When it comes to Donald Trump's indictment, you know it's 'serious'

True story: As a cub reporter I was covering a rape trial 40 years ago, which looked less like the act of a bad man than a consequence of bad timing — that being of a husband who had unexpectedly shown up in the middle of the day.

When I said as much to a sheriff’s deputy, his response was, “Well, he’s done a lot of stuff that he never got caught for.”

So is that how we’re supposed to feel now? That the tawdry silliness of paying a porn actress to keep her mouth shut is reason to throw the book at a former president because, well, he’s done a lot of stuff that he never got caught for?

This is Al Capone. The gumshoes are up against a man too cunning to be caught in the act of murder and mayhem, so they send him up the river for being a sloppy accountant.

These are serious charges. I guess. You know it from the hyperventilating press coverage, the choppers shadowing the car like they did with O.J., and the — if this doesn’t tell you all you need to know nothing will — open speculation that Trump would try to write off the cost of surrendering to U.S. Marshals as a campaign expense.

You know it's serious, because the former president dusted off his biggest jet, one that for years had essentially been rusting away in an airplane junkyard, giving it a shiny new paint job, but probably doing little more than shooing the rats out of the mechanical guts that the public can’t see. You can ride on that plane if you want, but I’m not.

You know it’s serious because suddenly the media are using Trump’s middle initial, the way your parents did when you’d really stepped in it this time. “Donald J. Trump is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan …” wrote the New York Times.

Donald J. Trump. This is to keep you from getting him confused with Donald P. Trump, who was also a former president of the United States with a penchant for paying off floozies.

Except there’s a side of this that isn’t serious at all. It’s a weak and pathetic act of a weak and pathetic man. It’s not pretty, but it happens all the time. Don’t tell the wife (or the American public) and I’ll buy you something sparkly. Or if that’s too romantic for you, you can just cut a check.

But really, the only thing we know today that we didn’t know yesterday is that Trump can’t spell “indictment.” And in some ways, this isn’t his fault, it's ours. We used to have a mechanism for punishing wretchedness. It was known as an “election.”

Timeline: How Trump was indicted after probe into payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels

And boy, were we strict. In the 1980s, a single toke off a J and you were toast. One “back rub” (or 12) might have cost Chuck Robb the presidency. American voters were Cotton Mather — any false move and a candidate would be swinging from a tree.

True, we have always reserved the right to be selective (when a Republican cheats it’s because he’s a letcher, when a Democrat cheats it’s because he has “appetites.”) JFK and Clinton got passes as, for a time, did Mark Sanford, whose absences while visiting a Brazilian mistress were characterized as “hiking on the Appalachian Trail.”

In 2009, he did not seek re-election for governor because voters felt he was too much of a scum dog. In 2019 he was defeated by fire-eating Republican primary voters, for whom Sanford wasn’t scum dog enough. A lot changed in that decade.

This is the point in the relationship where the spouse who’s getting the cold shoulder says, “This is about that insurrection thing, isn’t it?”

Well of course it is. Porn-star payment is placeholder text, something to distract us while we wait for the Big One.

And if the Big One doesn’t come? We’ll always have Stormy.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail reporter.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Porn-star payment is a distraction while we wait for the Big One