Donald the Magician

On Friday, the sham president took his Puerto Rican delusion to the next level, again claiming that the George Washington University study that showed 2, 975 American citizens died on the island as a result of Hurricane Maria was a Democratic hoax “to make me look as bad as possible,” he whined. 

Gee, no wonder this man was elected in a landslide – he is a veritable magician, able to make almost 3,000 dead people vanish as if they never existed with the simple movement of his tiny thumbs. Dang, ain’t we lucky to have such a master of legerdemain in the White House!

Donald Trump is actually going to need some big-time magic to get out from under the net that Robert Mueller is throwing in 360 degrees around him. Trump has never come up against an opponent with this degree of seriousness and experience who has the power to bring the full investigative force of the Federal government against him. So far, Mueller’s string of indictments and convictions is being braided into a rope and hangman’s knot for guess who.

As Trump’s ex-counsel John Dowd pointed out to him in no uncertain terms, in a battle of wits between Robert Mueller and Donald Trump, Trump is virtually unarmed and at the mercy of his own forked and lying  tongue.

Long ago and far away, when it was first gleaned that this schmuck might actually have a chance at the presidency, I remember saying to someone that even if Trump became president, all those slick-ass lawyers and politicians in D.C. would tie him up in so many knots Houdini himself couldn’t get loose.

I was only partially right. I never figured on how crazy Trump would actually be and how low the Republican party has sunk to give this maniac free rein.

But then again I was partially right, too, about the part of the culture and the lawyers in D.C. who are showing real professional acumen in unerring pursuit of the only thing that matters vis a vis Trump and his Russian allies: the truth.

Mueller et al have been throwing hard up-jabs at Trump until fairly

recently, but now his flabby midsection is being hit with crippling body shots. With the Cohen and Manafort flippings, every time he slinks back to his handlers in the White House he is becoming more undone and irrational, yipping about Puerto Rican death counts and the size of Hurricane Florence with no idea of what he was actually talking about. 

How about this: Trump is a known and documented pathological liar and a bully of longstanding who now has to stand and fight on his own, in his own scape-goating and blame-casting  pool of lies, and the circle of those he trusts has shrunk to basically his shady family. 

What does a guy like that do when it’s truth time? He cuts and runs like the coward that he is. Even Nixon had enough residual respect for the rule of law to turn over the tapes, take his lumps, and salvage some minute bit of respect by resigning.

Trump couldn't care less about the rule of law, which he has amply demonstrated. He does seem to care some about his family, entitled and rotten as they are, and a real and dramatic threat to them from Mueller could make him do the right thing and step down while there is still some America worth saving.

That would be his real magic.