O Lucky Man

Biden’s gift to Trump jeopardizes what seemed like a slam dunk.

As many many observers have noted, Donald Trump is the luckiest motherfucker on the planet.

Born into obscene privilege, he has led a life cosseted in unearned wealth and power, exempting him from consequences for 72 years of unrelentingly shitty behavior. He has avoided the blowback from a business career rife with corruption, fraud, tax evasion, and racial discrimination; escaped serving in Vietnam; evaded judgment in lawsuits too numerous to count; and even successfully dodged multiple credible accusations of sexual assault and rape.

Indeed, he seems never to have been made to answer for any of his ghastly actions throughout his entire pathetic, misbegotten life.

That pattern most certainly continued when it came to his behavior in the White House, behavior that included making kidnapping an explicit matter of state policy, poisoning the national bloodstream with the normalization of Orwellian disinformation, blackmailing foreign heads of state for personal gain, lining his pockets with bribes from foreign powers, exhibiting depraved indifference in (non)response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and — oh yeah — fomenting a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election.

Yeah, yeah, efforts are underway to hold him accountable for some of that. But I’m getting lightheaded from holding my breath.

One would think that this lifetime of impunity would make Don happy. Ecstatic, even. But on the contrary: one of the few sources of solace we have when it comes to Trump is that, despite this outrageous run of good fortune, he is demonstrably the most miserable, tormented human being I can think of. The man appears to be in a constant state of rage 24/7/52.

Hmmm. Maybe there’s such a thing as karma after all. Unfortunately, he feels the need to take that rage out on the rest of humanity. But that is a story for another day.

But I bring up Trump’s lifelong run of good fortune because — in case you missed it — he recently got another insanely lucky break.

It’s All Good, Man

Of the various legal issues currently bedeviling Trump, the Mar-a-Lago documents case was the cleanest, the simplest, and seemingly the…