Tucked into the outrage of the week — the Justice Department’s implosion over the Roger Stone sentencing recommendations — was a statement that, for any other president, would have provoked serious blowback. I understand why this has garnered zero attention and zero controversy. With Trump, you gotta pick your outrages with discretion. Attempting to call out this president on his every transgression would have us all babbling and drooling in the loony bin on a stopover to an early grave.
Here’s what I’m talking about… Ranting about the Stone prosecutors following his own Justice Department’s sentencing guidelines, Trump complained, “You have murderers and drug addicts who don’t get nine years!”
Wait a minute! What do those words say about the man who blathered them? Does he actually equate murder with drug addiction? Is he really incapable of distinguishing the difference between sociopathic criminality and chemical dependency? Drug addicts should be imprisoned? Is that what we heard? A junky deserves a longer stretch in the joint than a man who was found guilty on seven serious felony charges, including threatening a witness?
I don’t know about you, but I kinda get the feeling that, if that seven-times-a-felon weren’t the president’s stalwart dirty-trickster pal, who perjured himself to protect the president’s fragile ego, and who proudly sports a tattoo of our last criminal president Richard Nixon between his shoulder blades… if that guilty-times-seven guy were named Peter Strzok or Andrew McCabe, if he were a black teenager framed for a brutal rape in Central Park, Trump wouldn’t have been satisfied with a sentence of beheading in the public square. For scum like them, Der Trumpster would have called for a drawing and quartering before the guillotine was put to work.
Few Americans haven’t had their lives touched in some way by the scourge of the opioid epidemic. But, that’s only the latest in a long, sad parade of national plagues. Crack cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin have been destroying lives, ripping families and communities apart for decades. Our prisons are already bursting at the seams with drug offenders, overwhelmingly males of color. But opioid dependency is the problem Trump should actually be sensitive to — because it effects white Americans who voted for him, white Americans in MAGA hats who cheer him on at his fact-free rallies. I’m wondering if somebody should point this out in a forum where Trumplodytes are liable to watch, like Fox “News?” “Oh,” they’d explain, “He just misspoke. He does that all the time.”
But, if it were simply a slip of the tongue, why hasn’t he corrected himself? Maybe it’s because he still doesn’t realize his mistake. And that’s precisely why I decided to bring it up. You’re welcome, Mr. President.
Rand Bishop (aka, Gimpy Ol’ Norman) is the author of TREK: My Peace Pilgrimage in Search of a Kinder America. Part One of Bishop’s serialized, satirical e-book novella Option (D): Dosing Donald is now available for pre-order.