I’m from New York City. I think I’ve always understood the nuances in Trump’s speech patterns better than people from Magadonia. It’s why every single post you’ve ever read about Trump at DWT treats him like a grifter and lowlife. That’s what he’s been all his life, what he is now and what he’ll be. When he takes his last breath. The most accomplished— if fatally flawed— student of neo-fascist, Mob attorney Roy Cohn, Trump sat through years of master classes in how to get away with murder.
Michael Wolff was born in Paterson, New Jersey— close enough?— and went to Columbia University. He’s always known what Trump is, although he's sometimes less than forthright about the darker side of Trump’s nature. He wrote 3 books about him, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018), Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019) and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency (2021). On Friday, the NY Times published an essay by him, Down The Rabbit Hole Into Donald Trump’s Brain, about how he uses and misuses language to communicate. As the Trump regime was falling to pieces, Wolff talked with Mark Meadows who told him that Señor T “has a certain way of speaking. And what he means— well, the sum can be greater or less than the whole.”
“The words that will very likely get Trump indicted in Georgia, and possibly Meadows along with him,” wrote Wolff, were, a weary Meadows seemed to be saying, more of the same, part of Trump’s unmediated fire hose of verbiage, an unstoppable sequence of passing digressions, gambits and whims, more attuned to the rhythms of his voice than to any obligation to logic or, often, to any actual point or meaning at all and hardly worth taking notice of. Does Trump mean what he says? And what exactly does he mean when he says what he says? His numerous upcoming trials may hinge on these questions. Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal— as bewildered more than 30 years ago by Trump’s disconnected-from-reality talk as anyone might be today— came up with a formulation that tried to put Trump’s rhetorical flights from earth in the context of a salesman’s savvy. In other words, if you took him at his word, you were the fool, and yet, perhaps even more to the point, he succeeds because he comes to believe himself, making him the ultimate fool (as well as the ultimate salesman).”
What did Trump mean by that posting? Who was he threatening? Was he threatening potential witnesses? Was he threatening officers of the court. When the DOJ turned the statement over to Judge Chutkan, Trump freaked out and had his spokespeople issue a statement that he was only practicing his First Amendment rights and that he was only threatening RINOs anyway. “The Truth post cited is the definition of political speech, and was in response to the RINO, China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and Super PACs, like the ones funded by the Koch brothers and the Club for No Growth.”
“Yes, wrote Wolff, “he might have seemed to call for insurrection on Jan. 6, but as the events that day unfolded, according to various people in contact with him in the White House, he seemed uncomprehending and passive. He waved a classified document in front of a writer he was trying to impress, bragging about the secrets illegally in his possession. That certainly is in character, uncaring about rules, negligent about his actions, unthinking of the consequences. At the same time, his defense, that he had no such document, that he was waving just press clippings, that he was essentially making it all up, is in perfect character, too. And then there was the laughable plan to mobilize new state electors. Here was certainly an effort to subvert the election, but it was also a fantasy with no hope in hell of ever succeeding; indeed, he seems to have long delighted in surrounding himself with clownish people (especially lawyers) performing clownish feats to gain his approval— more court jesters than co-conspirators.”
His yearslong denial of the 2020 election may be an elaborate fraud, a grifter’s denial of the obvious truth, as prosecutors maintain, but if so, he really hasn’t broken character the entire time. I’ve had my share of exposure to his fantastic math over the years— so did almost everyone around him at Mar-a-Lago after the election— and I don’t know anyone who didn’t walk away from those conversations at least a little shaken by his absolute certainty that the election really was stolen from him.
It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim— an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality— that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules— often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child— is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.
Many Democrats have come to assume that the dastardly effect of Trump’s political success must mean that he has an evil purpose. During his trials, prosecutors will try to establish that precise link. But that might not be such a trivial challenge. He is being pursued under several broad, ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act, RICO, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind— and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.
His prosecutors will try to use his words against him: among them, his exhortations that arguably prompted the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his admission— on tape!— that he still had classified documents, his various, half-baked plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his relentless and unremitting insistence that he won his lost election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen, before he paid off Stormy Daniels.
For Democrats, it’s an explosion of smoking guns.
And yet the larger pattern, clear to anyone who has had firsthand experience with the former president, is that he will say almost anything that pops into his head at any given moment, often making a statement so confusing in its logic that to maintain one’s own mental balance, it’s necessary to dismiss its seriousness on the spot or to pretend you never heard it.
…Personally, I’m less sure of Trump’s legal fate. Prosecutors will soon run up against the epistemological challenges of explaining and convicting a man whose behavior defies and undermines the structures and logic of civic life.
There’s an asymmetric battle here, between the government’s precise and thorough prosecutors and Trump’s head-smacking gang of woeful lawyers. The absolute ludicrousness and disarray of the legal team defending Trump after his second impeachment ought to go down in trial history. Similarly, a few months ago, a friend of mine was having a discussion with Trump about his current legal situation. A philosophical Trump said that while he probably didn’t have the best legal team, he was certain he had the best looking, displaying pictures of the comely women with law degrees he had hired to help with his cases.
Here liberals see a crushing advantage: As ever, Trump seems unable to walk a straight line even in his own defense. But his unwillingness or, as likely, inability to play by the rules or even understand them creates a chaos often in his favor. Indeed, the prosecutors’ story of his grand scheming will most likely require them to present a figure of the former president— calculated, methodical, knowing and cunning— that none of his supporters or anyone who has ever met him or reasonable jurors and perhaps even the world at large would recognize.
I can’t imagine what will be produced by this dynamic of strait-laced prosecutors versus a preposterous Trump, his malfeasance always on the edge of farce. But my gut tells me the anti-Trump world could be in for another confounding disappointment.