Democracy Takes a Beating in New York
The leading candidate in November’s presidential election was convicted in a Manhattan courtroom in recent weeks. Does it matter?
Of all the surrealist, made for TV stagecraft of the New York “trial” former Pres. Trump was dragged through, perhaps the most surreal aspect, aside from the absurd legal Matryoshka doll he was charged with—a juridical Frankenstein concocted from the fumes of Upper East Side counter populist rage, is that the verdict is unlikely to have any meaningful impact.
The notion of a leading candidate for president in America being criminally convicted in an election year was the stuff of political thriller novels and television series. That it has actually happened is unprecedented. That the American electorate seemingly doesn’t care is breathtaking.
This notion is shocking so long as we disregard the circumstances that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon after a resounding 49 state victory in the 1972 Presidential Election. Or that even 60 years after the assassination of President Kennedy, the unwillingness to declassify the files and sources to fully disclose the happenings of that event remains on the agendas of our own federal agencies. Stuff of political thriller novels and television series’ no doubt, but a constant nonetheless. Unique only to those that are unable to acknowledge the parallels in each. This constant not only requires the efforts of the individual, but of all citizens, to pay attention to exactly what vested interests hold the metaphorical stock in being the opposition, so often in defiance of the will and desire of the people.
Perhaps it’s exhaustion after the American people have spent almost a decade rowing against the current in the oceans of ink poured out by elite media—written in newspapers, in blogs, on Twitter, and spoken over the airwaves, casting Trump as every order of evil ever described in the Western literary canon.
Perhaps voters are such steadfast members of their respective political tribes, their opinions irretrievably decided, that nothing can change their mind at this point.
Perhaps the sense Trump’s supporters feel that this is nothing more than a function of the foaming-at-the-mouth classist hatred their opponents have towards their standard bearer, and by extension, themselves, only steels their resolve and confirms their suspicions.
If you had polled the country, I’d imagine a confused but not insignificant chunk of voters might tell you that Trump had already been convicted before, that this is nothing new or significant. Amidst years of endless Trump controversies, some more important than others, fatigue is only natural and diminishing returns are to be expected.
Perhaps it’s all of the above.
Arguably, the most important effect of Trump’s putative conviction is the one that did not happen. That voters did not turn away from Trump en masse, that instead, according to the polls, that the man more Americans now say they want to be president than anyone else seems to have only grown stronger, raising nearly $53 million in the hours and days after his conviction while leading Pres. Biden in most battleground states, is a stunning rebuke of the nation’s justice system and political establishment, with American voters effectively declaring they do not care whether their man has been convicted of 34 charges or 34,000, with each Democrat-lead prosecution carrying less and less weight.
Remember of course that in the New York case, there’s just one charge they decided to charge again and again, 34 times to make things sound more like the machinations of Michael Corleone than Michael Cohen, due to 34 accounting related activities, all part of the same overarching charge.
This is not to say that all the charges against Trump are entirely fictitious, that juries have been rigged, bribes paid, or the instrumentalities of banana republics fully deployed.
But it is evidence of the ultimate effect of Trump's most virulent antagonists incessantly perseverating over vague notions of “finally getting Trump” or 'finally holding Trump accountable”—pulled straight from the pages of the DSM's “Revenge Fantasies” section.
For them, Trump's 2016 victory is the ultimate insult to aristocratic America—an unresolved trauma they've spent nearly a decade trying to avenge, undo, or reframe in their own minds.
As Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts recently recognized astutely, apparently one of the few on his side of the aisle to realize this, why haven’t Democrats benefitted? Moulton said:
"We need to look ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘Why on Earth is this even close?' You know, one of the American political parties is in a civil war playing out across the country…something that's never happened before in American history. And it's led by a convicted felon and yet we're not cleaning up. I mean, we should be winning every race.”
Moulton in his interview with WCVB, and to his credit, arrives correctly at the answer:
"I think we've lost touch with a lot of American voters, I think that, in some ways, we've become the party of the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. We've lost touch with a lot of people in the middle. People think we're more concerned about offending people than doing things to improve their lives. We need to look ourselves in the mirror as Democrats and say, 'How can we do better?'"
