I swear to whatever god you send money to and the continued health of my dog Sam, the world’s scariest beast, that I wake up every day committed to not giving Donald Trump another square millimeter of space in my brain. Enough was enough six goddam years ago.

But still. If and when he actually is indicted — for paying off the porn babe, inciting a riot to overthrow the government or anything in between — we’ll soon all be back in The Psycho Cheeto’s unstable orbit. Even now, his (never very bright) team is spitballing ideas on how to maximize/monetize the spectacle of his arrest. To cuff or not to cuff? To march in the front door or enter via the Waste Management garbage dock? To make a grand “Braveheart” speech (i.e. plea for another riot and more “legal defense funds”) or simply hustle back into the SUV with a brave, “tormented-by-the-libs” wave?

Amid all the hysteria of the past few days, as Manhattan authorities hardened the defenses around the court house, and the usual MAGA invertebrates threatened … something … against the DA, and it was revealed that Trump pulled in another $1.5 million just for claiming he was going to be perp-walked, I couldn’t help but notice a small, back-pages item on the internets.

Maybe you too caught The [Failing] New York Times piece a couple days ago describing the scene inside the CDC as the virulence and scope of the COVID virus was becoming clear?

If you live inside the reality bubble none of it was surprising. Basically, the Trump administration threatened CDC administrators and scientists to playdown/ignore/outright dismiss trending data — woke science-y stuff, y’know — that this thing was going to be big. All while, as we know from Bob Woodward’s recordings of Trump, the sociopath knew how serious it was, but preferred to do … nothing.

Now, inciting a riot to overthrow the government is to my mind a fairly serious offense. But being deliberately, consciously indifferent to a coming plague that was already shown to be lethal is psychopathic incompetence on a far grander scale. (I love the part where CDC employees were sent to airports around the U.S. to screen passengers arriving from China … but not to wear masks in order not to “alarm” bystanders.)

Says the piece, ” … many of their reports — including ones on when the virus arrived in the United States, guidance for meatpacking plants and religious services and on the risks to children — were suppressed or altered beyond recognition by the Trump administration, several said. (The House select subcommittee on the pandemic concluded that the Trump administration had meddled in or blocked at least 19 reports.)

“Morale plunged after a May 2020 report estimated that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives.”

36,000 for that week. Think about that. Or consider other estimates that Trump/Jared/Mike Pence’s incompetence — that is to say the astonishingly inadequate logistical preparation by the government of the most technologically advanced nation on earth —- could very well have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths over the longer run of COVD. (Some of the deceased obviously being MAGA cultists who gave serious thought to drinking bleach instead of listening to woke lib doctors.)

Yet this atrocity will likely never be adjudicated anywhere by anyone. Perhaps it would be different if a porn star had died somewhere … . I don’t know. But in that great mythical, sane world somewhere out there we would have had a full-scale 9/11 style commission, with public hearings and CDC witnesses and depositions of The Cheeto, Jared, Pence and all the other gross incompetents muzzling scientists … in their self-serving effort to avoid responsibility for a disaster that might impact their reelection campaign.

So yeah, I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with an indictment over a porn babe pay-off. A small beer arrest that will set off yet another freak show spectacle wherein Trump the Victim raises millions off MAGA shut ins, gun nuts and anti-wokers and likely gooses his poll numbers with that same crowd.

It ain’t much. It ceretainly isn’t justice for the 35,00-100,000+ dead from a combination of gross mendacity and incompetence. But it’s what we’ve got.