The Media’s Coordinated Campaign to Destroy the Supreme Court

By Becket Adams

Sunday, June 02, 2024

 

To save democracy and restore the soul of a nation, members of the American press are prepared to burn everything down, including the branches of the federal government.

 

Current target: the conservative-majority United States Supreme Court.

 

Leading the charge: the New York Times, ProPublica, and Rolling Stone magazine.

 

On May 29, the Times published an opinion article arguing that the Justice Department should exercise its authority and force Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from January 6–related cases.

 

The Justice Department has no such authority. The article’s author, Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, is talking out of his hat — par for the course.

 

Raskin’s preposterous argument represents the latest salvo in a broader campaign to paint Alito as a corrupt, illegitimate justice. In fact, Raskin’s op-ed is just one part of a broader effort spearheaded by the Times, which suggests that Alito is sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. The paper’s “evidence” lies in a moment from 2021 when Martha-Ann Alito, in a fit of pique aimed at some particularly childish neighbors, raised an upside-down American flag, which is understood to be a signal of distress. The other bit of “evidence” supporting the Times’ thesis is that the Alitos flew the George Washington–commissioned Appeal to Heaven or Pine Tree flag outside their beach house in New Jersey.

 

An inverted U.S. flag and the Revolutionary-era Pine Tree flag are infamous symbols of the “stop the steal” January 6 Capitol riot, according to the Times and left-wing activists. Notably, the Times and left-wing activists are virtually the only groups making this claim. In fact, it did not even make an appearance until the Times’ reporting, probably because the claim is not true.

 

Critics of the Court are simply trying to will “facts” into existence. It’s an insidious bit of gaslighting.

 

Stories alleging that Alito and his wife are treasonous-adjacent are outright absurd. It’s cock-and-bull nonsense, particularly the bit about the Pine Tree flag, which the Times characterizes as “provocative.” The flag is not “provocative.” It has never been “provocative.” It’s “provocative” only now because critics of the conservative-majority Supreme Court need it to be so.

 

Moreover, the Pine Tree flag was not widely known for any supposedly insidious “Christian nationalist” undertones prior to the Times’ campaign against Alito — not with the anti-police demonstrators who flew it throughout the unrest of 2020, nor the New Englanders who fly it regularly, nor even the city of San Francisco, which had been flying it in front of City Hall until just last week, when it was removed because the Times and others now claim that it’s problematic.

 

It’s clear what’s happening: Political agents invented a scandal from thin air, alleging “facts” that didn’t exist until they said so. The record-keepers at the Times and elsewhere then fell into line, revising the historical record to accommodate the new “truth.”

 

Meanwhile, you, the reader, are made to feel crazy because you remember the before times. You remember well that the Pine Tree flag was not “provocative” until May 16 when the Times told you it was. You know the flag was not “provocative” until partisan operatives decided to leverage it against a conservative Supreme Court justice. Those claiming otherwise are either liars or too stupid to realize they’re being used. Don’t doubt your memory. You’re not nuts.

 

What’s worse is that the Times’ hit on Alito is in service of a greater effort to tear down one of the three branches of the federal government. Indeed, the Alito smear is just one front in the war on the Court’s legitimacy. The Times hit comes on the heels of ProPublica’s sustained campaign against Clarence Thomas, in which the justice is cast as entirely responsible for the beliefs and remarks of his wife and in which he is characterized as a corrupt, bribe-prone crook. Like the Alito smear, there’s not much of anything to ProPublica’s reporting despite its best efforts to insinuate and suggest otherwise.

 

Then, there’s Rolling Stone, which published a report this week exposing the fact that Justice Amy Coney Barret’s husband is an attorney with clients.

 

“Amy Coney Barrett’s Husband Is Representing Fox in a Lawsuit,” reads the scoop’s headline. Its subhead adds, “Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s husband, Jesse Barrett, is defending Fox Corp. in a defamation case.”

