If the word “guilty” needed a visual prompt in Webster’s dictionary, Donald Trump’s face would be the illustration.It is conceivable that Trump has committed a criminal deed on every single day of his adult life — lying, misrepresenting, fleecing, failing to pay employees, threatening, scamming.

But really, Trump’s indictment is not about crime.

Enough people love Trump to make him an omnipresent threat to reemerge, like a zombie crawling out of the crypt, and reoccupy the White House. But however many people adore Trump, even more people find him vile, repugnant, grotesque, morally misshapen. He has taken to calling the source of his current woes — porn actress Stormy Daniels — “horseface.” This sort of gratuitous cruelty is so ingrained in Trump’s reality show persona that no one flinches at the sheer putridness that we have come to expect.

Trump is the most hideous villain that America has ever produced — even his physical appearance is a caricatured effort to elicit disgust — the fake orange hair, the angry red face, the shapeless bulk of him, all come together like a reified page out of DC or Marvel Comics. Trump’s villainy has kept the entire “liberal” news industry alive with an electric anticipation of “karma” that is always just around the corner.

Remember Mueller time? For years on end, the battle between Trump and the conventions of public decorum have been sustaining the news cycle. And the best part is that the show has been renewed season after season.

We have been told on the news that Trump’s indictment is unique, that no other president has ever been arrested on felony charges, but this is a meaningless assertion for two reasons:

1) The hush money payments are a timid proxy for Trump’s more serious transgressions — attempting to overturn an election, fomenting an insurrection, and (although not linked to a legal charge) orchestrating a systematic strategy of inaction during a pandemic that caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.

2) While Trump may be the first to be facing formal charges, many presidents have engaged in egregiously immoral and illegal official behavior. No less of an authority on international law than Nuremberg judge Gen. Telford Taylor, asserted that Richard Nixon’s targeting of civilians, both in bombing and in ground action in Vietnam, qualified as war crimes.

Nixon, who escaped prosecution for domestic crimes that foreshadowed those of Trump, via a presidential pardon, also manipulated the illegal overthrow of the democratically elected Allende administration in Chile by supporting Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of political opponents with the blessing and backing of the CIA and the U.S. military — a blatant violation of international law.

It is impossible to be exhaustive in a few paragraphs regarding the violations of international law and the endless roster of atrocities committed by U.S.-backed forces in Latin America and Asia under Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and Ronald Reagan (to name a few presidential scoundrels).

During Reagan’s reign, the U.S.-funded Salvadorian death squads that were alleged to have murdered 75,000 victims. U.S.-trained soldiers committed one of the world’s great genocides in Indonesia during the mid-1960s, an event that inspired an almost total blackout of U.S. media as detailed in Noam Chomsky’s book, “Manufacturing Consent.”

Adam Schiff, appearing on Rachal Maddow’s show on MSNBC, declared that Trump’s indictment is a vindication of the rule of law. There are some 23 million Americans that have spent time incarcerated in the prison industrial complex — the largest, most expansive prison system since that of Nazi Germany. As a retired mental health worker whose career took place in one of the poorest areas of Massachusetts, I can attest to how ubiquitous legal troubles are for our poorest citizens. I have had clients do months in lockup for drug possession, stealing a bicycle or driving to work with a suspended license.

TV pundits love to say “no one is above the law.” Law in America is TV entertainment, a prop to amuse and distract viewers.

Trump’s indictment is not about justice, and aphorisms about no one being above the law are an insult to all of us. Trump is still in the role of a reality TV performer. The indictment is a new installment, the beginning of a new reality season. Most of us either love Trump or hate his guts.

That is no small thing. If America is a crumbling empire, if we are faced with a sixth extinction, if most people are living shorter, poorer, unhappier lives, at least we have bread and circuses. Heat some popcorn — cable news ratings are going up.

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker living in Northampton. He has had political writings published nationally in Current Affairs and Common Ground.

]]>