Today is Monday, June 12, 2023. We are just hours away until the disgraced 45th president appears at a Miami courthouse to be arraigned on a 37-count federal indictment. I wonder how he will sleep tonight. His indictment, according to a new online analysis by Stephen Collinson for CNN, underscores the tension between the justice system that wants to put the former president behind bars for his stunning retention and possible distribution of highly classified documents to our foreign enemies and a former president who has vowed, if returned to the White House (hell, no, he won’t be!) to purge the system of the accountability he now finally faces after being unscathed for more than 70 years of his life.

The piece is called “Trump documents case is a test for the justice system he wants to dismantle.” When Dumpf appears in court tomorrow, “a new clash will unfold between a judicial system rooted in the core principle that no one is above the law” and an ex-president who wants to remove those guardrails forever if he’s declared emperor once more.

During his lone disastrous term, Dumpf preceded to do exactly as he liked and scoffed at accountability. He never owned up to his negligence during the worsening COVID pandemic, which indirectly resulted in thousands of deaths of innocent Americans.

Talking about the significance of the indictment, former Watergate special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste said, “This indictment really is a reflection of the former president’s arrogance, his disdain for the rule of law, which is so repugnant to people who have worked in law enforcement, who have worked for the Constitution, bipartisanly over the years.” This statement was given to Jake Tapper on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper last Friday.

Even Dumpf’s own former lapdog attorney general, William Barr, called the indictment “very damning” on Fox News, of all places, this Sunday, pushing back on Dumpf’s claims that he’s a “victim” of political persecution. Barr intoned, “He had no right to maintain them and retain them.” Continuing, he said, “And he kept them in a way in Mar-a-Lago, that anyone who cares about national security – their stomach would churn at it. I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were. If even half of it is true, he’s toast.” Very tellingly, Biden pushed back on the image of his former boss as a victim again, by saying, “This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous.”

Here is Dumpf’s own former attorney general calling Dumpf no victim in this case and stating that the case against him is very strong. However, Dumpf’s attack dogs in Congress, Republicans in both the House and Senate, are throwing water on Jack Smith’s latest indictment, making a false equivalence between similar cases involving former vice president Mike Pence and president Joe Biden (his retention of documents actually occurred while he was Obama’s vice president). Many repugnicans argue that their Golden Idol is being unfairly singled out by the judicial system, even though the Biden and Pence cases are quite distinctly different since both have cooperated with authorities and returned the material. “The Trump indictment allegedly shows the former president concealing evidence of documents in his possession that belonged to the government and that represented a risk to national security, given their haphazard storage at his Florida resort.”

As to the Pence investigation, the DOJ has closed its probe into Pence’s handling of sensitive documents, while a special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of documents is ongoing.

As for another of the repugnican party’s primary obsessions, Hillary Clinton, repugnicans have pointed out that former Secretary of State Clinton was not prosecuted over classified material found on her personal email server. While the FBI found that she had been careless with the material, it said there was no evidence that a crime was committed. On the other side, which I endorse, is the Democratic claim that ex-FBI Chief James Comey’s public statements in the case days before the 2016 election directly helped to elect the son of a bitch.

These latest Republican attacks on the judicial system threaten to undermine one of the pillars of American democracy, which worries many legal observers, including former Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

On Friday, Gonzales told Tapper, “It is disappointing, quite honestly, because an attack on the Department of Justice is an attack on the rule of law. And that’s not good for this country.”

To me, it’s just astounding that clear evidence of Dumpf’s mishandling of classified documents does not convince all Americans that this individual is a clear threat to our national security. I blame this former president for injecting the American bloodstream with a toxin that has affected the minds of a quarter of its population with an alternate reality mindset that will never be righted, regrettably. I think of the latest HBO series that I saw, White House Plumbers, starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the two “masterminds” behind the Watergate break-in that spurred the ouster of Richard M. Nixon who resigned in 1974.

I think of the end credits of this four-part miniseries that pointed out that 49 persons in the Nixon administration were tried and convicted, but not Nixon himself since Gerald Ford pardoned him. I now reflect on this latest indictment of Donald J. Trump which I feel is the government’s way of righting the history of Watergate 50 years ago when a corrupt and criminal president should have been indicted or at least impeached and removed from office. But now we are faced with this phenomenon once more in the form of Dumpf who has always said he adored Nixon not too unsurprisingly. He must have regarded Nixon as a role model. And now Dumpf is possibly facing jail time which his role model undeservedly avoided.

Anyway, it’s getting late here. Our friend “Gene” came over to watch Cate Blanchett in her Oscar-nominated role of Lydia Tar in Tar which was on Amazon Prime. I recommend this film, even though it’s very demanding in terms of its musical references to classical music. The story also takes too long to develop. However, Blanchett’s performance is worth the price of admission, so to speak.

Stay safe and be well.