COMMENTARY:
“Whoops, there goes gravity,” - Marshall Mathers.
Ten years later, it turns out Donald Trump does have mass and is subject to the laws of physics. Finally.
In 2018, Al Franken was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate after an old photo emerged of him making an inappropriate joke during a time in his life when he was a professional comedian. Two years prior to that, Trump was caught on tape boasting about the fact that he routinely commits acts of sexual assault and is able to get away with it because he’s a star.
When the tape came out, his only defense was that he was lying and didn’t really do all of those horrible things that he was so joyfully boasting about. And, apparently, that was enough. Because, you know, Hillary Clinton can be such a scold.
Evangelical leaders were among the first to rally to Trump’s defense, and have had his back ever since. Even after the hush money trial, which, admittedly, was overcharged in the courts. It may not be a crime to have sex with a porn star in the days following the birth of a son, but it’s the sort of thing Evangelicals used to frown on.
Two years from now, those same Evangelical leaders will want us to forget that the last decade ever happened and insist that we go back to demanding standards of morality and fidelity in our elected leaders. When that day comes, we won’t forget their hypocrisy.
In the four years after losing his bid for re-election, Trump not only lost the hush money trial involving sex with a porn star, he also was found liable by a civil court jury for forcibly holding E. Jean Carrol up against the wall in a department store in the 1990s and sexually assaulting her in the exact same manner that he boasted about on tape.
Incredibly, those losses in court somehow made him more popular with the voters. A guy who was born rich and worked the system his entire life to gain an unfair advantage against everybody he ever dealt with, had somehow managed to make himself the victim.
The 2024 election wasn’t even close. Because, you know, Kamala Harris was unprepared when she went on “The View.”
Of course Trump took office in 2025 believing all the rules that constrained previous presidents did not apply to him. His entire life history told him that he was above the rules.
And so, the past two years have been Trump Gone Wild: blowing up speed boats on the assumption that they might have drugs; invading Venezuela purely to steal their oil; imposing tariffs based on mood swings; unleashing masked thugs onto our streets under the guise of law enforcement. And the corruption. So much corruption, all of it right out there in plain view for the world to see.
As the results came in on election night in 2020, I watched with the same sense of amazement I get each time mentalist Oz Pearlman is able to figure out somebody’s banking PIN number by asking a series of unrelated questions. I’ve accepted there are some things in this life that will never make sense.
There is solace in knowing that when repudiation finally did come, it was thorough and complete. Let’s try not to ever do that again.
Walter Rubel can be reached at waltrubel@gmaill.com
Walt Rubel’s opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.