Paul Gordon
April 15, 2024 was a sad day in American history.
That was the day Donald Trump became the first former US president to be tried on criminal charges and was found guilty six weeks later.
Like many Americans, I watched television networks spend hours each day during the trial telling me what happened, showing sketches that made the testimony look more plausible, and telling me what to pay attention to.
I have read countless reports from trusted news sources on the same subject and still believe that print media has the ability to dig deeper in a meaningful way.
I watched on TV as he was convicted of 34 felony counts for influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, when the real charge was that he falsified business records to hide moral turpitude he didn’t want voters to know about.
But even though I believed it was the right decision based on what I had heard and read, I didn’t cheer or feel any satisfaction while watching it – instead, I felt sad that it had turned out this way.
I was saddened to think of what one man and his minions had done and would probably do if given the chance, and to think of what was to come. I was saddened to think of a time when people like Bob Michell and Ray LaHood could get things done across party lines without worrying about the “gotcha” behavior of Jim Jordan and Marge Green. There really was a time when party politics took precedence over what was good for the country.
Impeachment is a serious issue, not a tit-for-tat notion to be tossed around like candy at a Republican parade.
I have no interest in Donald Trump as a person. He is arrogant and has an ego like I have never seen before. Without that ego, he would never have been put on trial for anything. His fraudulent schemes like Trump University probably would not have gone unnoticed simply because the victims of those schemes were too embarrassed to say anything publicly.
The overvaluation of his Trump Tower apartment probably wouldn’t have been discovered because no one would have looked that closely at his numbers, given how long he’d been getting away with it.
While I have zero sympathy for Donald Trump, I do feel some sympathy for his family, who sadly must have considered themselves lucky to have been born with that surname. They may still be very loyal and proud of Trump, but without Trump’s ego, their name and image would not have become part of the growing slander around the world.
Trump deserves all the challenges he now faces. He decided to run for president to prove… what exactly? And now, after proving he is unfit for the job, he wants us to return to the White House.
stop it.
