This is a bad joke

| 9:09 am EDT July 30, 2023
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It’s surreal enough that a former President of the United States has been criminally indicted for stealing classified information and then trying to destroy the evidence. It’s even more surreal that his two co-defendants thus far are his personal assistant and the pool guy. The former President was trying to get away with violating the Espionage Act, and this was the best cast of supporting characters he could come up with?

It serves to show just how inept and powerless Donald Trump became the minute he was gone from office. This was a guy who controlled the U.S. military and the nuclear launch codes, and proceeded to do terribly criminal things with that power – and then suddenly all that was gone and he was reduced to asking the pool guy to help him commit crimes.

Back when Trump was still in power and had actual political operatives around him, the joke was that each time one of them got busted doing Trump’s criminal bidding, he’d claim they were just the coffee boy. But now we know that in the time since, Trump’s top “operatives” – the most qualified henchmen he could round up – were literally people like the pool guy.

On some level that’s because Trump burned through his top political operatives in the name of trying to carry out January 6th. But really, Trump was still a former President of the United States, a self proclaimed billionaire, and such a supposedly savvy businessman they once made an entire TV show about it. Yet within months of losing the protective shell of the presidency, he proved so inept that he ended up having to ask his own maintenance workers to help him carry out his crimes.

Of course even when Trump did have the massive power of the presidency and actual political advisers – scores of them – he still couldn’t come within a million miles of making the January 6th plot work for him. Before that he tried numerous ways to abuse the office of the presidency in order to rig his reelection, and he still couldn’t pull that off.

Donald Trump is a guy who simply can’t seem to accomplish anything he sets out to do. He’s been this inept for a long time. If he hadn’t lucked his way into office to begin with, he’d have washed out years ago. Even with the power of the presidency, he couldn’t keep the presidency. And without that power, he was reduced to trying to criminally conspire against the United States with his pool guy. In the end Trump has turned out to be what so many of us knew he was all along: a bad joke.