Trump sure seems like he wants a riot.
Donald Trump’s penchant for verbal intemperance is nothing new, but his banishment from Twitter and Facebook after the events of January 6, 2021, has had the effect, perhaps, of anesthetizing us to just how outright emotionally incontinent he has become in his post-presidential dotage, as he gambols aimlessly around the sand traps of Mar-a-Lago. It takes a special news hook to really remind us just how much rhetorical bilge flows unfiltered through his pipes when he is truly bestirred to action.
The last time he suppurated forth in such a manner was during his Excellent Thanksgiving Adventure with Kanye West and a clutch of lesser-known antisemites. This time, of course, it was with the breathless announcement he made, on his boutique chat-site TruthSocial, that he was due to be indicted and arrested on Tuesday by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for charges related to his hush-money payoff of porn star Stormy Daniels to conceal an affair. As NR’s Andy McCarthy points out, an indictment of Trump is almost certainly coming. My read of it is perhaps predictable: He clearly did the deed (he had an affair and made the payout), but it’s only dubiously illegal in the first place and the sort of crime that would never be prosecuted outside of direct political motivation in the second place.
None of that matters! Because Trump went and sandblasted all those niceties away with a series of escalatingly bonkers posts over the weekend and into this morning — imagine the perfervid rantings in a padded cell of a mental patient off his lithium and you’re mostly there. It began, as things normally do, with a measured update on the state of the Manhattan district attorney’s case:
If you got hung up on “open boarders” there in the first all-caps paragraph and missed <flips sheet over> “Page 2,” then you missed where Trump winds up this peroration by announcing (1) I’m going to be arrested on Tuesday; (2) get out there and raise some hell, people!
Lest we be accused of misinterpreting the last-numbered there, reading too much perhaps into the ambiguous text of a justifiably angry man, well then thank the once-and-former president for clarifying with his helpful follow-up counseling calm and restraint.
“PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!” Get out there in the streets, boys, just like back on January 6! (There is a meme floating around on Twitter that captures both Trump’s and the FBI’s shared interest in having this come to pass.) Responsible crowd management all around from our ex-president. But hey, it’s not like there’s anywhere for protesters to congregate now, is there? It’s not like back on January 6, when everyone knew to show up at the Capitol?
Oh. Ohhh.
See you at the courthouse in NYC. Got it.
Yes, it’s been a rough morning for Trump, as the reality of his indictment closes in. At the moment this goes to press, his ranting seems to have petered out into a bunch of muttered jabs at Ron DeSantis for maybe being gay (this is not a joke). But nevertheless, he’s given us some real bravura Brad-Pitt-in-Twelve-Monkeys energy with this latest outburst. The all-caps remains a nice touch, too; one imagines a truly virile set of vocal cords, maintaining a hearty, monotone screech for hours on end without his voice ever once dropping into lowercase. (Indeed, all of Trump’s posts make much better sense once you start reading them in the voice of Starscream from the old 1980s Transformers cartoon.)
Donald Trump wants a riot, is my guess. Or he is indifferent to the possibility of one. What he wants, most likely, is a media-frenzy mob scene on his behalf, and what happens in the wake of that? Well, that’s somebody else’s department. We have lived through this once already. Trump might not like the fact that he’s being put through the wringer on ticky-tack charges, but (1) he is unquestionably nailed dead-to-rights on what he’s accused of here (the hush-money payoff to Stormy Daniels), the only question being whether it ought even to be a crime; and (2) the solution is to litigate it in the system, not call for a street riot and casually sidle up to the edge of encouraging insubordination among the NYPD. (Also: You really shouldn’t have slept with that porn star right after your wife gave birth to your son and then paid off said porn star using a hatchet-man go-between whom you later hung out to dry.)
My advice? Take it from Walter Sobchak. I’ll leave it at that.