The “Get Trump!” cabal is beginning to remind me of nothing so much as the Terminator as described by Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to a skeptical and terrified Linda Hamilton in the scene above. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.” One of the main reasons that I wish the country had some safer and more reasonable option than Trump with whom to seek refuge from the totalitarian-aspiring Democrats’ blundering attempts to remake American society into some kind of socialist hellscape is that again, the “resistance,”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) will be spending his entire term of office in furious efforts to to deny Trump the power and prestige of the Presidency while turning as much of the public as possible against him irrespective of his policies, actions or accomplishments. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not stop.

We were shown this once again with today’s new appeal to Plan C among the Trump impeachment/coup theories. “Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest: Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president.”

You know: “experts.” Nobody asked me. The Times means “experts” like Prof. Richard Painter, a lawyer in the Bush family orbit who has been calling for Trump’s impeachment or disqualification from office since before he was inaugurated. I found the professor ethically estopped from raising the conflict of interest issue waaaaay back in December of 2016. For neither Painter nor anyone else seriously raised the thorny issues of potential conflicts when an international businessman and entrepreneur becomes President until after Trump was elected and it was too late to do anything about it in practical terms. I wrote then in part,

Painter’s easy-peezy solution: “For the good of the country, he should divest from his business empire as soon as possible, put the cash proceeds into United States treasury securities, broadly diversified mutual funds or a blind trust managed by an independent trustee, and then focus on being a good president.”

Sure ! That’s the answer! Also in the mix: removing his business and their planned occupations and livelihood from one or more of his children. Earth to Prof. Painter: It’s not going to happen. As Trump quite correctly pointed out, no law compels a President to do this. It’s up to him. By this time, anyone who doesn’t know that Donald Trump is not exactly a legal scholar, keen on ethics, or prone to do what everyone says he has to do is hopeless, and will probably be in a padded room somewhere before March…The question should have been raised repeatedly, and hard, with commentary and unimpeachable expert analysis, making the case that Trump had two choices: divest himself sufficiently that these conflicts would pose no threat to his Presidency, or don’t run. It wasn’t, and it is too late now….

As much, as long and as loudly as ethicists, lawyers, pundits and critics insist that Trump should be conflict free, it just isn’t going to happen. That’s a fact. Even though the mysterious Emoluments Clause poses a real threat that Trump will be routinely threatened by impeachment by Democratic legislators who see it as an opportunity to undermine his Presidency, that won’t be enough to force Trump to do what he doesn’t want to do. So, as a good friend likes to say, when you have no options, you have no problem.

We have to trust President Trump. All Presidents have conflicts of interest; the extent of their power and influence ensures it. That’s why there have never been conflicts rules for Presidents. This President just has about a gazillion more conflicts than all the previous Presidents combined…

All of this is still true, though now we have the added amusement of watching enablers of the Biden Family Influence Peddling Company try to argue that it is Trump’s potential and real conflicts that are the problem. Meanwhile, the argument put forth by the Times and their cherry-picked anti-Trump “experts” is strained at best:

Trump Media & Technology Group — the owner of Truth Social, the site Mr. Trump uses to rally his backers and blast his opponents — could present a new, fairly straightforward route for foreign leaders or special interests to try to influence him. Should he retain his control of the company while in office, the ethical questions that arose from Mr. Trump’s hotels and other properties in his first term as president would only multiply when applied to a publicly traded media company, they said.

“This will be a very easy vehicle for foreign governments that want to curry favor with the president to throw money at him in a way that benefits his financial bottom line,” said Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard University and a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush.

Corporations and other players wanting to sway Mr. Trump could buy advertising on Truth Social, other experts said. They could try to get on his radar by buying shares in the company. As the nation’s leader whose every utterance is monitored around the world, Mr. Trump would also be in an extraordinary position to drive traffic — and ultimately revenue — by the habitual use of the site.

The problem with this logic is that these payments would purchase something of value, and not be the kinds of foreign “gifts and payments”—-as in bribes—that the dead-letter Emoluments Clause prohibits. That section also was written before big corporations routinely gave large amounts of money to Presidential campaigns, and those are bribes in everything but the name. The fact is that nobody ever anticipated that anyone but a “statesman” or perhaps a military hero would become President, and no laws have ever been passed that could deal a President with Trump’s business involvement. From another post on the subject:

Obviously the way out of these looming conflicts would be for Trump to sell all the businesses. No law says he has to, however, and such a requirement would be unrealistic and punitive, harming investors and business partners. Trump could give everything to his kids, putting himself into the role of King Lear for the future, but that’s not really a cure for the conflict. His family would still be tied to the business and its success..

Many Presidents, including Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes, placed their assets in blind trusts, run by independent third-party managers had complete control over them.Those cases aren’t truly parallel, however. None of them were full-time business moguls; these were investments that they were turning over to third parties. The closest parallel we have  was billionaire third party candidate Ross Perot (in 1992 and 1996), and I don’t recall a major issue being made about his business conflicts either. Perhaps this was because everyone knew he couldn’t win. (You know, like Trump.)…To be fair, the power of the Presidency is so sweeping and the implications of the Office’s activities so wide-ranging that no President could be said to be completely unconflicted. We trust that for our Presidents, the best interests of the nation will prevail over all other considerations.

As I wrote back then, the problem is that so many people don’t trust Trump, and there are good reasons not to.

The ethics estoppel I slapped on Painter has expired: Trump is running again, so it is fair that the conflicts issue be raised before the election, as they were not in 2016. But as even the “experts” the Times interviewed admitted, there are no conflicts of interests laws that cover the Presidency, and unless Congress passes a new law mandating that Presidents divest themselves of financial interests, Trump isn’t obligated to do anything different than what he did in his first term. And Congress, as we all know, currently can’t agree on much of anything.

So Donald Trump’s implacable haters, foes and hysterics will continue, Terminator-like, to shake their fists, scream to the sky, and maybe bring lawsuits or bills of impeachment as they claim that foreign potentates who purchase services, products or shares from Trump businesses are participating in a conspiracy to funnel money to a corrupt President so he will do their bidding.

They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not stop.