On Tuesday, we on the Griftopalooza beat were dished up a massive portion of poisoned stew. Whatever shall we comment upon? The fact that a former president* ran one of the most obvious pump-and-dump stock schemes in the history of capitalism? (Trump? Pump? Dump? Harumph.) The fact that a former president* forced a judge to modify a gag order to keep that former president* from threatening the judge and the judge’s daughter? The fact that a former president* finally found a sucker to help post his modified $175 million bond, and that the sucker in question rose to fame as the “king of subprime auto loans” and is named Mr. Hankey into the bargain? Wherever should a wandering blog land?

Then there’s the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been unofficially posting the former president*’s bond in the purloined documents case.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, has asked Trump and prosecutors to propose jury instructions based on two legal scenarios that favor a claim from Trump that national security lawyers said have little relevance to the charges. Trump and Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, face a Tuesday deadline to respond to the judge’s order. The dispute is another instance of Cannon lending credence to Trump’s legal arguments about highly sensitive records taken to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida when he left the White House in 2021.... Cannon has been receptive to his defense in ways that could alter the course of the documents case. “You have a court who is more favorable to the views of one party versus the other, and you’re seeing orders and decisions that are reflective of that,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security official.

You get so exhausted by the financial corruption of the former president*, and the moral corruption of the former president*, that it’s easy to overlook the pure intellectual corruption driving what passes for his political philosophy, which you can find on a table at his rallies, next to the Eric bobbleheads and Lara’s latest single. Cannon is a product of that corruption. She has done her job in the Pool Shed Papers case in a purely utilitarian fashion, appearing to act only out of gratitude for her appointment. The judge has slow-played the case until it’s barely crawling, and she has done so with her arm on the scale up to the elbow.

The nation that chased Daniel Ellsberg for years, and the one that threw Reality Winner in prison, cannot seriously believe that the storage of undifferentiated government documents in a Florida bathroom in defiance of requests and demands from the proper authorities is a lesser offense just because the owner of the bathroom used to be the president* of the United States. The fact that the former president* spends hours raging at other judges for spurious conflicts of interest while Cannon is throwing sand in the gears down in Florida is just another highlight of the freak show.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.