Will they do Trump like they did Capone?

My art is all on Instagram @klonskyart

Yesterday was the perfect Chicago summer day. It demanded a drive to the other side of the Lake to New Buffalo.

Instead of posting or drawing I was tapping melons, bagging Red Haven peaches and grabbing a quart of sour Balaton cherries that will be turned into a pie today.

Balaton cherries were brought to Michigan about 25 years ago from Lake Balaton, in Hungary. They’re not as sour as regular sour cherries and are extremely local and limited in availability.

The Garden Market in Sawyer Michigan is a gold mine of Balaton cherries

.My last cherry pie with sour Michigan (not Balaton) cherries.

Meanwhile while I was enjoying Harbor Country, former President Donald Trump was taking the fifth before state investigators in New York.

All this time I thought Trump was a second amendment zealot not a fifth amendment guy.

Everybody knows that saying “I take the fifth” means you’re guilty, right?

Not really.

That’s what Trump has repeatedly suggested however. Only people with something to hide claim the protection against self-incrimination, Trump has said. He once declared that only “the mob takes the Fifth.”

It is true that mobsters often used the constitutional protection against self-incrimination.

But so have communists and progressives testifying before witch-hunting Congressional committees like the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy Era.

Pete Seeger, the great folk singer, famously refused to cite the fifth amendment when he was called before HUAC and took the first amendment which guarantees free speech instead.

The fifth amendment provides some protection against the use of torture by the police to get a confession.

Not so much in Chicago, which before our current States Attorney Kim Foxx, was the false confession capital of the United States.

It certainly didn’t provide the victims of Chicago’s notorious police commander, Jon Burge, from torturing innocent folks into making false confessions.

So, can we assume Trump is guilty of tax fraud because he took the fifth? Probably.

The irony will be that it is far more likely that if Trump ever serves time it will be for tax fraud, not for insurrection or attempting to destroy democratic institutions.

It was Chicago’s infamous Al Capone who got busted for tax evasion rather than the more serious crimes and murders he committed.

So Trump may be following in Capone’s footsteps.