Trump 'making a perpetual display of his unfitness for office' in series of 'frantic and foul-tempered' rants: columnist

Donald Trump has been issuing increasingly frenzied denials and defense as the House select committee concludes its investigation and hands over new evidence to help the Department of Justice conduct their own.

The former president had been wailing about his predicament on his Truth Social platform since before the Jan. 6 committee held its final public hearing, where they voted to refer him to the DOJ for criminal charges. However, his urgency seemed to pick up after the panel's final report dropped and the IRS finally turned over his tax records to the House Ways and Means Committee, reported The Bulwark.

"Trump truthed out a novel legal defense: 'The Fake charges made by the highly partisan Unselect Committee of January 6th have already been submitted, prosecuted, and tried in the form of Impeachment Hoax # 2. I WON convincingly. Double Jeopardy anyone!'" wrote columnist Bill Lueders.

"Double jeopardy is the legal principle that a person cannot be charged twice for the same crime," Lueders added. "It does not apply to impeachment proceedings, because those are not criminal prosecutions. Trump should probably ask a lawyer to explain this to him, although maybe not the lawyers who were advising him in late 2020 and early 2021, since the committee has referred some of them for criminal prosecution alongside Trump."

The ex-president continued blasting out frenzied denials through the holiday weekend attacking law enforcement and his political enemies, including one "frantic and foul-tempered rant" extending Christmas Day greetings to even the "Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country."

"Donald Trump gives new meaning to the word 'shameless,'" Lueders said. "I could go on and on with the catalog of Trump posts, but you get the idea: He is ensconced in his bunker at Mar-a-Lago, spewing nonsense, denying the obvious, and making a perpetual display of his unfitness for office."

The posts make plain Trump hasn't read the report or doesn't understand that its findings undercut his lies about election fraud and his subsequent attempts to escape consequences for trying to overturn his 2020 loss, but Lueders said they seem to point toward a final reckoning with his criminality.

"With the release of the January 6th Committee’s report and the picked-up pace of the Justice Department investigation now led by a special counsel, this moment may be the beginning of the end of Trump’s avoidance of consequence," Lueders wrote. "But don’t expect his social media to reckon with that possibility. He’ll just keep posting his angry lies — until, perchance, prison bars prevent him from accessing the internet."