By Stephen Macaulay
“Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.” ~ John Wayne
One of the movie genres that was once popular and almost definitive of America and what it means to be an American was the Western. Invariably there were narratives wherein there were groups of bad guys who (a) considerably outnumbered the good guys and (b) wanted something that wasn’t right, whether it was to bust one of their convicted brethren out of jail before he’d get strung up or who wanted to seize the land of a law-abiding farmer for their cattle.
And the good guys — with a certain amount of cajoling from, say, John Wayne — would invariably do the right thing and, with requisite sacrifice, stand up to the bad guys.
Now we are in a situation where there is question whether the Department of Justice should, assuming it has a case, stand up to Donald Trump and indict him for whatever crimes they may have assessed.
From Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to Donald Trump himself there have been not-so-veiled cautions or threats that some sort of violence could occur were that to happen.
What would John Wayne do? Turn lily-livered? Or saddle up and do what it takes, even if it meant having his blood spilled?
Law or lawlessness?
(Strangely, if you think about it Trump has more to him of the railroad magnate who, in those movies, paid off a group of black-hatted hacks to clear out the real folk, or of the smarmy suited gambler who would lie and cheat at every opportunity . . . and hide whenever the hard stuff began.)
Remember, during a campaign speech in Iowa in 2016 then-candidate Trump said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?”
In other words, he could flout the law and it wouldn’t have any effect on him.
But it isn’t about Donald Trump.
The man clearly doesn’t live in the same reality that most Americans do. There is a fraction of Americans who live in his warped world, or who at least find solace in the ostensible case that he is a victim just like they are, but how the alleged billionaire has anything in common with those who work on farms and in factories remains a mystery.
As Liz Cheney pointed out in her opening remarks yesterday, Donald Trump knew that he had lost the election. One could argue that he knew he had lost the election prior to it actually being held — which explains why he so early on began talking about how it would be “rigged.” Were he to be so supreme and superior, it would have been a blowout — in his favor.
When the landgrabber in a Western wanted to take someone’s farm, there was often a phony deed involved. A crooked lawyer would take it to a widow — her husband having been shot by one of the bad guys earlier in the story — and try to force her to sign it.
It isn’t real. Isn’t bona-fide. But when you’re a bad guy such niceties as truth don’t matter.
The January 6th Committee showed in Technicolor that Trump lied. Repeatedly. Lied knowing full well that he had lost the election. Lied in order to rile up the crowds who you could imagine taking torches to the sheriff’s office to get some miscreant out of jail. . . but in this case keeping some miscreant from going into jail.
The question is whether Merrick Garland is going to hitch up his britches, and do the right thing. The hard thing, but the right thing if he determines the law was broken.
Could there be violence? Certainly.
But is this a nation of laws?
Seems like that was one of the things we learned from those Westerns when the brave man stood up to seemingly insurmountable odds.
Does Donald Trump get to ride roughshod over the law?