Trump’s latest blunder

| 7:00 pm EST December 20, 2023
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One of the paramount aspects of Donald Trump’s gag orders — something he won’t permit his lawyers to admit — is how important they are in protecting Donald Trump’s ability to mount a plausible defense. You see, most criminal defendants voluntarily gag themselves out of a sense of self-preservation. And if they don’t understand why they need to self-gag, they have their lawyers to remind them that they should never, ever talk about their case to anyone, especially the press.

Just about every fool knows this. They know that everything they say to the press can and will be used against them in a court of law. Besides, talking to the press can sometimes limit their defence, which is the point I’m about to make here.

Take this latest revelation that, just before leaving office in January of 2021, Donald Trump stole a huge binder full of top secret documents concerning Russian election interference. According to several witnesses there were a number of lawyers with Trump that were diligently at work — under Trump’s specific orders — feverishly trying to redact certain parts of the document so they could declassify it. Let me just say that again: they were desperately racing against the clock trying to declassify the contents of the binder using accepted declassification methods.

You mean to say that Trump didn’t think he could simply declassify them with his mind? You mean to say that Trump was well-aware that mental declassification wasn’t a thing, long before he boasted about it on his third rate social media platform, in speeches and to the press? That’s exactly what I mean. Oops.

Imagine for a moment, brothers and sisters, what a prosecutor could do with that in the Florida documents theft trial: “You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we already know that Donald Trump was trying out his various phoney defences in public. We know this because one of the defences he was thinking about using was to say that he declassified all those documents that he stole with his mind. He was going to pretend that such voodoo declassification was possible, or that at least he believed it was possible. But he decided against using that fake defence because we found out later that he actually went through the real process of trying to declassify the top secret Russia binder using known and legal procedures — and he failed.

“What do we infer from this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? We infer the obvious, we infer that Donald Trump is a serial liar. We infer that he tried out various defences in public and he later realised that they wouldn’t work. So he abandoned them. None of his defences are sincere, including the one he’s using now, it’s just his latest and best attempt at deceiving you.”

This devastating point in the prosecution wouldn’t be possible if Trump hadn’t been shooting his mouth off about how he could declassify documents with his mind by muttering some magic incantation to himself, such as “I declassify thee,” three times. He should have kept that whole absurdity to himself and no one would have ever known about it.

Had he played it smart, Donald Trump would have stopped talking to the press or the public about his various pending criminal cases long ago. But Trump can’t do that. He can’t do it because he’s a stupid child without an ounce of impulse control.

This is why, practically speaking, lying in general is so stupid. Honesty isn’t just the best policy, it’s also the safest policy. One cannot become tripped up in the truth.This is why Republicans are so stupid, because they have taken upon themselves the tangled web of Donald Trump’s lies.

Lying may work sometimes with the uncritical base of Trump’s MAGA supporters, people that spend their lives in the Fox News echo chamber, but it doesn’t work with most thinking Americans, and it certainly doesn’t work in a court of law. Trump’s worst witness against himself is himself. It will be fun, after having to endure four years of his catastrophic, evil presidency, watching him destroy himself with his own toxic lies. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.