It wasn’t a midnight train to Georgia that carried the 19 criminal defendants charged by a Fulton County grand jury to that county’s sheriff’s office to have their mug shots taken last week, but one by one they all made the humiliating trek to the local jail to post the bond needed to avoid sitting in prison until their trials and to have the photographs snapped that would memorialize their disgrace. Those dreadfully humbled included former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows; former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro and Jenna Ellis; former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark; and Trump’s uber-consigliere Rudy Giuliani.
Of that sorry band, no one has been humiliated more thoroughly than Giuliani, who has gone from being America’s Mayor in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, to being a broke, broken and bankrupt laughingstock. Stripped of licenses to practice law, sanctioned by courts for contemptuous misconduct and reduced to begging a disdainful Trump for the legal fees necessary to defend himself against civil lawsuits and criminal cases, Giuliani stands a real chance of going to prison, which is no laughing matter. Along the way he has had his hair dye drip down his face in full public view during a fraudulent press conference held between a crematorium and a sex shop and been obliged to ask for a bail bond at Second Chance Bail Bondsmen across the street from the jail in which he may find himself residing if found guilty of the various felonies with which he is currently charged.
On Thursday night came The Mother of All Mug Shots. Flying into Atlanta on a private plane that is racking up some serious frequent flyer miles ping-ponging from arraignment to arraignment, Trump himself swept into the Fulton County jail complex in a motorcade fit for a former president, complete with flashing lights. He emerged 21 minutes later as the first former president with his very own inmate number: PO1135809.
Posing for his mug shot in the sheriff’s office, the former president got off just the menacing glower he had practiced for the occasion, succeeding in projecting a sort of “Super Felon” look he knew would thrill his faithful base. And, boy, are they ever faithful.
ABC anchor Kyra Phillips put her finger on what Trump’s flock is worshipping: it is “defiance,” and all that goes with it. But defiance of what? Of laws that prohibit every citizen, including presidents, from stealing nuclear secrets, obstructing grand jury investigations and trying to steamroll elected officials into falsifying election results so that an unsuccessful candidate for reelection can remain in office despite the will of American voters?
Apparently so.
The epic snake oil salesman has bamboozled students into paying to attend a bogus “university” named after himself, cheated charities, stiffed vendors, paid off porn stars and conned innumerable hard-working Americans into forking over hard-earned dollars to the self-professed billionaire in order to pay his criminal defense lawyers so that he could be spared having to pay his criminal defense lawyers himself. Small wonder that he had no difficulty selling 7 million dollars’ worth of merchandise bearing his prison photo within hours to people who could only worship him more fervently than they already do if some grand jury somewhere indicted him yet again.
Trump’s most recent indictment brings the total number of felony charges against him in the four jurisdictions in which he’s a criminal defendant to 90. As if the country has not experienced enough of a chilling roller coaster ride since the morally challenged real estate mogul first announced his presidential candidacy, we are in for yet more. The months ahead will feature a daily diet of hearings held, trial dates set (and postponed), and judicial rulings issued and digested, as Americans grapple with the stone-cold realization that roughly half of us will support this guy in 2024, inmate number and all. It’s increasingly clear that the wild ride we are on in the United States is very far from over.
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