Raise Your Hand If You Believe In The Rule Of Law September 21, 2022September 20, 2022 A BRIEF A private citizen just can’t take Top Secret stuff from the White House, put it in his drawer, lie about it, and refuse to give it back. Can he? “If the attorney General sincerely believes in the rule of law,” argues Jennifer Rubin, “Trump is in deep trouble.” She cites a brief filed by former Republican officials: The district court’s analysis, which gave greater weight to the reputation of a former president than to the reputation of any other citizen, and greater weight to that personal reputation than to national security concerns, is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic tenets of U.S. law. . . . Under the court’s reasoning, its analysis would be different if the plaintiff were not the former president but a school teacher, police officer, or veteran who had taken classified information from a U.S. government facility and stored it in their home. “In short,” she concludes, “the court cannot come up with a rule simply for Trump. That is what the rule of law is meant to prevent.” A BOOK From NPR’s review of The Divider (Trump in the White House 2017-2021): . . . As a sumptuous feast of astonishing tales, it may hold wonderments indeed for those first contemplating the enormity of the Trump phenomenon. For them, this could be like a child’s first encounter with Harry Potter or an adolescent’s first taste of Tolkien. But even a reader steeped in years of Trump coverage and well-versed in the precedent literature may be surprised at how compelling this narrative proves to be. The more one reads, the more one wishes to read. The authors begin with Trump’s first day in the Oval Office, Jan. 20, 2017, the day of the inaugural address that became known as the “American carnage” speech. Upon first entering the Oval, Trump is reported to have been pre-occupied with the quality of the light available for picture taking. This leads to a discussion of Trump’s careerlong obsession with appearances in general and his own in particular, asking aides: “‘How’s the look.” The new president, we are told, “wanted to project himself as the hero America had been waiting for, a strong man for troubled times… Were these merely the weird quirks of a vain septuagenarian? Or the menacing affectations of an aspiring dictator?” A BONUS Dogs. Woof! Woof! Their eyesight may be only 20/50, but they hear four times as well as we do and their sense of smell is from a thousand to ten thousand times better.