In God We Trust

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Do not trust. 

That was the advice a spiritual teacher gave me some years ago. It resonated with me, a skeptic by nature and profession. 

We tend to invest our trust in figures we regard as though they were infallible gods. The parent. The teacher. The priest. Bob Mueller.

We don’t know for sure, and we probably will never know for sure, but the Mueller Report  — at least as interpreted by another iconic figure of trust, the President of the United States (I’m trying hard not to laugh here) — seems to have found no criminal behavior attached to that same comic figure. “Seems,” because we’ve only seen forty-five words of the four hundred page report, and because the carefully chosen Attorney General (chosen because he essentially promised, if given this job, to clear Trump of obstruction of justice) needs a few weeks to redact anything that might lead to an embarrassing alternative conclusion. 

In a way, it doesn’t matter what the report says, or actually should have said in a world where truth still featured a capital T and didn’t need air quotes around it.

Whatever it says, we still have a president who lies a dozen times a day (not including the times he talks in his sleep).

Who still regards President Putin, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, Crown Prince MbS (usefully yet more abbreviated to plain old BS), President Duterte, and every other expensive thug on the planet, as role models and best buds.

Still thinks the best political argument is a schoolyard insult or a silly nickname. 

Still is the greatest threat to human rights since World War II.

Still has yet to reveal the financial entanglements that have made him town pump to enemies foreign and domestic.

Still hopes to kill thousands of Americans by taking away their health care.

Still is the man fifty Republican national security experts called the most reckless president in U.S. history.

Still…

Still…

Do not trust.