The White House to the Big House

Anyone who is any kind of regular reader of these postings will know by now that I consider Maureen Dowd to be the laziest columnist in existence. They pay her way too much for the far too few words she writes once a week. Once a week! There are high school students who write more for their high school paper, and of course for a lot less. She must keep waving that Pulitzer she earned long ago in the their face. "Yeah A.G. (A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the NYT), you got one of these?"

I will say she is one writer who can send you the dictionary more than anyone else. Like William F. Buckley Jr. she can be a sesquipedalian. An annoying one. In a recent column she uncorked a 28 letter word that hardly looked like a word but rather a set of spilled Scrabble tiles that were picked up and put on the bar. She must have been reminding us once again that she just got a Masters in English from Columbia University while in her 60s. The word? Floccinaucinihilipilifaction. Look it up. 

The word reminds me of the childhood riddle that asked, "what has fours I's and flows?" Mississippi.

I have to hand it her in her last column. She paints an absolutely delicious picture of Donald Trump running the country from the Big House rather than the White House.

The Justice Department's Special Counsel, Jack Smith, is a crackerjack prosecutor who has argued cases at the World Court in the Hague against warlords and war criminals. A conviction should not be unexpected. Even Alan M. Dershowitz in a WSJ Op-ed piece admits that the government has done their homework. He writes: "Mr. Smith has made a stronger case against Mr. Trump than many observers, including me, expected." Oh-oh. Ask Martha Stewart about pissing off the Feds.

The image is cinematic. Maureen has The Donald in the slammer like Paulie in the movie Goodfellas, being accorded all the jailhouse privileges you can have for the money. Paulie (Paul Sorvino) cuts the garlic just so for the sauce. Donald can cut the Big Mac cheeseburgers in half.

The orange jumpsuit might be a problem, what with the color of The Donald's hair. And how do you wear presidential cufflinks with that outfit? The red tie is definitely out. Suicide, and all. I wish Mad Magazine were still around. My guess is they'd be sketching the cartoon panels as we write.

Ms. Dowd has always been hard on The Donald ever since he was elected. You can't accuse her of suddenly not liking someone. Having Trump being granted conjugal visits, and not with Melania, might be a blow too low, but The Donald has had his share of women. There would no doubt be plenty of volunteers to take Melania's place, expecting to win a competition of some kind. If Melania were not to visit The Donald in a conjugal trailer parked near the exercise yard it shouldn't a surprise. It would not exactly be a suitable place for a former First Lady to have relations with her husband, even if the sheets are fresh from the prison laundry. It is hard to imagine Melania subjecting herself to being buzzed through a series of doors to reach The Donald waiting for her on a bed in a trailer in the exercise yard ringed in razor barbed wire. Meetings with world leaders should be no problem. That's what Zoom is for.

As for playing golf, well, the Federal prison system  was once nicknamed Club Fed for it easy going confinement comforts and amenities. That has supposedly changed. Regardless, there is probably no Federal prison that includes at least a nine hole curse adjacent to the property that prisoners might take advantage of. The Donald will have to play virtual golf on his iPhone, if he is allowed to have one.

Count on Ms. Dowd to give us an interesting piece of history. She tells us socialist Eugene Debs was put in prison for sedition and still ran for president, garnering 900,000 votes. The prospect of The Donald running for president from a cell block certainly would not make some people happy.

And Debs wasn't the only convicted felon to run for the highest office. Lyndon LaRouche, a convicted felon for attempting to defraud the IRS and defaulting on loans from campaign supporters, ran as a candidate for the United States Labor party in one his eight attempts at office. But these are fringe candidates and  fringe parties. It would be assumed that Donald Trump would be the Republican standard bearer, adding another unique chapter to American history.

But if Joe Biden basically didn't travel in 2020 and campaigned from his basement, then Donald Trump campaigning from a jail cell can't be all that different.

What if he wants a recount? And where do you hold the victory speech, the mess hall? Losing would prove no problem as far a speech is concerned. The Donald doesn't admit defeat or quit.

The above photo is credited to the United States Justice Department and shows storage boxes of what are purported to be classified government documents kept without any apparent security in a Mar-a-Largo bathroom. 

The sensitivity of the stored papers will certainly be brought in question. Can anything the government put out there years ago still be relevant? It is possible that the defense will argue that they hold nothing more exciting that yesterday's newspaper, and we know that goes underneath parakeets or wraps fish. The Donald just had a huge supply ready for that.

A place as big as Mar-a-Largo surely has umpteen bathrooms, so the storage of boxes in one of them shouldn't keep any household members from  relieving themselves. It is an incongruent scene. A chandelier in a bathroom that is stuffed with storage boxes in front of a shower curtain that looks as seedy at the one Janet Leigh was behind when she was written out of Psycho very early in the movie. That Hitchcock.

We always live interesting times. One news analyst with ABC's David Muir provided an escape scenario where Donald Trump gets elected and then has his Attorney General dismiss the case against him.  A criminal's heaven.

If a Florida jury doesn't convict Mr. Trump of the charges the government has brought against him, it wouldn't be the first time a Don will have been acquitted. Anyone from New York can easily remember the number of times organized crime's John Gotti was hauled into Eastern District Federal Court with a laundry list of transgressions who ultimately would get acquitted. This happened so often that New York newspapers nicknamed John Gotti the Teflon Don.

John Gotti was eventually hauled in and was convicted, sent to prison and died there in 2002. But if a Florida jury acquits we will have a new Teflon Don. Hollywood awaits.

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