No, Trump and his people aren’t going to magically “get away with it all”
The DOJ just raided the homes of Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing in relation to their roles in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. The DOJ also just filed a multimillion dollar suit against Roger Stone. And the DOJ has a cooperating witness in Joel Greenberg who has stated in writing that Matt Gaetz is guilty of everything. This past week has finally shattered the defeatist “they’re going to get away with it all” narrative, right?
You’d think. But the most defeatist of liberal pundits are already trying to find ways to spin all of these developments as somehow either bad or pointless. Some of them are insisting that because Bill Barr paused the probe into Rudy, it gave Rudy time to destroy the evidence against himself, which means Rudy is magically getting away with it all!
Nothing comes within a million miles of working that way, of course. The Feds have typically obtained someone’s electronic communications from their service providers before a raid even occurs, and it was reported this week that the Feds have had his electronic communications since 2019. If Rudy did destroy any of his phones, then not only was that evidence not actually destroyed, it means the Feds can tack on obstruction of justice charges on top of everything else.
You can go down the line and poke holes in every one of the doomsday deflections being floated by the most defeatist of pundits. They say that Joel Greenberg won’t be viewed as reliable witness by a jury. And they’re right. But if Greenberg’s claims about Matt Gaetz are true, then Greenberg can surely point the Feds to receipts, paperwork, and other more reliable witnesses who can corroborate it all.
The bottom line is still the same thing that it was back in November. If Trump had won the election, or if he had come close enough to convince the courts to give him the election, then he and his people would indeed have gotten away with it all. But the minute Trump was declared the loser of the 2020 election, it was a guarantee that he and his guilty associates would all go down. It’s just how things work. You’d have to be lost in a total haze of defeatism to somehow convince yourself otherwise.
Yet we still have a segment of liberal pundits who decided a long time ago that defeatism is their brand, because doomsday proclamations are always good for getting attention. Liberal political punditry is such a perversely upside down industry, the liberal pundits who feed you the doomsday stuff are actually lauded for supposedly telling it like it is, whereas liberal pundits who factually point out that not everything is on fire are accused of just telling you what you want to hear.
But once the handcuffs start getting slapped onto Trump and his henchmen – and particularly once they’re convicted and actually land in prison – one can only hope that liberal doomsday punditry will go out of fashion. That kind of defeatist crap causes real harm, because if you’re a liberal activist and all the pundits are telling you that your side is doomed anyway, you’re going to be a lot less likely to make the effort to fight and win these battles. But I believe more firmly than ever that we can rescue liberal political punditry from the abyss.
