Photo Courtesy Fulton County Sheriff’s Office: Former President Donald J. Trump’s booking photo from Fulton County, Georgia.
Column By John Young
I expect a finder’s fee for this.
The Trump Organization is hard up for spending cash; this we know. But I’ve found something certain to stir its acquisitions department out of court-ordered slumber. Here goes:
If you’re an amateur historian, you believe Hitler wingman Joseph Goebbels said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
In my research to assign the quote to its source, I found that historians dispute that Goebbels ever said it.
It sits in history’s dustbin of unclaimed quotes.
For Donald Trump and his shyster sons, this fact spells two words: “business opportunity.”
Claim ownership of that quote, guys. Put those words in gold on every Trump Tower.
Tell your followers, “That’s mine. I own that.” You sure do.
It’s the perfect motto – call it a possession — for one who bounces from courtroom to courtroom, uttering lie after lie.
It’s a tremendous schtick. In the face of a blizzard of legal challenges, Trump has proved deft at techniques straight from the annals of the Nazi mind control.
And like Hitler, who convinced followers to embrace genocide and embark on a suicidal bid to rule the world, millions of gullible people gobble whole all of Trump’s indefensible claims:
Claim No. 1: He has “done nothing wrong” and nothing illegal.
Nope: didn’t lead an illegal effort to overturn an election; didn’t incite a deadly insurrection; didn’t take classified documents and ignore subpoenas to return them; didn’t pay off porn stars and conceal it with fraudulent records.
Again, nothing illegal, nothing wrong.
Indeed, the opposite, says he. Every criminal charge and every civil suit filed against him is “totally illegal.”
Claim No. 2: Every legal challenge he faces is politically motivated – “the weaponizing of politics; weaponized it like it’s never been before.”
This applies to the two defamation suits he lost to E. Jean Carroll, which he calls part of the “Biden-directed witch hunt” against him. What rancid baloney.
Trump knows neither of these claims to be true, just as he knows he got walloped at the polls in 2020.
Refuting Claim 1 is not hard to do. If Donald Trump were innocent of the criminal charge he faces, he would demand a speedy trial to clear his name.
But Trump isn’t going to do anything of the sort. Indeed, he asks the courts to declare him immune from prosecution.
Meanwhile, he will delay, delay, delay — stall with every fiber in his being.
Why? Because he broke the law – over and over. You bet he did, and he knows it.
When he said presidents should be allowed to “cross the line,” he wasn’t thinking of anyone but himself.
How about refuting Claim 2 – that it’s all a politicized witch hunt waged by Joe Biden?
It’s futile to try to convince Trump’s Gullibility Brigade that this is false – that the attorney general represents the people, not the president.
We don’t need to beat our heads against that wall, however. The key point is that all of Trump’s criminal charges emanated from grand juries – citizens who consider the facts and authorize prosecution. He knows that. His attorneys know that. But every Trump defense motion appears to make the claim – yeah, one more lie — that Joe Biden is behind it all.
In fact, it is the prosecutors who are practicing law as authorized by those grand juries. It is Donald Trump who is practicing politics at every turn.
His motivation for stalling is purely political: to buy time for his return to the presidency so that he can pardon himself and his partners in crime and go after his political enemies.
Trump knows he can’t win in the courtroom, so he seeks to win outside the courtroom.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it . . .”
Joseph Goebbels didn’t say it. Hustle over to the patent office, Trump Organization. You can make those words your own.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
