Rhyming

We’ve been listening to Bag Man, the podcast from Rachel Maddow about the investigation and eventual downfall of Spiro Agnew, who ended up resigning the Vice Presidency in 1973, ten months or so before his boss, Richard Nixon, suffered a similarly ignominious fate.

Wow, what a duo. What a time in our history!

What’s not clear is how Agnew’s lawyers were able to make one of their demands stick—the condition that Agnew would serve no jail time—apparently because he was Vice President? This was a non-starter, from their perspective. What I’m not getting is how this was not immediately disregarded as a bridge too far, as something they could put on the table, but also something that could be easily taken off the table, dismissed or overruled.

Agnew and his lawyers were probably savvy enough to sense that Elliot Richardson and company were under a time crunch. Their first order of business was removing a criminal like Agnew from the line of succession to the Presidency, so some sort of plea deal, something that could be effected quickly, was almost an inevitability. Richardson was desperate, to some degree, and had to make the hard decision not to pursue to the fullest extent what apparently was a robust case against Agnew for bribery, extortion, and tax evasion (he was still taking kickbacks in the White House).

The parallels with Donald Trump are obvious and perhaps instructive, not to mention troubling.

How dare he drag us along for this drawn out, painful ride? How dare he? He has no shame, he doesn’t care, he’s just seeing what sticks, and what he can get away with. And we have to endure the whole painful fiasco because the press cannot let this go, cannot just ignore the bastard. This is news, after all.

Or maybe it’s just a strange, twisted carnival ride.

When all is said and done, Trump will be facing something approaching a hundred counts on at least four indictments, and he’s gonna avoid consequences for all of them, or at worst he’ll get what amounts to a slap on the wrist.

The Agnew case was a foreshadowing of things to come in this current encounter with a slimy politician, a slimy politician who is basically going to be allowed to walk away from doing time because the office he once held offers some sort of magic immunity? Because he was once too powerful to be prosecuted?

This makes no sense, and it won’t stop many from wondering: In what universe is such an outcome at all fair? Does it just come down to whose lawyers make the strongest argument or uncover some obscure technicality that makes a mockery of reason?

That’d certainly be in keeping with the whole Trump nightmare.