trump apparently looks in the mirror is to admire his own reflection. The only one he truly ever fights for is himself.
That fundamental lack of character underlies Mr. Trump’s rampant dishonesty and reckless law-breaking. It makes him manifestly unfit for the Oval Office.