What Trump means when he says he loves the poorly educated

| 9:00 pm EDT July 13, 2023
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Many years ago the Stella Awards were born. They were invented by an unintentional shill for the corporate world. The story goes like this: Back in 1992, an octogenarian named Stella Liebeck incurred third degree burns to her thighs and legs while opening a McDonald’s coffee at a drive thru in order to add milk and sugar. McDonald’s refused to pay for her medical bills. So she sued them.

She was ultimately awarded — not tens of millions, not millions — but $640,000. That amount was reduced to an undisclosed figure when she and McDonald’s reached an after-trial settlement. Even though the case was quite reasonable it eventually came to represent, through exaggeration and breathless, make-believe outrage, the quintessential frivolous American lawsuit.

An urban legend grew up around the case, and other cases of similarly fake outrage-inducing calibre appeared. My favourite was the one where a woman was awarded $80,000 after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store, even though the toddler was her own son. That “case” and others were invented out of whole cloth. It never happened.

I remember laughing with a superior laugh at that one. Imagine someone successfully suing someone else for a problem they generated? “Preposterous,” I used to think, “it couldn’t happen in a million years.” And then, I’ll be damned if something like it didn’t actually just happen.

It turns out that Donald Trump’s lawyers have just filed an injunction with Judge Aileen Cannon requesting an indefinite postponement of his stolen documents trial. The reason? Trump can’t get a fair trial because they will never be able to “seat an impartial jury because of pretrial publicity and an inflamed community atmosphere.” [Italics mine.]

So there you go. Life imitating art. Donald Trump has metaphorically just crapped on someone’s porch and rang the doorbell asking for toilet paper. He’s spent years on his crappy, third rate, failing social media platform “Truth” Social inflaming the public. Now that they are duly inflamed he is using it as an excuse to avoid responsibility for his own criminal behaviour.

This is what Trump means when he says he loves the poorly educated. His fans are simply too ignorant or their brains are of insufficient wattage to understand the hypocrisy of what he’s done here. He’s submitted a court filing asking for a delay in a trial because of public inflammation of his own doing. And with a judge like Aileen Cannon, he just might get it.

The brief will be answered some time next week. Until then, don’t worry. If Judge Cannon should grant this absurdly formulated request, the Department of Justice has a recourse in appealing to the same body that slapped Cannon down for appointing a special master in the same case last September. But I doubt it will go that far. In any event we shall see. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.