Reap what you sow
It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I am often a glass half full kind of guy. In fact, I’ll take it even further than that. I think the glass is entirely full, half air, half water.
For example, after the initial shock and disappointment at the court’s decision to extend Trump’s appellate bond deadline by ten days and reduce it to $175 million, I reframed that as a tremendous opportunity for our side instead. Think of it yourself, Trump has spent the last nine years of his current political life boasting about how massively effing rich he is, that he’s a bloated billionaire several times over and all that crap. He constantly shoves his wealth in our collective faces and down our throats. He lords it over us as if he’s ever-so superior.
Now imagine how humiliating it will be for him if, despite being given ten extra days and some $300 million less to come up with, he STILL can’t pay the ticket! What a massive, massive climb down that’s gonna be for him! It will prove how truly broke he is.
What’s more, Trump won’t be able to whine about how unfairly he’s been treated any more with quite the same street cred. What could be more fair — even biased in his favour — than a bond extension and reduction? It’s going to be a titanic mortification for the lying bastard. He won’t soon live it down. And we should make sure to keep reminding him of it. And all we have to do is wait ten measly days to watch it happen. In the vernacular of ex-cons, after all the waiting we’ve done, we can do ten days standing on our collective heads.
But I want even more than that. After Trump is stripped of his property and what’s left of his wealth, after he’s been mired up to his orange neck in debt, I want to hit him further. I want to deprive him of his pension.
There may be a way to do just that fairly soon. Recall, back in 2021, Democratic representatives Sean Patrick Maloney and Pramila Jayapal sponsored a bill to deprive former presidents of their $219,200 annual pension, office space and their budget to pay for staff, if they’ve been convicted of a felony. It’s an extension of the Former Presidents Act of 1958, and it was called the Restoring and Enforcing Accountability of Presidents Act, or REAP for short.
The bill was never passed, but, as you can correctly guess, it was aimed with double barrelled, deadeye precision at Donald John Trump, and it intended to hit him where it hurts, in his pocket. Once Democrats reclaim the House in 2025, which I believe they will (there’s that glass full thing again), they can go after Trump’s final remaining income. We could, theoretically, turn Donald Trump into a bloody pauper. He can die in penury, a state he’s never once occupied since being born with that infamous silver spoon in his disgusting little foul mouth. It would be the ultimate triumph of poetic justice.
So let’s remind our new Congress in 2025 that they have at least one job to do. Let’s see if we can encourage them to revive and pass the REAP Act. It will make other would-be criminals who want to become president think twice. Above all, it would make Donald Trump finally and fully REAP what he’s sown. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.