We are not a monstrous country. Not yet, anyway.
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As a nation, we must face the reality that we have a monster among us.
That fact rose its ugly head yet again last week when Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Donald Trump in the New York hush money fraud case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, several of which were related to his attempt to conceal the payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the presidential election in 2016.
Reading Judge Merchan’s order is like being in a room with a middle-aged man on his first day in a yoga class, pain leaching from every corpuscle of his body as he contorts himself into making a decision he clearly believes is not in the interest of either justice or the wellbeing of the country. The order begins this way:
By letter dated August 14, 2024, Defendant requests an adjournment of his sentencing, currently scheduled for September 18, 2024, until after the 2024 presidential election. He argues the adjournment is necessary to provide adequate time to “assess and pursue” appellate options in the event this Court denies his pending Criminal Procedure Law (“CPL”) S 330.30 motion and to avoid the potential “politically prejudicial” impact that a public sentencing could have on him and his prospects in the upcoming election. He attempts to bolster his application by repeating a litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances from previous filings that do not merit this Court’s attention and will not be addressed in this Decision.
The judge’s quotes from Trump’s letter are proper, given the nature of the order, but let me tell you, along with his dismissal of Trump’s “unsubstantiated grievances,” they are included to reflect the contempt Merchan has for Trump, his lawyers, and his request to delay sentencing.
Take a step back for a moment. This is the judge that Trump trashed every single day of the trial that concluded by finding him guilty on all counts. He is the judge who found Trump in contempt of court 10 times for various violations of gag orders imposed to prevent the defendant from harassing the judge’s clerk and employees and relatives of the prosecutors and other persons associated with the New York court system, including the judge’s own daughter.
The tenth time Merchan found Trump in contempt, after fining him $1,000, he threatened him with jail time. Merchan had already fined Trump $9,000 for his previous violations. Trump had attacked the judge’s daughter as “a rabid Trump hater,” among other slurs, and Merchan sanctioned him for that, as well as forbidding him from discussing any relatives of anyone associated with the case.
Trump had also attacked the make-up of the jury. He made thinly veiled threats against witnesses in the case that Merchan warned Trump against but did not find contemptuous.
Defendants in criminal trials don’t do this stuff unless the defendant’s name is Donald Trump.
In his order, Merchan cited the unprecedented nature of criminally sentencing a candidate for president: “This matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this Nation’s history,” Merchan wrote. He also included a statement of impartiality and purpose that you would not ordinarily find in such a judicial order:
This adjournment request has now been decided in the same way this Court has decided every other issue that has arisen since the origination of this case, applying the facts and the law after carefully considering the issues and respective arguments of the parties to ensure that the integrity of the proceeding is protected, justice is served, and the independence of this judiciary kept firmly intact.
The statement is — without citing instances of Trump’s continual disruption of his trial with lies, slander, and bluster — a defense of the integrity of the judicial process, which Merchan was obliged to do almost daily during the trial.
All of this is unprecedented. The nature of the crime is unprecedented: a presidential candidate paying off a porn star to conceal a sexual affair from the voters; the defendant being a candidate for president during his trial; the contemptuous behavior of the defendant during the trial; the contempt of the defendant for the jury and the verdict; and of course, before the defendant was sentenced, the intervention of the Supreme Court that found Trump immune from prosecution for official acts taken while president, at least several of which — the signing of checks to Michael Cohen by Trump in the Oval Office — the defense will contend somehow fit the definition of “official acts.”
Trump wants the sentencing hearing postponed so that voters will not know whether he has been sentenced to jail for his crimes in New York. That is unprecedented, too, just as was Trump not wanting voters in 2016 to know that he had paid hush-money to a porn star.
Whether voters would take into consideration the judge’s sentence is almost irrelevant. At this point, voters are met daily with face-slaps of Trump’s misbehavior and madness — his jumble of unintelligible remarks and lies about childcare before the Economic Club of New York being one of the more recent. The Economic Club of New York includes among its membership people Trump wanted so badly to respect him when he was a real estate developer and citizen of Manhattan. They are the uppermost crust of the upper crust of New York society and business — members of the clubs Trump wanted to belong to, such as the Union League and Metropolitan Club and other mahogany-and-brass-fittings temples of the Manhattan elite.
And yet there he was, mumbling and lying and stumbling through a discussion any parent in America could speak about coherently:
But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, childcare is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.
The phrase “word-salad” is inadequate to describe what he said to that roomful of business executives and economic experts. What could he have been thinking?
Well, he wasn’t thinking. He was just flapping his jaws incomprehensibly, because that is what works for him out there among his MAGA faithful. They don’t have childcare they can afford, and they don’t care that Trump has no plans to get it for them, because that is not what they want from him. What they want is hate, of which he supplies copious quantities, which is not unprecedented in this country — and that in itself is a problem and has been since our founding as a nation.
Just as Judge Merchan had to take into consideration who the jury found guilty in his courtroom and upon whom he has to deliver sentence, I am afraid that the rest of us are saddled with a similar burden. We have a monster in our midst. We are trying to bar the monster from the White House as we did in 2020, but even if we succeed, he will not be gone, not in person, nor in the excretory politics he has encouraged among the citizenry.
We are not a monstrous country, not yet anyway, but we have always had the tendency to become one. We avoided such a fate only by civil war once in our history. We will find out in November if defeating Trump at the ballot box will enable us to go forward as a nation without resorting to violence.
We can only vote, and hope.
Reprinted, with permission, from the Lucian Truscott Newsletter. Lucian K. Truscott IV has had a career spanning five decades as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter.
