Your Daily Trump Dump

I'm starting to think launching this feature was a mistake on my part. Three-fourths of the news sites on the Internet have turned into little Trump Dumps, listing Yesterday's Bad News for Donald Trump and Yesterday's Outrage by Donald Trump. Doing it daily also forces me to spend time reading those sites and there are some days when I'd rather just forget he's there and he has so many people hating each other. The last few days I've had an intermittent headache and while he's not the cause of it, he sure ain't helping.

I couldn't follow all of the hearings today but my impression is that this is the game he and his defenders are playing. If it feels familiar, that may be with how much it resembles the way O.J. Simpson's lawyers made it possible for him to walk. They couldn't argue the facts of his case. They offered no alternate theory of who'd killed those two people if it wasn't Simpson. In fact, after the case was over and O.J. was acquitted, several of those lawyers and others who supported him said they would blow the case wide open with books revealing who really dunnit.

None of them did. Well, F. Lee Bailey eventually published one that was high on conjecture and devoid of facts…but the point is that no one had an even semi-credible argument that someone else killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. Simpson got away because they convinced the jury that there was "something wrong" with all the evidence. They couldn't really say what it was they made that jury generally distrust the whole prosecution and they set O.J. free because to those jurors, a frame-up felt highly likely. It was feelings over facts.

The way this parallels what we're seeing now — and I'm not claiming this is an exact match — is that Trump's defenders are attacking the process and the witnesses saying "something's wrong." No matter how many fact witnesses (and even the not-a-transcript that Trump released) corroborate what The Whistleblower said, they argue that he is evil, he is biased, he is a Never-Trumper, he has always had it in for Donald, etc., and so he's tainted everything that followed. (A "Never-Trumper," by the way, now seems to be anyone who has ever indicated that he or she thinks D.J.T. has ever done anything that wasn't brilliant and perfect and more successful than everyone else.)

In other words, if the process proves Trump committed an impeachable offense, the process cannot be trusted because it involves people who think Trump committed an impeachable offense.

Anyway, there are ten bazillion sites where you can read what was said in the hearings today and why it's so damning to anyone who cares about facts over feelings. I'm going to go lie down and I won't think about Trump except to come up with a new name for this feature without the word "Daily" in it.