A Monumental Ego
Terry H. Schwadron
June 14, 2022
Momentarily set aside the specific events surrounding the Jan. 6 rioting to focus instead on the judgment from former Attorney General Bill Barr about former President Donald Trump’s rejection of election truth:
“I thought, boy. . . he has become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said in video testimony to the House special committee investigating the post-election whine about losing that led eventually and inexorably to the fateful January 2021 riot.
Unless you are a fully subscribed, deaf-to-fact Trump believer, the remark encapsulates why Trump’s own Cabinet came to circulate ideas about invoking the 25th Amendment to force Trump out, about why generals and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper felt they had to keep Trump away from nuclear weapons, about shunning facts about losing from family and advisers, about why, in the end, Trump pointed the mob to the Capitol and refused to stop an insurrection attempt even at the risk of bodily harm to legislators and his own vice president.
The judgment is a damning condemnation of a dangerous character, a kind of mental health red-flag notice against holding the keys to the White House.
And now, a year and a half later, consider that this same monumental, unchecked ego wants not only to run again for president, but to be assured of a win by dismantling election procedures to allow states whose majority of voters might oppose him to allow hand-picked state officials to throw out adverse results. That’s banana republic stuff.
Monday’s resumption of hearings to report out the congressional committee’s investigative conclusions were simple: Trump cared more about keeping Trump in the White House than about your vote and mine. And in his own behalf, he launched simultaneous and apparently fraudulent legal, political and fund-raising efforts to get that job done at any cost.
That was the message spelled out in a hearing featuring only Republicans who tried telling him otherwise, that the numbers showed he lost with no election fraud. Even Fox News showed this hearing. On Wednesday, Trump’s plot to subvert the Justice Department to win legal approval for his scheming.
Importantly, that distillation shows Trump’s willfulness in denial of election fact to pursue avenues he repeatedly was told were dead ends — willfulness that can be read as legal intent towards committing the crimes reflected in the Jan. 6 coup attempt.
Legal accountability issues aside, why would this country let such a self-serving guy run again?
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