What Donald Trump is really trying to distract us from with his Biden pickup truck stunt
Whenever the law cracks down on Donald Trump, he always cowers. He just doesn’t want there to be headlines about how he’s cowering, so he tries to distract from how he’s cowering by pulling some other stunt that he knows will get him headlines about how “dangerously powerful” he is. It’s happened again.
This week Trump got hit with a fairly strong gag order in his New York criminal trial, a reminder that the trial really is going to start in about two weeks. The gag order covers specific things related to the trial, and Trump is indeed backing down on that front. After all, he’s very afraid of getting locked up.
But as always, Trump doesn’t want to be seen as weak and cowering. So today he shared a video of President Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck. This video is repulsive, but he doesn’t appear to be committing a crime by posting it. Prosecutors would have a tricky time getting any sort of incitement charges to stick over the video. If a private citizen were to post such a thing, they might or might not get a visit from the Secret Service, but that would be the end of it.
Yet Trump is already getting exactly what he wanted out of this: endless headlines and tweets about how he’s more dangerously powerful than ever and how he’s getting away with it all. Oh no, we’re doomed.
What’s stunning is that Trump is mostly senile, as evidenced by his every public appearance these days. Yet even with only three brain cells left to his name, Trump is still able to goad a complicit political media and a bunch of gullible political “activists” into giving him exactly the headlines he wants – and more importantly, no headlines at all about how he’s cowering in the face of this gag order.
While the talking heads are all screaming about how we shouldn’t let Trump “get away” with posting this video, that misses the point entirely. Trump is trying to distract us from the fact that he’s now at his weakest, most helpless, most constrained point ever, as he prepares to be hauled into court in two weeks to stand criminal trial on thirty-four felony charges. We shouldn’t allow Trump to “get away” with goading the media (and us) into portraying him as more dangerously powerful than ever, when in reality he’s at the weakest and most helpless point in his entire life.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report