Donald Trump + The Stony Lonesome
Prison...can be a real nice place to start.
The tease has gone on for months and months. The will-he or won’t-he roundelay regarding the very distinct possibility that former President Donald Trump goes to prison (or at least gets arrested). It’s grist for the lefty mills and catnip for the right leaning ones. This idea that one of the most powerful men in the world will either get what was coming to him or get railroaded.
For? For a variety of issues and charges that are either crimes and felonies of the highest order or nothing burgers. Hush money, purloined documents, lies, prevarications, obfuscations. All in a day’s work for a man who, coming up in the New York building trades, knows that there are more than half a dozen ways to skin cats.
Barring that, money always talks. And perp walks are not for men with golden toilet bowls.
Trump has, predictably, tried to rally the weary troops of MAGA hat wearing folks who between tweeting and buying red hats are, at least anecdotally, proclaiming exhaustion at what they are both being asked to sell and what they’re being asked to buy.
In fact lots of my friends who spent time in prison both didn’t like it and found it usefully instructive.
I’m hoping dear Donald gets the chance to feel the same.
Especially in the shadow of very real convictions being handed out to January 6 “Patriots” and the marked lack of support the Big Man has thrown behind them. Which is usually the way it goes when the going gets tough.
But there’s a whole other angle of attack that’s being missed here and that’s that as we get closer to Trump’s moment of reckoning, in a weird way, in a Checkers way, he manages to do that which he thus far has failed to do. At least for me. He’s managed to be…sympathetic?
I mean who can forget, or not forgive, that irrepressible cut-up, that picaresque jester of yesteryear, him of the funny nicknames and alleged dressing room rape? The laser-eyed NFT salesman, the friend of “The Blacks”, and the reminder of the fact that them Jews really need to be more thankful for all he did for them? Or the pornstar pay offs, the emoluments excess and attempted government take over based on the knowingly false conclusion that he had been robbed of the presidency?
These were not bugs, there were features for a man who is first and foremost a knickbocker. Like the lore surrounding Texas we just do things bigger as New Yorkers. And never does a big man stand so tall as when he stoops to get into a police cruiser while hoping that the arresting officers don’t take his advice from yesteryear and not go gentle when it comes to his head and their door frames.
Trump, like Stalin’s Beria (Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria), or Jimmy Cagney going to the electric chair, seems to be going all bone-spur on this one, fear and trepidation cowing the once proud boy, er, man. He’s trying to tie-in January 6 to a “possible” arrest and lay out in “anything could happen” fashion several scenarios in which the people rise up and…well…
Well, at the very least they RISE up and free the last truly free voice in America. Or some such bullshit. Like some opposite-world derivation of Emperor Jones.
However, what Trump is not factoring in, nor his most ardent supporters, is that prison can be a real fine place to start for a certain type of world leader. Think Mandela. Or Aung San Suu Kyi. Or even Adolf Hitler. All recognized some of their more significant “accomplishments” post-prison. And in the spirit of “how can we miss you if you don’t leave?” and absence making the heart grow fonder, can’t he see that a little TV time out might be good for both him, and us?
That was certainly the case when I went to jail.
“He says you’re a drug using, ex-con…” It was a fact checker from the New York Times calling me. I’d written about the loathsome Carlos Watson, himself now facing the possibility of prison after having been arrested for multiple frauds. They were checking my quotes on him and this was his attempt to derail. I’d been very open about my past with performance-enhancing drugs. I’d been less open about my time in jail.
While I go into it in great deal in A Walk Across Dirty Water + Into Murderer’s Row, my upcoming memoir on Feral House, I wouldn’t be cheating here to say that I found it to be highly instructive. Useful, even. It both demystified what happens when you run headfirst into the state and more importantly solidified this idea that becoming a regular customer here was in no one’s best interest.
I mean who can forget, or not forgive, that irrepressible cut-up, that picaresque jester of yesteryear, him of the funny nicknames and alleged dressing room rape?
I don’t say it scared me straight. I do say it tied, much more significantly, crime to punishments.
“You realize this is ridiculous don’t you?” The judge looked over his glasses at me as I vigorously nodded my head.
“Yes! My point EXACTLY!” I said, thinking we were having a meeting of the minds over the…trumped…up charges I was facing.
“No. I’m talking about you.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll credit you with time served and if you keep your nose clean for 18 months you’re off the books. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
And it was. The straight and narrow never looked so good and I was never so careful skirting it as I had been pre-jail. In fact lots of my friends who spent time in prison both didn’t like it and found it usefully instructive.
I’m hoping dear Donald gets the chance to feel the same.
A friend of mine who casually described himself as “the crystal meth king of Oklahoma” despite breaking bad to be and do so, describes his 14 years in prison in glowing terms. He didn’t like it. But claims it made him “a better person.”
Which is all we can really hope for. To see The Donald try to get out of this like he got out of going to Vietnam is not seemly, and frankly, disappointing. Especially if your goal is not just to make America great, but yourself as well, in the process.
So while I’m not on Truth Social, I know some of you are. Please tweet or forward this to him. I know he needs it now more than ever. And I’m just here to help.
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END NOTE: Now that OZY MEDIA has finally shuttered, maybe even for real this time, it should be mentioned that every link to anything ever written or produced there is now in the ether. Which is very different from the cloud. All links to past OZY articles are now dead. While I had PDFs made of a tranche of my over 900 pieces there, any links to OZY from this substack are now dead. Some articles are still up at NPR, Yahoo, and Meta (formerly Facebook). If you find others, please send them. Otherwise we’ll just all remember them fondly. Minus all of the screaming, and workplace toxicity.