Six Things Every American Needs to Know About Trump

 

When it comes to Trump, piling on is a civic duty. We cannot afford to allow him even the slightest chance of retaking power. He needs to be overwhelmed.

Simon Rosenberg — the veteran political analyst who famously predicted that the Red Wave of 2020 would be the Republican debacle it turned out to be — is urging a practical, grassroots approach to the problem. He is openly optimistic about the Democrats’ prospects this year, but he wants us all to be smart about it.

He's especially concerned about getting information to the depressing percentage of the public who have no real grasp of who Trump really is, let alone the clear and present danger he represents. Right now, they are not paying attention, but Rosenberg wants us to be ready when they are, and to have at our command “The Six Things Americans Are Going To Learn About Trump They Didn’t Know in 2020.”

There’s nothing new here, but seeing it in one place is valuable. Think of it as a starter set of Trump’s most monstrous adventures, packaged for easy consumption. Some were actual crimes, some just should have been.

Here, I’ve taken the Six Things and riffed on them — my own variations on Rosenberg’s themes. Feel free to draw on his, or mine, or make up your own. The point is to pile on.

I’ve not ranked these by severity, because degrees of awfulness are hard to quantify. But here they are — six possible answers to the question “What is Donald Trump?”

1. Trump is a rapist

He has always been a misogynistic slimeball, so who knows which of his sexual conquests rises to the level of rape. Still, there’s no doubt whatsoever that E. Jean Carroll was raped. The fact that her legal victory came through the civil court system, rather than the criminal, doesn’t matter. Dozens of other women, including his first wife, have come forward with similar stories.

Voters need to know that Trump is a sexual predator going back many decades. If the legal system isn’t fully on top of this, that doesn’t mean we can’t be. We don’t need a courtroom to call a rapist a rapist.

2. Trump is a fraud

The State of New York has ruled that Trump’s business practices have been massively fraudulent for years. He inflated his assets when he needed a loan — which was often — then he undervalued those same assets to cheat on his taxes.

The cases were open-and-shut, and he is now on the court-ordered hook for roughly half a billion dollars. His lawyers can delay the penalties all they want, but there’s no changing the verdict. The courts have declared him a fraud. Voters need to decide if that’s what they want in a president.

3. Trump is for sale

Trump ran a pay-to-play administration, and anyone who wanted favors knew it. A profusion of public documentation shows that he accepted millions in what are, in effect, bribes from foreign interests.

The money he’s taken from the Chinese, Saudis, Emiratis, and others is in the many millions. The funds were laundered through sales of Trump-owned condominiums, leases of his office space, inflated prices at his hotels, and Chinese trademarks for his daughter’s tacky product line.

The emoluments clause of the Constitution was written specifically with a Donald Trump in mind. As far as we know, the Justice Department has not stepped in to enforce it, but the case is there to be made. We’ll probably have to make it ourselves.

4. Trump is an insurrectionist

Jan 6 was a conspiracy to nullify the last election, full stop. It was planned by Trump and executed by his flunkies. The House Committee laid out the entire plot in their hearings in 2022. If those hearings had been a trial, a guilty verdict would have been virtually automatic.

As it is, Jack Smith has evidence so damning, Trump’s inquisitors on the Supreme Court have felt the need to interfere in the case, on embarrassingly specious grounds. So it’s up to us to amplify the abundant evidence that’s in the public record. We don’t need a verdict, or even a trial, to make sure people know he tried to bring down the country.

5. Trump is a traitor

The technical definition of treason might not apply here, since the country was not at war when Trump stole government secrets on his way out the door in 2021. But the word ‘traitor’ is more flexible, and there can be no doubt that Trump is a traitor to this nation.

He stole dozens of boxes of classified documents, including national security secrets. He has reputedly jeopardized intelligence assets — both human and technological — and we have no way of detecting which of them he’s compromised. He is known to have shared secrets with people not authorized to see them, and it’s possible that he sold them to enemy regimes. He is not above using them for blackmail purposes.

The corrupt judge, Aileen Cannon, seems bent on delaying his trial until after the election, but we can’t wait. Voters need to know what Trump is accused of, what the case is against him, and why he’s not already in jail.

6. Trump destroyed abortion rights

Trump’s role in the fall of Roe v. Wade might be a crime against humanity, but it’s not, regrettably, against the law. Even so, he and his corrupt Supreme Court handed us a key tactical advantage, in that abortion is now the issue most likely to bring him down.

I’ve written extensively on this subject, so all I will add here is that Trump is still bragging about his part in this moral atrocity, and he seems to have no clue what it’s doing to him, or to his party. This is a gift to us, and we need to batter him with it.

There’s more, of course

The Six Things are all legally fraught, which makes them useful for combating ignorance about Trump. But they barely scratch the surface of the myriad crimes, corrupt acts, and assorted perfidies for which he may never be held accountable.

So while he might well be a convicted felon by the end of next week, his biggest crime by far — the mass murder of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Covid victims — will likely go unpunished. His appalling mismanagement of the pandemic was a unique blend of malevolence and incompetence, and it’s now being actively forgotten by Republicans. We need to remember.

Trump will be dominating the history books for at least the next half century, and what gets written in those books will be directly related to what happens in the next six months.

I suggest we pile on.