Donald Trump doesn’t have a magic wand

| 9:09 am EDT July 20, 2019
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Donald Trump has a magic wand that he just keeps using to get his way on everything, and get away with everything. That’s the narrative we keep hearing from the optimists within his base, the fatalists within the Resistance, and anyone in political punditry who wants to manufacture an arbitrary ratings spike. The thing is, it’s just not true – or at least it’s half untrue.

Trump and his regime are every bit as evil as advertised. And they’ve gotten away with a lot of horrible things that have done real damage to real people. There’s no way to minimize the damage that’s been done, nor should we minimize it. But just last week, the fatalists and the alarmists were insisting that Donald Trump was about to cast the Supreme Court aside and do whatever he wanted with the 2020 census.

Predictably, that didn’t happen. In fact the opposite happened, when Trump caved entirely. It was easy to see this coming. For all his big bold threats in public, most of them are mere bluffs. Trump makes most of his truly corrupt moves in secret, such as kidnapping immigrant kids and locking them in cages while initially keeping it under wraps for months. If one of Trump’s schemes has been flushed out into the open before it can be fully realized, he usually pulls the plug. Then he start some other controversy to distract us from the fact that he just lost.

Then there’s William Barr. This month he may or may not have succeeded in getting Hope Hicks and certain members of the Trump Organization off the hook in the campaign finance scandal, depending on whether you believe the SDNY is simply waiting to charge everyone with conspiracy after Trump is out of office. But Barr failed to keep Trump’s friend Jeffrey Epstein from being arrested on underage sex trafficking charges that are clearly scaring the crap out of Trump. Barr also failed to keep George Nader from getting busted on similar charges, which could be a big deal if Nader cuts a plea deal and finally coughs up what he knows about Trump and Russia.

The point is that Donald Trump, and his henchmen like Barr, have quite a spotty record when it comes to the corruption they manage to pull off. Trump fails at his schemes at least as often as he succeeds at them. That’s thanks in large part to those members of the Resistance who keep fighting each day. On the other hand, it’s no thanks at all to the fatalists who keep (incorrectly) shouting that Trump is “getting away with everything.”