“Delay is the deadliest form of denial”

by David Benjamin

“… Having seen Trump survive too many other scandals that should have ended his disgraceful political career, I cannot be overly sanguine that he has finally reached his rightful reckoning. The cancer has been exposed but could still continue to metastasize.”

— Max Boot, The Washington Post

MADISON, Wis.—Donald Trump’s political epitaph has been written a thousand times in the last seven years. Before he backed into the White House, he admitted on videotape that he regularly forces himself on women and “grabs them by the pussy.” Twenty-six women agree, including two who have accused him of rape. Let’s continue: Trump is the only president in history—the only political figure in history—to be intimately associated, photographed hugging and grinning, with at least eight convicted, indicted or credibly accused sexual predators, namely Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz, Joel Greenberg, George Nader, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell.

Trump is our only president who cheated on his (third) trophy wife with a porn star while said spouse (Melania) was pregnant. He’s the only president ever required by a federal court, during his term in office, to pay a settlement—of $25 million—for promoting a fake “university” that defrauded 7,000 starry-eyed celebrity-worshipping suckers. He’s the only president ever to be sanctioned for racist practices by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump’s the only president whose family members have called him a sociopath, whose closest cronies have deemed him, “crazy,” “unhinged” and “detached from reality.”

And he’s gotten away with everything. He’s as pure, goes the saying, as the driven slush.

Despite “damning” revelations unearthed by the House select committee examining the attempted coup d’etat of January 6, and despite “devastating” testimony this week by West Wing aide Cassidy Hutchinson, all the the odds still favor Trump. He makes Dickens’ Artful Dodger look like Little Nell. 

Trump learned evasion, distraction and dissembling from his slumlord dad. Fred Trump taught little Donny not that he should aspire to be—in the common formulation—“above the law.” Rather, Donny grasped instinctively that the secret of his success would be to place himself, like his old man. “beyond the law.”

The stuff, of course, that greased Trump’s skids for life was money. If you have enough wealth—or the illusion of wealth—you can buy lawyers. With lawyers—and they don’t necessarily have to be good ones, shysters will do—you can trigger a cycle of corruption that begins with denial, proceeds to defiance and drags on endlessly, with delay after delay upon delay. Credible, provable cases have been brought against Donald Trump hundreds of times by thousands of plaintiffs. Trump has survived and often prevailed by simply exhausting and impoverishing his less wealthy, less patient, less ruthless victims. 

These precedents foreshadow a stalemate almost certain to unfold if Attorney General Merrick Garland ever musters the temerity to seek accountability for the myriad crimes committed by Donald during his “stop the steal” scam. 

Denial is always Move One. Since studying at his amoral dad’s knee, Trump has styled himself as a mob boss, unfortunately devoid of Michael Corleone’s cool or Tony Soprano’s endearing angst. Don’s a wannabe don (all suit, no hitmen) who surrounds himself with fawning shnooks who sacrifice reputation, dignity and family for a pat on the head and a two-dollar tip from his mythic billions. Hunkered behind a phalanx of limo-chasing attorneys, Trump wraps himself in deniability by winking his wishes but never stating them directly, never putting them in writing or ever sending an email. 

Shielded by obeisance, he mounts defiance, poking his golden comb-over above the parapet, flipping a finger and yelling, “Nyah, nyah, nyah! Come and get me.” Like a Gotti or a Patriarca in his Florida fortress of kitsch and golden toilet-handles, he brags that, yeah, so what if I did it, you can’t touch me. Call your witnesses, pile up your evidence. By the time every expense has been analyzed, every grift exposed, every lie unraveled, every woman shamed, every fall guy sent up the river, prosecutors will have changed and the new ones will have fresher fish to fry. Victims will have died, despaired, blown their savings, gone into hiding or taken a chump-change settlement to call off Donny’s dogs and end the horror. 

And then, there’s the statute of limitations. 

As C. Northcote Parkinson said, as though he personally knew Fred Trump, “Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

Right now, the January 6 inquisitors are racing furiously to build their case. They have to rush because they’re working against two malignant forces. The first is a November election that will likely turn over the leadership of every committee in the House of Representatives to the Party of Trump. The January 6 committee will be replaced by a series of “Freedom Caucus” counter-investigations designed to deny, refute or bury every fact that proves Trump’s vast criminality. More important. Trump’s minions will make it their sole mission to destroy the life, livelihood, family and future of Cassidy Hutchinson—and every other relict of a moribund Republican Party who stepped up and spoke truth. 

Trump’s other trump card is a Justice Department whose gears, when they turn at all, grind so slowly that movement is indiscernible. Merrick Garland might well convene a grand jury or two this year. His jurists might shockingly return a lonely Trump indictment by the Ides of next March. Before Thanksgiving (2023), there might be a trial date, requiring a cameo by Trump’s army of attorneys. But all these hypotheticals are haunted by the specter the 2024 presidential derby. Once the eager media saddle up to trail the horserace, the attempted prosecution of any candidate—namely Donald Trump—would be deemed unfair and unseemly, lest the Justice Department find itself discredited for fostering a political agenda and trying to influence the campaign.

By announcing his candidacy, whenever it tickles his fancy, Trump renders himself untouchable. As he has always done and will do until he dies without a single stain on his rap sheet, he will wield the deadly power of delay. 

The Donald has proven, to every bright child in America, that you can spend your entire career as a crook but remain as free as a carrion crow. Blessed with a silver spoon and an almost supernatural load of chutzpah, you can grow cultishly beloved and draw bizarre comparisons to Jesus Christ. You can inspire fairy tales of unparalleled business acumen without ever actually being in business. You can spawn legends of charm, benevolence, sexual prowess and “stable genius” that are not merely groundless, but preposterous and outright ugly. You can spit in the eye of every legitimate authority and ruin—ruin!—thousands of people. You can do all that, run amok, wrestle with the Secret Service, throw your food at the wall (ketchup? Really?) and suffer not the slightest consequence. 

Recently, speaking to the January 6 committee, Judge J. Michael Luttig, who is widely deemed America’s most respected conservative jurist, referred to Trump as a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”

It’s hard to imagine words emptier than this statement. Judge Luttig is unknown to all but a handful of the 300 million Americans who all know who Donald Trump is. The judge has never had his own TV show. I saw forlorn resignation in his testimony. Judge Luttig seems to fear—and perhaps knows for sure—that he will be ten years moldering in his grave before Fred Trump’s bad seed faces the unlikely prospect of setting foot in a courtroom.