Unfortunately, the rest of Rep. Moulton’s party is having none of that. Whether you choose to look towards collaboration of those in the highest towers of government, social media, and tech industries to direct political discourse how they see fit, or the invasion of ideology within academia and higher education, or the coordination of corporate and government interests financially and socially as exemplified throughout COVID and the ensuing vaccination efforts, has driven the Democratic Party to become the part of cultural elitism, corporate power, Big Tech, snobbery, condescension, and a deep loathing of the public. Fortunately for Trump and his supporters, so long as things stay this way, with Democrats endlessly hooked on using whatever levers of power they have their hands on to try and keep a thumb on Trump’s dirty populist mob (that they imagine it to be) the public will continue to see through these cases against Trump, of which there now seem to be more than all the cases ever tried during nine seasons of Perry Mason, as being nothing more than using the pretense of criminal justice as a fulcrum to keep them down, rather than a genuine end in and of itself.
After all, if New York was serious about bringing accounting-related charges or charging everyone who paid off a mistress, half of Manhattan would be in jail. How many Wall Street bankers did the state of New York prosecute after 2008? Zero.
It doesn’t help that Trump’s Manhattan case involves charges so dubious that officials hesitated to even bring them, that it ultimately involved the prosecutor who finally agreed to bring the charges rolling up state misdemeanors into federal election law predicates to eek out felonies to overcome the statute of limitations in a way never before seen, and that few Americans would be able to explain or understand.
Elsewhere, voters see through the hypocrisy of charging Trump in relation to his handling of classified documents on the one hand, but not charging others who committed the same or similar actions on the other hand—including President Biden.
In the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s own classified records case, Democrats were violently outraged when the investigation, which did not even result in charges, merely described President Biden, correctly, as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” for whom “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him…a president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The only real impact of all this lawfare, is that America edges closer to the kinds of countries it sanctions—those nations in which the chief rival of the current leader is jailed by prosecutors hailing from the then-ruling party in an election year. This case, occurring in New York, not just a bastion of, but the very seat of the American elite-left whose hatred of Trump and his populist movement is not just political, but seemingly present in their very DNA, by how fanatically they hate him, seems to have the opposite effect than the one its pursuers intended.
Instead of “finally getting” Trump (whatever that means) the only thing taking any kind of a beating here, has been democracy, as Trump’s detractors, seemingly unable to put him away politically, now seek to do so in court. Naturally, depending on which side of sanity you stand on, Trump going to jail would appear to be the worst case scenario. This effort is only the latest in a long and wildly unsuccessful list of attempts to take the man out of the arena. Campaign efforts continue to be made, but this can be seen as simply a campaign strategy of keeping Trump Force One grounded from taking flight.
The most astonishing fact of all, is that, as Rep. Moulton pointed out, the fact that a criminal conviction of a candidate for president has not ended his campaign, but instead seemingly strengthened it, is an indictment far more powerful than anything on Trump’s CVS-receipt length list of indictments.
That Democrats more broadly do not stop for a second to think, to wonder, to question how it could be possible that this sort of political anti-gravity applies to Trump, and against them, is the most unbelievable fact of all. You’d think they might stop and wonder how they could be so unpopular that voters would still choose Trump despite all of this.
Of course, they cannot do that, because doing so, thinking this way, leads to realizing an inevitable indictment of elite power, of themselves, and that Americans no longer see them as credible representatives concerned with their problems and interests, but as detached, aloof elites who look down on them, do not care about them, and want to continue to do so.
This jarring realization that the public has turned on the inputs to their elitism, and would prefer Trump to more of themselves, is in fact so horrible, and since when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, the only option Democrats see is to continue to call everyone (at this rate, half the country) racist, a victim of misinformation, a purveyor of it, ignorant, hateful, or some combination thereof, and salt the fields in retreat on the way to November’s election.
