TWGB: Nearly Nothing to Say

 

The death of Alexei Navalny is an example of how authoritarian power reacts to courage--the strongman is, at heart, a small villain. The warm voice of opposition is the thing that threatens his snowflake grip on power. In the US, we enshrined freedom of speech in the Constitution. In Putin's Russia, it is punished, sometimes fatally. The likelihood that Russia will call this "natural causes" is a laugh--naturally, we know what caused his death. 

But I'm not an expert in Russia politics, so there's only so much I can add to that discussion. I just want to note that the power to eliminate opposing voices was exactly the power that Trump's claim of total presidential immunity would result in. It would be the power of the thin-skinned and weak man to no longer have to argue his case, but to end the argument with one fatal command. 

I won't link to the sickos on the right who linked the imprisonment of Navalny and the straits of former president Donald Trump, except to note them by name, D'Souza, Zeldin, Mace (there's more, but linking to them hardly matters). Trump is not a crusader against corruption--he is corrupt. He is not downtrodden by political violence; he is an ardent encourager of it. This is the real Trump Derangement Syndrome: to never blame poor little Trump for anything, ever. Not even the legal troubles of a long-time crook. 

Trump, having been manifestly unfit for office in the first place, is even more dangerously so--we don't know that he still has not retained valuable national secrets, and now has millions of reasons to see if they prove fungible. That his little fan club are being tuned up to see him as a martyr, even though he is certainly no Navalny, is both absurd and chilling. 

When we listen to the grotesque words of Putin's American propagandist, Tucker Carlson, rationalizing the assassinations by the dictator as something all leaders do (perhaps he could enlighten us about the famous hits of our numerous presidents?) it's easy to hear Trump's same rationalization from 2017: 

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Perhaps no country is ever truly innocent. But we also need not be naive that those who demand immunity from any accountability are those who would require it for the things they fully intend to do, not for our sakes, but for their own appetite. 

I suppose as far as having things to say about it goes, that isn't nothing. But it's only what I've been saying about TrumpWorld all along. And as for whether Trump's most recent set-back doesn't leave him financially bankrupt--of course, he's been there before. But the morally bankrupt can always find friends, even when the morally just have no help, not even from heaven.