Written on November 11, 2018!
It's not just taxes that the wealthy reserve for the little people. Why would they stop there?
It's the rule of law. Rich people don't have to obey. The rest of us do.
Sure, we white guys can catch a break, as ever. We can gun down a black security guard who's a good guy with a gun. Oops! Sorry.
Not sorry enough to do anything to end the systematic killing of innocents that's so proportional to darkness of skin. Just sorry enough to say that blue lives matter. Not sorry.
Don't even start on the extrajudicial killing of slightly non-innocents for misdemeanors, for the pettiest of petty crimes that never carried the death penalty in any legal regime less oppressive than the slavering slavers of the Confederacy.
Black lives don't matter, which is exactly why we need an aspirational hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter. This is obvious to everyone who doesn't have his white head up his cinnamon-colored asshole.
Wait! I came here to talk about the rule of law and big and little people, which I guess I have, but Trump is my target, not his base.
Trump personally is many things, all of them bad. He's completely amoral. He never met a rule - of law, of etiquette, of common decency, of any social norm - that he would obey without being forced to. Tax returns, I'm sure, have been a lifelong game for him, which is one of the reasons we haven't seen them. We've seen enough, though, to know that he's a punk with a pen, stealing anything that's not nailed down. See the New York Times report on his persistent, law-flouting tax frauds. (How did that get forgotten so fast?)
The founders of the United States built a framework of liberty through law. Every previous President has pushed the bounds of what's legal. Those bounds can be a bit fuzzy, true, but they've all tried stuff that no one had ever gotten away with.
Trump's different. He doesn't accept any limits. The only power he knows how to wield is personal and absolute. He doesn't grasp enough details to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal. He only forces.
That's why there's been a Constitutional crisis since the day he took the Oath of Office. Of course, for him, it was only a Suggestion of Office that he promptly forgot as soon as his hand lifted off the Bible - unburned, so he must be the chosen one of God. Of course, he can't remember a single passage from the Bible, not even the usual bits of the Pentateuch whose vengefulness so thrills self-labeled, so-called winger Christians.
So, it's not a question whether Trump will openly break with the Constitution and all the law it undergirds. It's only a question of when.
My money's on January 3, 2019, or whatever day the Democrat-led House of Representatives starts its oversight. Trump will gleefully refuse, and we'll be off to the federal courts, now thoroughly stacked with toadies who will cave.
It's bad. It's going to get worse. Because the House doesn't have the authority to call out the military against a coup from within the Executive.
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