Keller @ Large: Donald Trump a chronic offender of holding himself above the law
BOSTON - Oops. A drunk just ran a red light and killed your family.
Yikes. You've been sickened by food served in a restaurant that ignored the health codes.
What's that, doctor who's about to operate on me? You don't have a license to practice medicine?
There's a reason we have laws, rules and regulations. As the Judicial Learning Center puts it in their explainer of the Rule of Law: "Laws protect our general safety, and ensure our rights as citizens against abuses by other people, by organizations, and by the government itself."
Donald Trump is presumed innocent until the government proves its 37-count indictment of him for making off with secret government documents and obstructing justice when the government sought their return.
But as the cacophony of political posturing, endless whataboutism, misdirection and demagoguery surrounding this case further pollutes a political climate already fouled by our addiction to junk thought and fatty grievance, a bit of clarity seems in order.
We need laws, and the rule of law.
However imperfectly or unevenly they are enforced, a society in which we simply pick and choose which rules we follow is something out of a cheap horror movie.
And while Trump is far from the first pol to hold himself above the law, he's a chronic offender.
There are more than 4,000 lawsuits involving Trump as either litigant or defendant over the years.
Most ended in settlements; that's what the money to pay for good lawyers buys you.
Some, like the 2010 fraud case stemming from the ill-fated Trump University scam, ended in multi-million-dollar payouts by Trump. Taken together, they form a pattern of behavior, a grifter's philosophy summed up tartly by Trump on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.
"I don't even wait," he said, referring to his taste for groping women. "And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the [female body part]. You can do anything."
In the current case, it's our country's top-secret national security information he grabbed us by.
And to let it go unprosecuted - as an appalling array of Trump apologists are insisting we should - would be to validate the credo of the scofflaw: "You can do anything."