Some enterprising entrepreneur ought to find a way of collecting a cover charge for the entertainments that the Get Trump concession is currently offering the public free and for nothing.
At the moment, the first of my two favorite forays into the twilight zone are the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. Carroll claims that sometime, she cannot remember exactly when, but it was about thirty years ago, Trump sexually assaulted her in a fitting room at the swank department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. A New York jury found Trump guilty of defamation and sexual abuse (but not rape) and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million of the crispest. Now she is back asking for more. Who knows whether she will get it. Stand by and pass the popcorn.
Then down in Georgia, site of one of the four major lawfare assaults to damage Trump and make him radioactive to the electorate, Fani Willis, the district attorney, is after the former president because — it is alleged — he tried to overturn the 2020 election. How did he do this? By telling the secretary of state Brad Raffensperger that “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The conversation was taped and the New York Times went to town with it, claiming that Trump “pressured” Raffensperger to manufacture the votes.
Vocabulary quiz: what is the difference between the words “find” and “manufacture?” Use each in a sentence.
That’s not the sort of test the Times is likely to pass. Remember back during the 2016 presidential election campaign when Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s “lost” emails, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The Times instantly accused him of “essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.” It reminded me of the passage in The Pickwick Papers when Pickwick’s landlady, Mrs Bardell, brings suit for breach of promise because of a couple of letters like this: “Dear Mrs. B. — Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.” “Gentlemen,” said the lawyer for the plantiff Bardell, “what does this mean? Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away, by such shallow artifices as these?” Ha, ha, ha.
The anti-Trump legal fraternity needs lawyers like that chap.
But it gets better. It turns out that the delightfully named Fani Willis hired her boyfriend, Nathan Wade, as chief prosecutor to go after Trump. He had no experience in such legal matters. Doubtless he has other skills. One skill is extracting money from the taxpayer. So far, Willis has paid him $654,000 in legal fees. Some of that money went to pay for lavish trips with Willis to Napa, Florida, the Caribbean and elsewhere. We know all this because Wade is in the middle of a divorce and details of his shenanigans have leaked.
Willis is fighting a deposition scheduled for next week and has in the meantime claimed that attention to her behavior is evidence of racism. Natch. All criticism of African Americans is racist by definition. Bizarrely, Willis started out promising she would not sleep with her staff. “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me,” she said in an interview in 2020. I could not tell whether she had a twinkle in her eye when she said “work under me.” The jury is out on that.
