As the toothed trap closes on Donald Trump, he contemplates going coyote, and chewing through his own leg, leaving it behind and limping off into the underbrush to either heal or grow a new one.
In other words, he dithers and jitters on the edge of a revolution, beginning, and not timidly, to call for said revolution, a rising up of “We the People.”
They will, he figures, rise up in their sweatpanted millions, leaving the couch and the Cheetos and the beer, so entranced by the thought of shooting liberals instead of paper gun-range targets that they will cheerfully miss “Monday Night Football,” maybe for years.
I’m watching the trap close, too, here in this small room of a home office, a room furred with my pipe smoke, a room that just holds back the dark New England night, thinking and writing three feet from the cat’s litter box, a location that reminds me of my own mortality.
Trump is in trouble with the law. He’s in Mafia family trouble with the law. He’s in biker gang trouble with the law. He’s in the kind of law trouble that produces indictments thicker than a Bible. He’s in the kind of law trouble that requires thousands of pages of damning documents. Ask anyone who owes child support or taxes what happens when the law gets its hand on you. Only the very poor can escape, and that’s because they can walk off and sink into some tent city on a disused piece of industrial property. Anyone who owns anything, works anywhere, or lives anywhere can be found.
And I, who have written hard things about Trump, I will not be glad as he starts to be revealed for the cheap huckster he’s always been.
I won’t gloat because nothing that wounds my country is a personal victory for me. I will not do what my self-proclaimed non-snowflake friends do, and whine about how I “suffered” through a Trump presidency.
I will not chant, “Lock him up!” That would be rude, and stupid, and cruel.
I want this thing worked out in courtrooms, with deadly serious purpose, and the oath, and the flag hanging limply from a varnished pole. I want robed justices and legal language that’s full of Latin. I want dignity, and quiet, and the inching forward of the judicial process just as surely as it inches forward in the trial of the poorest, scabbiest junkie in the lowest court in the land.
I’ll be sorry for every second of this mess that passes, but I’ll be happy if it goes by in the quiet way that government is meant to go by.
As someone who spent a quarter-century of his life covering politics in towns of less than 100,000 people, and often in towns of less than 30,000 people, what I know is that properly run government is boring as hell, because everyone knows what they’re doing, no one is stealing, and there’s enough money to pay the bills. If a “big story” comes out of government, it means government is not working.
Whatever happens to Donald Trump, even if it seems to be in my interest, I will not gloat. I don’t believe in any one person, and I don’t like saviors unless they are as poor as Christ. I believe in my country, and I believe in our form of government, and I want to see it work, as certain as the clock’s next tick.
Marc Dion, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a reporter and columnist for The Herald News, the daily newspaper of his hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. For more on Dion, go to go to www.creators.com.
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