The Trump subpoena probably won’t matter much

Poor Donald Trump. The January 6 committee has subpoenaed him. The New York attorney general is seeking to put the kibosh on his new Trump II organization. The Supreme Court has rejected his bid to stymie the Mar-a-Lago investigation. What next? Will it turn out that Jared or even — gasp! — Ivanka has been ratting him out to the feds about his hoarding of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago?

Far from ending with his ouster from the White House, the Trump show has become an unending pageant of new plot twists. The central actor remains Trump and Trump alone, intent on hogging the spotlight in one way or another.

The biggest revelation today was that Trump himself was fully aware that he had lost the election but terrified that his supporters would cotton on to the fact that he was a loser. Apparently he and his confederates were already plotting in October to announce, win or lose, that he had won big time. One of his aides reported that Trump, as is his wont, was watching the television after his defeat and expostulated, “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?” Another aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, stated that Trump complained, “I don’t want people to know we lost… This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”

No one did. Trump’s shambles of a presidency had already reached its terminus with the Covid-19 pandemic when he demonstrated his flagrant inability to contain the virus inside his own White House, let alone the nation. His preening and posturing, complete with a Mussolini-style appearance on the White House balcony where he defiantly ripped off his mask after returning from Walter Reed hospital, underscored rather than disguised his ineptitude. He was a commander-in-chief who wasn’t commanding.

When it came to disrupting the election, though, he did have a motley crew of forces to lead, and they followed the leader. “The vast weight of the evidence presented so far,” said Representative Liz Cheney, “has shown us that the central cause of January 6 was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.”

Whether the House subpoena against Trump will go anywhere is another matter. It keeps the spotlight on him, ensuring that he will have to respond to queries about his culpability for January 6 in the coming weeks. In this regard, it may help the Democrats’ electoral prospects a smidgen. But the likelihood of a Republican takeover of the House means that it will be null and void. Trump’s mandate is not only for the GOP to protect him in the coming months but to turn the tables on the Democrats by subjecting the Biden administration to a host of investigations, including targeting Attorney General Merrick Garland, the premier foe of the former guy.

For his part, Garland may well decide to indict Trump after the midterm elections for his purloining of classified documents. Nothing represents a greater threat to Trump. Should the GOP win both the Senate and the House, the political atmosphere in Washington might well go supernova.