Before we get too far down the rabbit-hole,??? ?????.???.??????.???????? here's the TL;DR: Former President Donald Trump believes he's soon going to be arrested, and he's freaking out about it online.
Now, not too long ago, there was a time when former President Donald Trump's latest Twitter freakout was pretty much the news of the day. Of course, the Big Man of the Republican Party has since ditched Twitter — even after Elon Musk unbanned him and practically begged him to come back — so the latest diatribe was published on Truth Social, Trump's own site.
Just for clarity's sake: It's not totally clear if, or when, Trump will be indicted and, in turn, arrested. The former president has claimed, time and again, that he's going to be arrested on Tuesday, without providing evidence as to why he believes that. After first making the claim on Saturday, the former president basically called for mass protest in a manner shockingly similar to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
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"IT'S TIME!!!" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "WE JUST CAN'T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY'RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!"
Since then, it's basically been one extended rant.
Now, you'd be excused if you lost track of why, exactly, Trump might be arrested. After all, there have been countless investigations, cases, and scandals. The issue at hand is a New York grand jury's investigation into alleged hush money payments from Trump to cover up sexual encounters. This is the whole Stormy Daniels scandal coming home to roost.
So, believing he's going to be indicted and arrested, Trump is returning to his usual playbook. You can see the whole thing over at his Truth Social page, but the beats are relatively predictable. The country lived it for, oh, I don't know, five or six years?
He's attacking his perceived enemies. He's claiming Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is being paid by "Radical Left Enemy of 'TRUMP,' George Soros."
Trump is both claiming he did nothing wrong and, anyway, even if he did, they can't do anything about it. "They are MANY years beyond the Statute of Limitations which, in this instance, is TWO YEARS. More importantly, THERE WAS NO CRIME!!!" he wrote on Monday.
He's ditching his previous pal and lawyer Michael Cohen, calling him a "A CONVICTED LIAR, FELON AND JAILBIRD." Cohen went to prison for paying off Daniels and model Karen McDougal.
He's pleading with NYPD to not arrest him, saying (in all caps, of course), "CAN YOU IMAGINE THE GREAT NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT ... HAVING TO DEFEND & PROTECT THE “DEFUNDERS” & “COP HATERS” OF THE RADICAL LEFT THAT WANT TO PUT THEIR GREATEST CHAMPION & FRIEND IN PRISON FOR A CRIME THAT DOESN’T EXIST[?]"
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. But you catch the drift. The past few days Trump has been treating Truth Social like he treated Twitter for years. He's throwing attacks and ideas and justifications at the wall like so many strands of spaghetti, hoping one or two stick. Of course, Truth Social is nothing more than an echo chamber of sycophants so his diehard supporters eat it all up. Slightly different than Twitter, when people built their whole online personas around indignantly responding to Trump's posts.
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It's nearly impossible to summarize all of Trump's complaining and ranting over the past few days. But it all pretty much touches on those beats listed above. He's repeatedly attacking Bragg; he's bringing up Soros; and he's saying he did nothing wrong. Hilariously, he's posting screenshots of tweets on his own competing site.
While seeing Trump actually get indicted over this is would be strange — the man has wriggled out of worse — the rest feels very familiar. Trump is trouble and he's posting relentlessly. Only this time he's screaming into a void of his own creation.