The theft of priceless French crown jewels from the Louvre turns out not to have been the most brazen, outrageous heist attempted this week. That honor goes instead to the president of the United States, who has confirmed he is considering instructing the Department of Justice to pay him $230 million dollars in compensation for its (wholly legal and completely justifiable) investigations into him, Russia and the mishandling of national secrets.
Experts have called the fact that President Trump is even considering seeking the monies given his current role a “travesty.” One group, the non-profit advocacy organization and government watchdog Public Citizen, asserted that “this wannabe dictator is drunk on power and no amount of money will ever be enough to satisfy him.”
Were Trump to direct his DOJ to open the doors of the U.S. Treasury for him, the precedent set would open up new frontiers in corruption—even for an administration that is already the acknowledged all-time leader in the field.
But such an action ties with other recent Trumpworld developments in providing telling insights into just how traumatic the legal investigations have been for him. Apparently, the prospect of spending his twilight years in a six-by-eight cell rather than, say, swanning around with his buddies in the ornate 90,000 square foot ballroom he’s currently tearing down part of the White House to build, really got to our president. Do you blame him? If he were in the slammer there would be no one to host next year’s UFC battles on the South Lawn.
How do we know this? Because retribution against those who prosecuted him and related efforts to undo, erase and push back on prosecutions of those related to his cases has become, to an astonishing degree, a clear priority for the president and his team of bent Keebler Elves working inside the administration’s morally and ethically hollow tree.
A major effort is underway to not just recast the January 6, 2021 insurrection that Trump led as an act of “patriotism,” but to pardon the vast majority of members of the mob who attacked the Capitol—and win compensation for them. Trump’s DOJ is now vindictively prosecuting or looking into going after multiple figures tied to high-profile Trump cases, former FBI Director James Comey, NY Attorney General Leticia James, and former Special Counsel Jack Smith among them. Other portions of the U.S. government that investigate crimes (and a broad array of other white collar misdeeds) like those Trump and his cronies have been accused of are being shut down, defunded or told to redirect their focus to other issues. These include offices associated with criminal prosecution of tax cases to those investigated securities-related abuses.
He has shut down independent inspector generals in departments across his cabinet and run campaigns against whistle blowers across the government. When he sees other like-minded world leaders or allies accused of crimes like his, he casts the cases against them in exactly the terminology he used to characterize his own—calling them “witch hunts,” politically motivated and unfair.
Perhaps most notably, he has erased any hint of DOJ independence on, well, virtually any matter. Indeed, even in the case of his claims against the department he acknowledged that he would have the final word on the matter saying, “It’s interesting, because I’m the one who makes the decision.”
In modern France, those jewel thieves are the subjects of a nationwide manhunt. The country’s leaders who break the law are held to account, as in the case of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy who reported to prison this week to start a five year sentence for a campaign finance violation.
Trump seems committed to a different French model. Between his efforts to turn the White House into an all-American Versailles and his “I am the state” philosophy of government, he is harkening back to the country’s 18th century ancien regime.
But Trump needs to be careful. One of last weekend’s No Kings demonstrations took place at the site of France’s Bastille, a flashpoint in the uprising that ended rather unhappily—and certainly abruptly—for one French monarch and his wife just down the street from Louvre (at what was then called the Place de la Revolution.) Apparently building palaces while ignoring the needs of the people has consequences. Even for kings.
The post Opinion: Trump’s Latest Daylight Robbery Makes the Louvre Jewelry Heist Look Like Chump Change appeared first on The Daily Beast.
