Foster: When it comes to Trump, you can’t make this stuff up

Published 6:00 am Friday, April 5, 2024

Recent revelations about Donald Trump’s criminal presidency seem to cool some of the ardor shown toward him. So I’m wondering if it’s having an impact on local Trump boosters who won’t admit he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

That has been my litmus question to Trump supporters. If you still believe he was cheated out of a second term, then you’ve swallowed the biggest whopper spun in American election history.

Fortunately, some clearer heads, including Sen. Mitchell McConnell, publicly stated he lost, but even McConnell has fallen on his knees to endorse Trump in recent weeks.

Those who haven’t kneeled to Trump’s ambition include former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most conservative men to serve in office. He was so powerful as George W. Bush’s veep that he was the subject of a running joke in Washington: Cheney awoke from a heart procedure on the operating table and asked the doctor, “Am I still president?”

Liz Cheney was one of a handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Since then, Trump has declared war against those representatives and the seven GOP senators who voted to convict him.

He has endorsed some feeble candidates and spent mightily trying to unseat these folks. Cheney is one of his top targets because she was appointed vice chair of the House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol. She and the only other Republican member of that committee, Adam Kinzinger, endured withering insults from Trump.

I mention Dick Cheney because he accompanied his daughter to the House floor for a hearing designed to rebuke her. Whatever opinion you have about the man as a politician, I’ll sing his praises as a loyal father and the only Republican to attend on her behalf.

Afterward, he was asked by a reporter about the status of the GOP party, and he replied it wasn’t the party that he had known. That’s why the Bush family and many moderate Republicans publicly stated they didn’t vote for Trump.

Meanwhile, several House committees now under Republican control are salivating at finding political dirt on President Biden. After multiple witnesses were called to smear Biden, remarkably none have said anything close to being used to impeach him.

Instead, we’re watching the spectacle of committee chairman James Comer and Jim Jordan squirming to deflect damage from their key witness who was recently indicted by the FBI.

While Republicans in Congress are flailing at the Biden “tar baby,” new reports are surfacing about the chaotic final days of Trump’s term in office. Testimony before Congress illuminated plans to subvert the electoral vote. Trump was even considering a scheme for the military to confiscate all the election machines in the nation and conduct an audit that would have delayed the election results well into 2021.

New revelations also are coming out in books by reporters and former White House aides. Perhaps the most damaging is the way Trump withheld and destroyed administration papers that belong in the National Archives.

When Trump vacated the White House, he carried off about 20 boxes of documents to Mar-a-Lago. The National Archives tried for a year to have these papers returned, but Trump only did so when the archives’ lawyer threatened to take the matter to the Justice Department.

Even then, he refused to return some of the classified material and told his lawyers lies to feed to the Justice Department. Some of the documents that he did return were torn and clumsily taped together. Others were shredded into confetti.

Some may never be recovered because a plumber reportedly found wadded up papers flushed down Trump’s toilet in the White House residence.

Folks, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Public hearings, however, may be the least of Trump’s problems. Should the Justice Department pursue the case brought by the National Archives, a provision in the law governing the ownership and use of presidential papers has a specific remedy. Anyone convicted of breaking that law would be barred from holding future public office.

Unless Trump gets a reprieve from the Supreme Court, his hope for running in 2024 also would be flushed down the toilet.