Trump Gets Things Done

Former President Donald Trump arrives Saturday to deliver remarks to the Georgia state Republican convention. On Friday, he was indicted on 37 felony counts in connection with his handling of classified documents taking from the White House.

One of my conservative friends — yes, you can be friends with people of different political persuasions — often says, “Trump gets things done.” 

The comment followed something Donald Trump said while he and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were campaigning earlier this month in Iowa for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. 

I realize it’s hard to keep up with every brainless thing that comes out of Trump’s mouth, but how can someone so self-absorbed be so clueless about the promises he didn’t keep when he was president and the failures his policies delivered? (We all know the answer; it’s a rhetorical question.)

DeSantis likes to tell supporters he’s running to be the president for eight years, the point being that Trump can serve only one more term if elected, so he wouldn’t be able to get as much done in four as DeSantis can in eight. (Yes, this assumes a lot.)

Trump took the bait. Speaking at a breakfast with the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he told attendees: “You don’t need eight years; you need six months.”

“Who the hell wants to wait eight years?” he rambled on. “If it takes eight years to turn things around, you don’t want him as president,” to which someone in the crowd yelled, “You’re hired!”

This was before the Department of Justice — excuse me, the “weaponized” Justice Department (a line my friend often parrots) — filed a 49-page indictment against the former president that outlines seven charges broken down into nearly 40 counts. The weight of the charges and the volume of evidence are breathtaking. 

Among them: 

• Trump willfully kept national defense information after he left office and then concealed those documents despite a grand jury subpoena.

• Information in the documents included the defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, our nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities to a military attack against both the U.S. and its allies, and plans for retaliation after a foreign attack.

• Boxes of classified documents were piled all about his Mar-a-Lago estate or scattered hither and yon, even in bathrooms, a shower (it appears there is no shortage of bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago) and on the stage of an unguarded ballroom. (Photos are included. There is plenty of other photographic evidence.)

• Trump showed classified documents he described as a “plan of attack” to a writer, a publisher and two staff members (none of whom had security clearance to view them) during an audio-recorded meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, calling the material “highly confidential.”

• He also showed a classified map of a military operation to a member of his political action committee, telling that person not to get too close, admitting that he shouldn’t be showing him the document.

• He directed an aide, Walt Nauta, to hide boxes from Trump’s attorney, the FBI and a grand jury. (Nauta has also been indicted and faces six criminal counts.)

• Text messages were exchanged between Trump employees about moving the boxes of documents, including ones labeled “The Beautiful Mind Boxes.”

• In response to a grand jury subpoena requiring the return of all documents, Trump told two attorneys, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes,” and one attorney quoted the ex-president as saying, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

The charging document contains multiple quotes from the public record of Trump stressing the importance of enforcing “all laws protecting classified information.”

In this Department of Justice photo, boxes are stacked in the White and Gold Ballroom of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The pervasive attitude gleaned from Trump’s behavior is arrogance. The documents are mine. I can do what I want with them, move them anywhere I want, tell anyone I want that I have them and show them to anyone I want.

Worth noting: At 3 p.m. Tuesday, when Trump arrives for his arraignment in a Miami courtroom, he’ll be doing so with new legal representation. The two lawyers he was previously working with, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned Friday.

I wonder what the person at that Iowa breakfast who yelled “You’re hired!” is thinking now, or if he read that indictment or if he ever pondered how little Trump accomplished in his four years as president.

Well, a president racking up 37 criminal counts in his second indictment after being impeached twice, found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and facing a possible third indictment on the serious charge of attempting to steal an election… I guess that’s an accomplishment.

My friend had no comment on those remarkable achievements.

Of course, it took Trump four years to notch all those incredible feats, not counting the E. Jean Carroll defamation suit, the origins of which go back decades. But what an athlete! Imagine how many more criminal charges Trump might rack up if he had four more years. Four more years!

Because, as my good conservative friend says, “Trump gets things done.” 

