Donald Trump had a great week last week, at least with respect to facts reported in the media. He ran the table in Arizona, a state that Trump wanted to nuke into glass after 2020. His extremist group of “nut jobs” (Joe Scarborough’s word) now have to go up against “normal people” Democrats. But at least Trump’s “enemies” lost, and even if it turns Arizona blue, that’s all that mattered.
And yet, at Trump’s Wisconsin rally last night, he wasn’t all that celebratory, indeed – he made a point of saying that he’s the most persecuted person in U.S. history. Move over Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, move over every Native American who walked the Trail of Tears (And Oklahoma would be stolen soon enough), and scoot aside Abe Lincoln. Donald Trump is here to take first place. He is the most persecuted American to ever live.
TRUMP: “A friend of mine recently said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country. When I thought about it, I actually felt that he may very well be right.” #TrumpRally pic.twitter.com/vYOQjWQppc
— Newsmax (@newsmax) August 6, 2022
After exacting so much revenge last week, it goes to show that Trump’s mind is actually elsewhere, as it should be. The walls continue to close in. The public is not going to accept the Secret Service or the Pentagon throwing their hands up and saying texts were deleted. Every drug dealer ever arrested anywhere has had deleted texts effortlessly extracted from their phone, probably by a local FBI agent. Certainly, some of the world’s most sophisticated forensic experts are within the same department as DHS (Secret Service) and at the Pentagon’s military intelligence.
Those texts are coming out while, at the same time, witnesses are lining up to go in and get their part of the story down before someone pins it all on them. Maggie Haberman assures us that the satisfaction with his revenge is kept in check by Trump’s abject fear of investigations.
On Anderson Cooper’s regular hour, Jim Sciutto asked Haberman to weigh in on Trump’s recent endorsements and also asked whether both grand jury probes, the Fulton County grand jury investigation and Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s January 6 probe. Like too many others, Sciutto is forgetting about what might be the most dangerous grand jury probe of all, the one with what could be the cleanest straight line to a provable and serious felony – the grand jury probe of the top secret files stashed in Mar-a-Lago. Sciutto asked whether the grand jury probes were impacting Trump’s thinking on running for president. The question was as dumb as a bunny battle, but Haberman answered, “Yes.”
Haberman: So he did have a good week in terms of the fact that the candidates he backed won, whether it is all building to another presidential campaign, I think that you know, the main impetus for him running again, Jim, is not because he particularly wants the job again, although he will talk about that. But the second that he says that he is not running, you know, the crown in the Republican Party goes to somebody else. And I think it’s as simple as that.
Haberman is one of the world’s elite reporters (Don’t listen to trolls on Twitter, the NYT knows what it’s doing), but no one does “as simple as that” quite as well as Haberman.
SCIUTTO: Do the ongoing prosecutions, both January 6 Committee, but more notably, the DOJ possible criminal prosecution, is that a factor? I mean, you’ve heard theorizing that he wants to run because he thinks that would head off potential criminal charges indictments?
HABERMAN: Yes, I believe it is based on my reporting. Yes. I mean, you know, this is something that he has alluded to, in some conversations. You know, he tries to project confidence about — at least about the DOJ investigation.
You know, he has openly talked more worriedly about the Georgia investigation in Fulton County, into his actions in that state. However, Donald Trump fears investigations, generally speaking, and the fact that the DOJ is now calling in witnesses from the White House, only ups the level of concern.
Some might read and believe that Trump’s “openly talked more worriedly about Georgia,” and think that Trump believes he’s more exposed in Georgia or in more trouble in Georgia. It is not necessarily so.
Georgia is out in the open. It is on tape. Everyone knows the evidence. Everyone has an opinion on the crime.
The January 6th conspiracy is anything but “out in the open.” Trump is not going to be openly talking to people about, “Geez, I hope they don’t cut a deal with Stone who will testify that I ordered the whole operation,” or “Whoa, I sure hope that Ornato dropped those Secret Service phones in the Potomac the way we discussed. It would look bad if those texts about me telling them to kidnap Pence ever came out…”
It is entirely possible that Trump is far more worried about the January 6th criminal probe than Georgia… he just can’t talk about it. “Talk” is precisely the problem. Too many people talked and now look where he is?
@JasonMiciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, and currently studies philosophy of science, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact for speaking engagements or any concerns.
