Copeland's Corner: April 5, 2023
The bully was now just the frightened little coward he’s always been.
Well, what most of us hope is only the first day of reckoning has finally arrived. Donald J. Trump became the first American President to be indicted in criminal court on 34 counts of illegal conduct in Manhattan yesterday. If things play out as they appear to be, he’ll soon be charged in the State of Georgia for attempting to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election and he’ll be indicted in Federal Court in the Mar-A-Lago documents scandal. If there’s any true justice, he’ll also be held criminally responsible for inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection that killed five people, injured dozens of Capitol Police officers and threatened to destroy our democracy.
Trump has spent his life lying, cheating, and bullying everyone who was not of use to him in the moment. He has lived into his 70s without ever being called to account for any of his behavior. Ever. Even he can’t believe it. According to an NBC news reporter who was with him during the booking process, when he was being fingerprinted, he said, “Are they really going to arrest me?”
The bully was now just the frightened little coward he’s always been.
In court, the threatening and the intimidation and bullying were gone. He’s literally been involved in hundreds of civil lawsuits in which he pays off plaintiffs, intimidates them or threatens to drag the litigation out so long that the person he owes money to will end up bankrupting himself to get it. That’s been his experience with the justice system all his life. Not this time.
There is no plaintiff or plaintiff’s attorney to bully. No judge he can smear or is in any way beholding to him. He is now a criminal defendant and is being treated as such. The system will work how the system works and there’s nothing he can do about it. That was most clear when the blustery tyrant uttered a quiet, “Not Guilty” during his arraignment. He can play the deranged showman all he wants outside the courtroom. Inside the criminal court, it’s a whole different story.
After the arraignment, he did in fact address the lunatics, racists and bigoted sycophants who hang on his every utterance. He berated the judge in his criminal case and the judge’s wife. He went after prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Bragg’s wife. He tried to portray the special prosecutor looking into the document scandal and the insurrection as somehow “unhinged.” Desperate words from a truly desperate and terrified man.
While I’ll be the first to admit that I’m thoroughly enjoying his comeuppance, I remain disheartened that millions of my fellow countrymen will still vote for the man if he’s the Republican nominee. I expect the Klansmen and the Proud Boys and the Neo-Nazis to continue to goosestep behind him. That’s no surprise. What is surprising to me is the number of normally (at least I thought) rational people who are willing to compartmentalize his racism, his sexism, his calls for violence, his xenophobia and his support for the physical abuse of women, because they like his views on taxes or immigration or some other selfish issue that will benefit themselves personally. Everyone else be damned. This is the most sickening part to me.
I grew up in the post-Civil Rights era thinking that we had made real racial progress in this country, only to hear the leader of one of this nation’s two major political parties refer to an African American prosecutor as an “animal” and his party either vocally agrees with him or they remain silent and refuse to condemn him.
People say that Donald Trump divided this country. I disagree. I think that Donald Trump showed us who a lot of people truly are. Trump just made it okay to say the quiet part out loud.