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Call Him "Private Citizen Trump" [1]

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Date: 2022-08-11

He doesn't live here any more.

We call Trump lots of names around here. TFG — the former guy, as Biden calls him — is a popular one. I use it myself a lot. But in writing comments here and elsewhere since the FBI search, I’ve taken to referring to the Great Orange Shitgibbon as “private citizen Trump,” and now I offer it to the Dkos world (free of charge, of course; I’m no Trump).

TFG is useful as shorthand for “former president Trump” or “ex-president Trump,” but I suggest that all of these are both somewhat clumsy and insufficiently descriptive. At 12:00 noon on January 21, 2021, President Trump ceased being the most powerful (and dangerous) person in the world and became a private citizen. We need to stress that.

Yes, as a former president, he should be entitled to a certain amount of deference, but that deference is an acknowledgement of the heavy burdens a president bears on behalf of the nation. (Please try not to giggle or groan at the thought of Trump doing anything on anyone’s behalf other than himself.) And that’s the point: Trump is entitled only to the same respect as any other former president IF he gave his high office the same respect other presidents have done.

So now he’s a private citizen. We want to keep him that way, of course, but the more immediate issue is that he gets the same courtesies and treatment under the law as any other private citizen. Private citizens do not get to take, much less keep, still much less lie to the FBI about keeping, any federal documents; they belong to the government and the people. Still less does a private citizen get to keep any classified document.

It’s starting to look like the documents Trump lied about keeping and tried to hide from the FBI may have to do with nuclear secrets. Tell us, Private Citizen Trump, what were you planning to do with them?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/11/2116055/-Call-Him-Private-Citizen-Trump

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