Jack Smith throws in the towel

by David Benjamin

“I don’t take responsibility at all.” — Trump

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a shocking Friday the 13th bombshell, Jack Smith, a Justice Department special counsel assigned by Attorney General Merrick Garland to hound Donald Trump to his grave, announced that all investigations of the ex-president have been indefinitely suspended. Smith, who brought to his position in the DOJ a reputation as a relentless pursuer of the high and mighty, indicated that no future action against Trump is anticipated.

Asked by a reporter to explain this remarkable reversal by a Justice Department that had been gutted, politicized and embarrassed by Trump, Smith merely said, “What’s the point?”

He took no further questions.

The Attorney General was not available to the media for comment. Only hours later was an explanation pieced together from remarks by more than a dozen sources close to the numerous Trump investigations, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity. According to one knowledgeable DOJ insider, prosecutor Smith’s first discovery was that Donald Trump represents the most startling case of arrested development in the history of American politics. 

“Our research revealed,” said the source, “that the former guy is completely incapable of understanding how appalling, irresponsible, dumb and incorrigible he is. To call him a human train wreck would be an insult to train wrecks.”

Reporters noted that the creepiness of Donald Trump’s personality has been well-known for decades. However, sources close to the abortive DOJ probe revealed a clinical study showing that Trump has an emotional, temperamental and neurological age of slightly more than four years. “His body grew, and his ego expanded monstrously,” said one source involved in the study, “but, before he was potty-trained, he had somehow pissed away almost all human feeling. The first word he spoke, at age eighteen months, was not ‘Mama.’ It was ‘Gimme.’”

One source tried to explain this phenomenon by comparing the ex-president to a wildfire. “The more we investigated all the outrages he committed in the White House,” said the anonymous clinician, “the bigger his vanity became. We were complicit in an out-of-control conflagration of vainglory that was being fueled by public scrutiny. Attention to Trump—any attention—is like oxygen to a wildfire. The life-giving air that sustains normal, modest people gets sucked up by the firestorm of Trump’s ego and expands, beyond all control, his power to wreak rampant destruction. We were like firefighters in Hell. The deeper we dug into Trump’s antics, the greater became his flaming self-regard, towering ever brighter and higher into the polluted sky, forcing us to stare and gasp, pondering the vast, scorched, ashen landscape that his infantile ego always leaves behind.”

One DOJ lawyer, speaking also on condition of anonymity, compared Trump to the character of Oskar, created by author Gunter Grass in his novel, The Tin Drum. In that story, Oskar willed himself to stop growing. He became a dwarf as a personal, childish protest against the horrors he saw in Germany before and during World War II. “The difference, of course,” said the source, “is that Oskar’s refusal to grow was a moral choice. In contrast, Trump’s decision to remain—for the rest of his life—a loud, whiny, pathologically mendacious and amoral pre-kindergarten dwarf was selfish and solipsistic.”

Every source agreed that no power on earth could change the former president in the least. “If prosecuting him posed the possibility that he could see the error of his ways,” said one unnamed member of Smith’s staff, “we might have pressed on to an indictment. But in Trump’s case, all his ways were errors. He has no ‘good side” to which we could appeal.”

The special prosecutor came to the reluctant conclusion that the Justice Department could pump billions of dollars into a battle against Trump’s battalion of ambulance-chasing shysters, swatting away a swarm of ridiculous legal motions, enduring delays that would stretch beyond Trump’s—and possibly Smith’s—lifespan. But all of this arduous jurisprudence would only serve to bloat Trump’s vanity into an eclipse of sanity so colossal that would cast a permanent toxic shadow over Capitol Hill. The counsel feared that the ordeal of a ten to twenty -year prosecution would turn Trump’s ragtag mob of fanatic followers into a permanent standing army of professional vigilantes, armed with AR-style rifles, bazookas, armored vehicles, grenade launchers and IEDs (all legal in Texas), a sort of terrorist network bombing abortion clinics, shooting bear spray at police and hairspray at the ozone layer, menacing the spouses and children of Democratic congresspersons and torching pedophile pizza parlors.

To forestall this national nightmare, sources said, special prosecutor Smith is formulating, and will soon announce, what he calls “the Amish solution.”

“We’re gonna shun the son of a bitch,” said the DOJ source.

Before suspending their investigation, the prosecutor’s staff came to a consensus that the only workable strategy for cleansing the United States of Donald Trump is to declare him, officially, a Giant Irrepressible Pain in Americas’s Ass (GIPAA) and, thereafter, ignore him completely, no matter what he does says, or tweets and no matter how violent and profane his torrent of tantrums.

“When an Amish person violates the community ethos, the penalty,” said one of the unnamed sources, “is to exclude that person from all notice, from all contact. This is a devastating punishment. Not to be spoken to or listened to, not to even get a nod or a smile from folks you’ve known all your life, not to get anyone’s attention even if you climb up on a chair and scream, well, this is enough to drive a normal person around the bend. For someone as cosmically needy as Trump, being ignored is like a hot, raging itch in your asshole that never goes away.”

But what about the media, who’ve been captivated by Trump’s act since he told his first lie at the age of two? Smith’s team characterized the effort to divert the press from Trump as a “war of attrition.” 

“Let’s face it,” said one DOJ staffer. “We’re not gonna shut him down overnight. But Trump, at bottom, is a bore. He’s been spouting the same crapola for ten years now. Millions are already tuning him out. If regular folks get the message that they can—they should, for the sake of their own sanity—ignore the raving egomaniac, the press will follow the trend, slavishly. There are few creatures on earth with less imagination than a political beat reporter.”

One anonymous DOJ lawyer said that the Smith team had fussed over a concern that ending the “Trump hunt” would seem to place him and all his transgressions “above the law.” This discussion led to a novel legal theory that might apply to future cases involving political celebrities whose behavior gives most educated Americans a violent case of the willies.

“We’re talking about a coldblooded sociopath who shafted his personal lawyer, his campaign manager and his accountant—and who fingered his own daughter—to keep himself out of jail,” said the source. “He’s not above the law because he’s not above anything, or anyone. He belongs to a class of public figures who get noticed, get paid and accumulate deluded followers because of the sheer, relentless rottenness—but also the pathetic, look-at-me triviality—of their behavior. As prosecutors, you examine, but eventually opt to ignore petty crooks, creeps, grifters and GIPAAs like Donald Trump not because they’re above the law, but because they do not deserve the dignity of legal scrutiny. They are—for all practical and moral purposes—below the law.”