Yes, the walls really are closing in on Donald Trump
Last month we saw the arrest of Donald Trump’s CFO Allen Weisselberg and the arrest of Trump’s political money man Tom Barrack. This week saw the arrest of Jared Kushner’s sidekick Ken Kurson. This week we also saw the arrest of Alex Jones’ sidekick Owen Shroyer. And now there’s the suggestion that Trump’s COO Matthew Calamari may be cooperating with prosecutors against Trump.
And yet the defeatists still demand to know why “No one has been arrested” and “Nothing is being done.” These cries are, of course, coming from people who either don’t understand how criminal cases work, or who are simply too worn down by the previous four years to be able to accurately process what’s playing out here.
Are we supposed to believe it’s mere coincidence that all the biggest names in Trump world are all seeing their biggest sidekicks arrested? If you’ve watched one too many fictional TV crime dramas, you might be left with the false impression that the bad guys are always taken down in an hour. But even those fictional TV shows make clear that the way you take down a big fish is to get a top assistant or henchman to flip. It’s how you prove to a trial jury that the big fish did indeed perpetrate the crimes, even if the big fish was hands-off when it came to carrying out those crimes.
So yeah, we’re all tired of waiting. But this is the reality of how these kinds of mafia-style criminal antics are prosecuted. Yes, it’s tedious to have to wait to see if Calamari’s apparent cooperation will motivate Weisselberg to cut an official deal before Calamari can. And yes, it’s annoying to watch Rudy Giuliani’s inevitable arrest stalled by a court proceeding with a special master over a dispute of a date range on a warrant.
But while the real world criminal process turns out to be infinitely slower and less tidy than what we see on Law & Order, the developments we’re seeing make more clear than ever that we’re on a path to Donald Trump and the biggest names around him being taken down. If you don’t want to believe that, it’s only because you’re ignoring all of the evidence for the sake of defeatism.
