Well, all the odds are, they're in my favor
Something's bound to begin
It's gotta happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time, I'll win

While they are lyrics from the famous song from "Cabaret," they may as well be part of the Anti-Trump theme song.

Since even before he took the escalator down to the lobby of Trump Tower, the former president's detractors have been absolutely sure he could not be elected, and even if he was, he would — within months — end up an impeached, disgraced, vestigial punchline inhabiting, along with Pinochet, Baby Doc, Mobotu, and Pétain, the Island of Misfit Presidents.

Now — with the egregious raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, the usual suspects are back at it, but this time with even more vitriol and certainty, with MSNBC hostess with the leastest Joy Reid linking the literal death of American secret operatives to Trump's possession of various and sundry documents.

And that's just the start.  From the schadenfreude of too many pundits to count to specific claims like this one, the political ether is filled with chorus after chorus of "maybe this time..."

In light of the truism that it takes a lifetime to build credibility but only an instant to lose it, it may behoove the chattering wind-up dolls of the airwaves to remember that they have said this before and before and before...and a lot.  While it is clear that that truism has lost much of its meaning in the past few years and that making many, many very provably and objectively false statements and mistakes on the order of "sun rises in the west" magnitude is no longer a career impediment, one would think that at some point, someone would notice and cancel a contract or two.  (CNN's latest moves show, at least, that the possibility exists.)

This "maybe this time–ism" is not a creature entirely of the woke, though it is of a different tenor on the right.  It can be safely assumed that tens of millions of people — including the vast majority of American Thinker readers — have asked themselves, "Really?  Really?!  This has got to be last straw!  Things have to change now."

From teenagers getting their breasts cut off because they might be sad to the lies spewed by the FBI, CIA, NSA, CDC, etc. — the very people who need to be trustworthy for the nation to work properly for its citizens — to the untenable border situation to cancel culture to kowtowing to China to absurd continuing COVID restrictions to Joe Biden's speech (apparently co-choreographed by Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer) the other day to...well, you name it, the astonishment that none of radical changes the nation has undergone in the past few years — changes that were met with little or no opposition — is very real, and it is correct to wonder for how long these trends can continue.  Sadly, for now at least, and it seems for quite some time to come, the camel can take straw after straw and keep standing, and too many people are either too scared of the societal ostracism or too lulled by the promise of free stuff to stand up and demand an end to the madness.  The right seems to ask itself every day when the tipping point will come.  So far, no such luck.

None of this concerns the woke hope machine, a machine that has been turning out the same predictions for more than half a decade.  Each of these stories has been wrong, but people still kept writing them, people still kept reading them, and people were utterly convinced by them that, finally, they got him this time.

Feel free to enjoy this extremely truncated (google "MSNBC Trump Jail," and you get 1.6 million results) trip into the soul of Trump Derangement Syndrome:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/donald-trump-has-broken-the-constitution/507146/ (days after his election)

https://www.mediaite.com/trump/msnbc-panel-speculates-about-trump-getting-jailed-theres-a-new-i-word-and-its-imprisonment/ (this was three years ago)

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/04/08/msnbc_joy_reid_what_if_trump_refuses_to_be_arrested_by_federal_marshals.html (four years ago)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trumps-luck-has-run-out/ (pre–first impeachment, certainty from north of the border)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-over-trump-will-be-indicted (a few days ago)

https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/fat-joe-trump-won-t-last-4-years-1112773187971 (2017, and it's important to know what obscure rappers are saying about politics)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-robert-mueller-may-have-to-give-donald-trump-immunity (five years ago)

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/18/donald-trump-michael-avenatti-mueller-investigation-218403/ (months before Avenatti was charged with trying to extort Nike)

And then there are the truly committed — the Tom Steyer–backed Need to Impeach movement came into being within a year of Trump's election and still has a list of "reasons," most fabricated or debunked or patently false, all a bit on the crazy side, posted on its active website.  (True, he was impeached but not convicted and removed from office, which is akin to winning a potholder at a $5,000 charity raffle.)

Of course, no list of Trump-related "oopsies" would be complete without at least one piece from the perpetually wrong New York Times columnist — and permanent stain on the very concept of the Nobel Prize — Paul Krugman.

Unquestionably, Trump is not entirely blameless.  He was a polarizing figure well before he entered politics.  His personality can be grating — the only reason he was elected in the first place was that he was Donald Trump, and the only reason he lost re-election (if you think that happened) was that he was Donald Trump — and he was woefully unprepared to take office.  While Trump scrambled to fill even Cabinet posts — let alone lesser staff vacancies — after the 2016 election, leaving him extremely vulnerable to leaks, pushback, slow-walking, lies, manipulations, and other chicanery from Obama holdovers and an already ornery media and their Deep State allies, Hillary Clinton's campaign had spent literally tens of millions of dollars poring through résumés and had a person lined up for every job, from secretary of state to assistant deputy to the acting director of Sector Eight, Western Region, of the Bureau of Land Management.  (That job may not exist, but you get the idea.)

Even after — hopefully — the Mar-a-Lago Mishigosh is put to bed without charges being filed, the "Maybe This Timers" will most assuredly not go quietly into that good night.  They will bray about unfitness for office, prop up legal barricades to his ever running again, and continue with their "just you wait" cockeyed optimism that Trump will one day get his well deserved comeuppance.

And this will literally never stop, to the point that one has to wonder if — like Pope Formosus in 897 — he will be dug up after his death and put on trial for crimes and misdemeanors.

While it cannot be said with certainty that that will occur, what can be said with absolute certainty is that if it happens, MSNBC will be there to cover it and belt out, "This time, this time, we won!"

Note — obviously this piece cannot go with a link to the song. However, as we are all familiar with Liza Minelli's version, I thought it might be neat to offer Emily Hampshire's honestly moving version from the show Schitt's Creek.

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter.  He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com.  You can read more of his work at https://thomas699.substack.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.