If that’s true, if Trump says you don’t need eight years, you just need six months, how do you explain the four years he spent in the Oval Office? Let’s take a look:

He promised to hire only the best people. More people in his inner circle have either stepped down in disgrace or been convicted of criminal acts than any previous president, which is really saying something when you consider past presidents like Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding.

He promised a new health care plan. We didn’t get it.

He promised an infrastructure plan. We didn’t get it. We didn’t even get “Infrastructure Week.”

He promised a wall the length of our southern border that Mexico would pay for. We didn’t get a wall, and Mexicans still tell jokes about it. Meanwhile, federal authorities arrested his buddy Steve Bannon and charged him with fraud for stealing fundraising money donors sent to pay for it. Only the best people.

He promised to release his tax returns. We’re still waiting.

He promised to cut the national debt. Instead, he added more to it in one term than any president before him.

He called COVID-19 a Democratic hoax. Great. Blame a viral outbreak, on your watch, on someone else when you should have listened to virologists and immunologists. Apparently they weren’t “the best people.” 

He praised China on its handling of COVID. Then he blamed China for its handling of COVID. Then he imposed a travel ban six weeks after the virus broke out during a December celebration in Wuhan, China, because he spent six weeks denying its existence as a global threat, and by the time a travel ban went into effect in February, every holiday traveler in Wuhan had returned home to every corner of the world, bringing the virus with them. Almost as brilliant as suggesting bleach as the COVID cure-all. Way to get things done, you putz!

Some of his religious followers bought into that bleach nonsense and tried it. And died. Though apparently not the one at that Iowa breakfast who said, “You’re hired!”

Trump divided the country like no president before him. His blaming COVID is credited with a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and we’ve seen how his rhetoric has emboldened a new generation of white nationalists and anti-founding principle supremacists. As the song goes:

   “I wanna be there when we take the streets,

   So I cut out two little eye holes in my sheets.”

He cozied up to foreign leaders who are the very antithesis of America’s founding principles. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and China’s Xi Jinping.

“I really believe he liked me,” Trump said of Xi, whom he praised for extending his Chinese leadership to a lifetime tenure.

That’s all an adversary has to do: Shower Trump with compliments and you can get away with murder. Literally.

Several presidents have looked out the window of the Oval Office wondering if they might end up behind bars: Nixon, Bill Clinton, Harding. But the criminal indictment against Trump marks an important and necessary time stamp in our nation’s history: For the first time, federal law has become a vehicle of accountability for a president’s behavior — whether in office or out of office afterward.

I say it’s about time if it has anything to do with Donald Trump. It’s not because I dislike him; I don’t. He’s too pitiable a creature to dislike. It’s more his cavalier arrogance, his contempt for American norms, his audacity to say no one is above the law and then complain when law enforcement agencies apply it.

The kingly prerogative that the king can do no wrong was one of the driving forces of the American Revolution. Had we discovered after his term in office that Trump actually shot someone on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue before his election, should that grant him immunity from prosecution?

I suppose some of his goose-stepping loyalists would call any such prosecution a witch hunt.

But as Trump himself has said, no one is above the law. The Mar-a-Lago indictment will test how true that truly is. How the 2024 Republican hopefuls decide to run against Trump in the face of this indictment could determine the future of the Republican Party. Someone within the party itself has to tell him, “That’s right, Donald, no one is above the law, including you.”

We’ve all heard that Americans have a declining faith in our political institutions. This is a chance to reverse that decline, at least for today.

The Justice Department’s indictment sets a precedent in which federal prosecutors no longer see charging a president or ex-president as unthinkable but as a law enforcement tool applicable to the highest office in the land as readily as to any member of the taxpaying public.

Now that’s a contribution I can acknowledge as a positive from Trump’s presidential legacy. At least he got that done.

“No president has ever done what I’ve done,” he has boasted. “No president has ever even come close.”

For once, we can say, that’s not an understatement.