Will He Who Shall Not Be Named ever be indicted?

Don't count on it.

We have a long tradition in this country of admiring people who get away with stuff.  Think of the long list of Mafia dons who graced the pages of city newspapers in their three-thousand-dollar suits and embroidered cuffs and looming, block-of-meat bodyguards; or think of corrupt mayors and police chiefs who managed to color outside the lines of the law and bask in the glow of the media and citizenry.  Or think of the decades of media coverage and public adulation enjoyed by He Who Shall Not Be Named in New York City when he was being celebrated as the “billionaire real estate developer” who turned out to be, upon closer examination, nothing of the sort.

As it turns out, He Who Shall Not Be Named got away with a whole lot of shit over the years, and remarkably, he has held on to what they call “his base” who continue to admire him for it.  In New York City beginning in the 1970’s, he was notorious for lying about the number of stories in his buildings, openly stiffing contractors, outrageously skirting building codes, exaggerating the number of condo units he had sold, and straight-up lying about his net worth.  Every time the curtain has been lifted even a tiny bit, the man who claimed again and again to be worth “10 billion dollars” turned out to be serially bankrupt, living on gigantic loans and mortgages, and scuffling for chump change running low-rent scams that traded on his name.

His company has been shown to be a shell with a handful of employees, not the huge multi-national real estate business he made it out to be.  The tax returns he labored so hard for so many years to keep secret revealed exactly what everyone suspected they would – that he earned far less money than he claimed, and that he paid zero or close to zero taxes year after year. 

But if you lived in New York City when he was coming up in the world, you couldn’t miss him.  He made “Page Six” in the New York Post almost daily.  If there was a hot new restaurant or club, he was there.  If there was a world premier of a film or a gala ball or a World Series game in town, he took a bath in the spotlights surrounding them. 

What seems most remarkable to me was how he did it.  The amount of energy it took was incredible: to be out every single night somewhere getting your picture taken or showing off the latest hottest girlfriend or appearing on local television news and talk shows or getting your name in the gossip columns – in the city that created fame and fed on fame, there was no one more famous than He Who Shall Not Be Named chiefly because he worked so hard at it.  He would go anywhere.  He would show up for anything.  He would do anything to get his name in the paper.  If his name didn’t appear, he would impersonate a PR flack and call the columnists to promote himself until the coverage picked up again.  Can you imagine?  It was an around-the-clock job being him, and he never let up.

In fact, in 2016 when he began his campaign for the presidency, we should have seen him coming:  He worked the media for all it was worth and more – for every column inch in every paper no matter how small, every moment on cable news, every moment of coverage in local markets, and he did it day after day after day.  He never stopped. 

Looking at a list of the rallies he held that year is flat-out amazing.  He went to towns no presidential candidate had ever appeared in.  He showed up in Oskaloosa, Iowa; Appleton, Wisconsin; Watertown, New York; Berlin, Maryland – and that was just the primaries.

He held rallies every day, sometimes twice, or three or four times a day.  Just like he did when he was getting his name in the paper in New York City in the old days, he was relentless.  The newspapers reported that he had managed to be the recipient of over $2 billion in what they called “free media” during the campaign.  He generated every dime of it by showing up more places and more times than anyone ever expected.

He Who Shall Not Be Named has been just as relentless since he lost in 2020, spreading lies and rumors and conspiracy theories far and wide, even though he was stripped of his biggest megaphone, Twitter, almost a year ago. 

When will he be held accountable?  That’s the question you hear from somewhere nearly every day.  We know so much about him.  We know he committed multiple impeachable offenses in office and beat being convicted both times.  We know he obstructed justice during Russiagate over and over and was never even indicted. We know he incited the riot that turned into a violent insurrection at the Capitol last January 6.  We know he made those phone calls trying to “find votes” in states like Georgia and Michigan and Pennsylvania as he attempted to overturn the results of the election in those states.  We know he conspired with people inside the Oval Office to change the slates of electors of at least two battleground states that would be sent to be counted and certified in Washington. 

In short, he appears to have violated multiple federal laws having to do with counting the votes of federal elections and certifying electors.  Over a year has passed since he committed some of those crimes.  His crimes have been serious federal offenses.  Ordinary citizens in multiple states have been charged with far less serious criminal offenses related to the last election such as falsifying votes or voting twice.  Why hasn’t he been charged and tried in a court of law?

Because his name is He Who Shall Not Be Named.  He learned early on with his marriages and divorces and his real estate crimes to deny and deny and deny.  With the big stuff like the outright theft of banks’ money he committed again and again in the early 1990’s, he did it so bigly and so brazenly that he forced the banks to sit down with him and renegotiate with his bondholders and accept less money rather than be completely wiped out.  At one point, he was in a room in a New York office building with more than 40 lawyers representing multiple banks and bond holders and ceded control of most of his empire.  A few years later, he was able to take his casinos public and shift his failures and losses onto shareholders.  Holders of his bonds and stocks would lose more than $1.5 billion overall, and yet during the same time, he managed to transfer some of his personal debts onto his casinos and take millions in salary, bonuses and other payments out of the businesses.

He Who Shall Not Be Named did all of this right out in the open, and yet he was never charged with a crime, never spent a night in jail, and about 20 years later would run for president as a “successful businessman.”

There’s a lesson here.  He learned a long time ago from his father to skate right up to the line and if you’re going to cross it, make sure someone else’s name is on the paperwork and then claim you never heard of them.  The “memos” we’ve seen recommending ways to steal the last election – did you see his name on even one of them?  Nope.  Not as authoring the memos, not even as a recipient.  Just as somebody else in the room lost the money he owed on his casino loans, somebody else in the room will end up with a conspiracy indictment even if everyone, including the prosecutors, knows full and well whose interests were served, in whose name the deeds were done, and who benefited from the crime.

There is a small chance that the Department of Justice will come up with a crime or crimes to charge He Who Shall Not Be Named, but if I were to guess, what has prevented it so far is the old prosecutorial rule that you don’t bring cases you can’t win.  Prosecutors can read the polls.  They read the headlines.  I think they’re looking at the country and wondering where they could find 12 jurors who would find him guilty of anything at all.  They remember what happened after the Access Hollywood tape:  his numbers stayed the same or went up.

Someone once claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” 

Even if you shoot me in the middle of Fifth Avenue, I refuse to name him, okay?