What Do You Do With A Mad Dog? What Should Have Been Done To Trump On January 7th

Last week, Michael Tomasky had a piece in the New Republic, It Just Got Worse— Again— for Donald Trump, whose ending was worrying, more so for me, I think, than for the author. “Trump,” Tomasky wrote, “is a cornered animal. As the walls close in, he is going to go insane. Nothing in his pampered life has prepared him for the reckoning that’s coming his way. He’s gotten out of everything, from the Vietnam draft to all the bankruptcies, to the impeachments, when he obviously committed high crimes and misdemeanors. His skating days are over.”

My friend Amos has a skittish Lab who seems like a nervous wreck. Amos told me he was taking Andy— I know, I know; wild— to a doggie psychologist, Charles, a nice guy in his late twenties who told me he’s actually an animal behaviorist and he treats all kinds of animals, usually for aggression, separation anxiety and more general anxiety. Personally I think Andy’s a nut because Amos is a nut and it rubbed off on his and also because before he met Charles he was giving Andy his zanex (before Charles put him on Reconcile or canine fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, kind of like prozac). Anyway, the dog seems as nervous as ever but I asked Charles about the psychology of cornered animals.

As I suspected, he said a cornered animal is more likely to attack because they feel threatened and have no way to escape— “natural instinct for all animals, including humans,” he said, although he doesn’t know as much about human psychology as he does about animal psychology. It’s a separate discipline. Typically, a cornered animal will become aggressive— growling, snarling, hissing, showing teeth or claws in a threatening manner. They will be scared and confused and likely to act erratically and unpredictably.

Tomasky didn’t concern himself about how Trump is likely to lash out. I mean isn’t this guy capable of starting a civil war if he feels cornered, if the walls really are closing in on him and he’s going to prison?

“A judge, wrote Tomasky, “has preliminarily found coup-plotter John Eastman culpable of trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Will he be the next MAGA minion to flip?… Eastman isn’t guilty of anything just yet. But he is now closer to being disbarred, and that could make it more likely that he flips. MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance wrote on X: ‘If John Eastman loses his license in the bar proceeding, it incentiv[iz]es him (or would incentivize a rationale person) to plead & cooperate in the criminal case to avoid prison (since he’s already lost his license).’” In theory, he could join former Trump attorneys Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro in testifying against Trump (and Giuliani).

At stake is more than the White House; it’s a quarter billion dollars in the New York case alone, not to mention his future and his freedom. And we all know how much Trump hates a loser. That’s the genesis of the whole Big Lie he’s put the country through.

We’re entering what’s going to be a maddening and horrifying time. In all likelihood, none of these other Republican candidates is going to make a charge at Trump. They’re just too afraid of him. Nikki Haley criticized him obliquely a few days ago, but no one (save Christie) is going to tell the truth about him because they know what will happen to them: They’ll sink like stones. So they’re in an impossible position— of their own making, by the way, because every one of them cheered Trump’s rise— whereby if they don’t go after the front-runner, he’ll be untouched and stay 25 points ahead of the field, and if they do, it will hurt them, and Trump’s lead will likely only grow.

So we’re in for 10 weeks— until the January 15 Iowa caucuses— of poll after poll showing Trump ahead and probably gaining. No piece of bad news will matter. He’ll roll in Iowa. Next will come New Hampshire. No date has yet been set for that primary, but it’s expected to be sometime in January. In New Hampshire, Trump is if anything further ahead than he is in Iowa. Then there’s not another GOP primary until South Carolina on February 24 (there will be Nevada and Virgin Islands caucuses on February 8). In other words, if Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, the race is basically over, and there will be a full month of headlines calling Trump victorious and unstoppable.

Actually— not all headlines. In fact, on the very day, January 16, that we’ll wake up to headlines blaring, “Trump Sails to Victory in Iowa,” we will also be greeted by this headline: “E. Jean Carroll Damages Trial Against Trump Starts Today.” Remember that New York Judge Lewis Kaplan has already said that Trump raped Carroll in the normally understood sense of the term. So readers, and voters, are going to be reminded of that. Then the January 6 trial, the one in which Meadows flipped, starts the day before Super Tuesday. And so on.

Related— very related: on Friday, Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in NYC ruled that the jury in the defamation trial against Trump “will be kept anonymous for the jurors’ own protection, citing the potential for harassment by the former president’s supporters. In ordering the anonymous jury, the judge… noted Trump had twice been fined for violating a gag order issued by the New York judge overseeing a civil fraud trial in state court in response to comments Trump had made concerning the judge’s clerk. [Kaplan] cited Trump’s repeated attacks on judges, courts, law enforcement officials and even jurors in other matters. Trump, the judge noted at the time, had made sharply critical statements about the forewoman of a special grand jury in Atlanta… Kaplan wrote Friday that if jurors’ identities in Carroll’s next trial were disclosed, ‘there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted media attention to the jurors, influence attempts, and/or harassment or worse by supporters of Trump’— or by Trump himself, the judge added.”