NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
March 11, 2017
If, if, if Donald John Trump read books or knew American history or gave a damn about things not named Donald John Trump, he’d appreciate the line in William Faulkner’s 1951 fiction “Requiem for a Nun” about how “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Or, as the Onion had it in 1997: “U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out Of Past.’ ”
“Fake news” for the win, as the internet has all but collapsed the span bridging past and present, dropping us onto a gerbil wheel inside a rabbit hole. Pinned, service-station style, to a dirt wall there are 1990s-era Penthouse covers of Paula Jones, most recently on stage last October beside two other past Bill Clinton accusers and Trump at a wild press conference just before his second debate with Hillary Clinton.
Jones sued Clinton in 1994, saying the new President had sexually harassed her when he was Arkansas governor. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that “the President, like all other government officials, is subject to the same laws that apply to all other members of our society.”
That decision led special prosecutor Ken Starr to Monica Lewinsky, which led in turn to the President’s impeachment in a House then controlled by current Trump ally Newt Gingrich, who wasn’t going to let Democratic adultery pass unpunished just because of his own cheating ways.
Clinton kept his job, but paid, in time, energy and political standing, and with the suspension of his Arkansas law license, a $90,000 penalty for “contemptuous conduct” before the federal courts and a nearly $1 million settlement to Jones.
Starr, who stepped down as president of Baylor, a “Christian” University, after turning a blind eye to rapes committed by football players, is reportedly being considered for a role in the Trump administration.
Past is present again in this age of Trump, who’s failed his way up through three messy marriages, four corporate bankruptcies and five decades of real and fake news about you-know-what grabbing detailed by alter ego John Miller in 3 a.m. red-line phone calls to a cushy gig as commander in chief that’s already paying off big for his family’s little businesses — and racking up billing hours for lawyers in his orbit.
Like when Charles Harder — the attorney who sued gossip site Gawker to death on behalf of Hulk Hogan with help from Trump supporter Peter Thiel — filed suits for Melania Trump claiming that news outlets’ shabby stories repeating nasty claims about her days as a young model had cost her a “unique, once in a lifetime opportunity” to create “multimillion dollar business relationships” as “one of the most photographed women in the world.” That is, those stories cut into her ability to profit from her new role as the First Lady.
The government-as-family business model, and the legal questions it raises, extends to Eric Trump declaring “the stars have all aligned” for Trump’s golf business, with “our brand . . . the hottest it has ever been,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway giving what she called “a free commercial” on Fox News for Ivanka Trump’s retail brand, and on and on.
Trump himself hasn’t separated from his business interests or released his tax returns, so that the conflicts between his public job and private gigs — including as executive producer on “Celebrity Apprentice”! — remain so many known unknowns.
We do know he’s already on the hook in several cases wending their way through the courts, including the not yet quite wound up Trump University class action fraud settlement and a wine bar’s complaint that the President’s ownership of Washington’s Trump International Hotel — now the preferred destination of foreign diplomats and domestic favor seekers alike — gives its drinking holes an unfair advantage.
Expect more suits to come, perhaps, as First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams has suggested, from reporters whose work Trump’s smeared. Or, closer to Jones territory, from his uninvited forays into the changing rooms at beauty pageants he owns.
While eight justices signed the Jones decision reasoning that such suits would remain rare, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a prescient concurrence warning they could proliferate, posing “significant threat to the President’s official functions.”
That danger’s fast approaching given Trump himself — never shy about lashing out at judges or otherwise testing separations of power — and the political climate that made him President.
Trump only knows what’s worked for him before and keeps doubling down on that. And it’s hard to argue with success, what with the winning streak he’s been on since going down that Trump Tower escalator. But the past catches up to all of us, and it’s coming for him, too.
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