Subsidizing Perfidy, Or Respecting The Law

SINCE HIS INDICTMENT, Donald Trump's presidential campaign has become flush with increased contributions. As of indictment day, donations are said to total about seven million dollars, and counting. Hard working people living paycheck to paycheck, sending their disposable income, what litttle there is of it, to a billionaire. To a billionaire who openly boasts about being wealthy, and backs it up by fyling around in a personal passenger jet. To a billioaire who brags aobu this wealth, but does not have a smuch wealth as he wants us to believe. Sending their money to a former prsident who was impeached twice, tried to steal the election after losing it, and then tried to overthrow the American government by organizing a violent mob to storm the Capitol. As we say, "go figure". Eighty percent of registered Republicans consider the pending charges bogus, politically motivated. This is a only a slightly higher percentage than consider the Capitol insurrrection 0f 01/6/21 to have been justified and necesssary, or, as the Republican National Committtee clearly, amazingly says in its official position statement: "legitimate political discourse." The masses of garden variety Rethuglicans apparently endorse this outlandish nonsense. We therefore need not be surprised that they wholly approve of Trump's many instances of obvious criminal behavior, believe all of it to be either acceptable behavior or a hoax, and virulently disapprove of the several pending investigation into Trump, beleiving them all to be works of purely political motivation. Trump is not the first president to have been arrested. U.S. Grant, quite the adrenalin freak, was speeding down Pennsylvania Avenue at full gallop in his horse and buggy in 1872. William West, an African-American police officer, pulled him over, and gave the president a warning. Grant apologized profusely, congratulated the officer for doing his duty, for enforcing the law fairly and equally, and promised not to let it happen again. Quite a difference from Trump's reaction. It happened again. Grant, the speed merchant. This time West had less patience and understanding, and wrote the president a speeding ticket. A date for a court apperarance was set, but Grant failed to appear, electing instead to forfeit his twenty dollar bond. West, a compassionate man of honor, chose not to discuss the incident, nobly foregoing potential profit from its disclosure, preferring to save Grant any public himmiliation. (When a culprit is courteous, deferential, and contrite with law, good things happen to said perp.) He waited until 1908, thirteen years after Grant's death from throat cancer, to report the episode, which was verified by others. Grant, a chain cigar smoker, barely lived long enough to complete his seminal autobiography, which he intended to provide financial assistance to his surviving gamily, which indeed it did. In the lengthy book he did not mention the incident, possibly from embarassment. Naturally, most autobiographies are hagiographic, tending to emphasize the subject's virtues, and to interr the embarassing with their own bones, as Shakespeare might have said. Thus Trump's dilemma is not altogether an historical first. In reconstruction era America, African-Americans could become police officers, and tended not to murder the the people they arrested, and blacks were elected to political office, if only at the point of the guns of the American army. Not all history is progrees. It often lapses into cycle of regression, as we witness currrently.