 

There’s no need to read beyond the headline and subhead because there’s nothing newsworthy there.

 

Prediction: Neil Gorsuch will be the next targeted justice. Left-wing operatives and their subservient boosters in the press are simply working their way down the list.

 

More seriously, the thing that underscores the absurdity and cynicism of these attacks is the fact that these same newsrooms have had little, if anything, to say all these years about similar “scandals” involving the court’s liberal justices.

 

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, never disclosed when her husband’s law-firm colleagues had business before the Supreme Court. Nor did she ever recuse herself from cases involving those colleagues.

 

The Times has published 22 opinion and news articles regarding the Alitos and their flags — twenty-two articles, some of which were authored by Pulitzer winners. Yet the Times published exactly zero articles about Marty Ginsburg’s work pals appearing before his wife at the Supreme Court.

 

The point isn’t to shout, “What about!” Instead, it’s to note the Times and others clearly don’t care about judicial impropriety, “provocative” behavior, conflicts of interest, or the like. They care only that liberals no longer control the Supreme Court.

 

It’s almost June, and you know what that means: The Supreme Court is nearing the end of its term and will be handing down decisions on a slate of major cases. It’s important to remember the timing here as the Times and others, who claim to care deeply about democracy and our institutions, continue their war of attrition against the branch of the federal government that has slipped, for the foreseeable future, beyond their control.

Are Conservatives Anti-Democratic? Not Peculiarly So

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, May 31, 2024

 

Joshua Tait has unleashed another of his stem-winders about the American conservative movement that is long on citations but short on perspective or common sense. Or perhaps, it’s misdirection.

 

The subject this time is conservatism’s supposed hostility to “democracy.” The piece is begging to be pulled into the slipstream of liberal-centrist readers who believe “democracy” is in unique peril in this moment.

 

“A comprehensive history of the attitudes of American conservatives toward democracy would excavate source material at least as far back as the Founding and the American response to the French Revolution. But for present purposes, focusing on just the twentieth century and after, it is clear that there is a strong undercurrent of anti-democratic thought in American conservatism,” he writes.

 

To the alarmist reader, this is alarming. To just about any other politically literate reader, this is so banal as to be barely worth mentioning.

 

He continues, citing some of William F. Buckley’s formative influences:

 

Each of the writers who joined Buckley at the foundational conservative magazine National Review—men like Russell Kirk, James Jackson Kilpatrick, James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall—were in their own ways skeptical of democracy.

 

Indeed, although at this time, Buckley’s skepticism of democracy is tied up with his attitude that “populism . . . is anti-conservatism.” It’s a point many alarmed liberals have been trying to make themselves in the current panic about “our democracy.” To say that thinkers as supple and differentiated as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and Willmoore Kendall “were in their own ways skeptical of democracy” is to utterly flatten and falsify their views. Burnham’s political realism was concerned primarily with how elites possess power over the masses. Kendall, a staunch supporter of McCarthy, could also be accurately described as wildly more sympathetic to democracy than not just his peers at NR but most liberals who saw in it the dangers of mass prejudice.

 

From there we get another recitation of Buckley’s defense of segregation, which was likely the political position he abandoned fastest in his career and repudiated shortly thereafter.

 

Next, a summary:

 

The conservative arsenal of anti-democracy is well stocked, and often effective. It challenges democracy from multiple angles, from critiquing democracy as empty proceduralism to attacking its effect on the polity and individual. There can be merit, of course, in a critical analysis of democracy; such philosophical critiques go back at least to Socrates. Even in the American context, it is possible to critique democracy—both the theory and the practice—in constructive ways.

 

The admission that it’s possible to critique democracy in constructive ways is obvious. Our Founders did so, and many since then. Not just conservatives, but liberals — who, again, saw that democracy needed to be restrained by doctrines of inalienable rights or other republican structures as a bulwark against passing or popular prejudices and bigotries.

 

Finally, Tait turns to the obvious point that conservatives sometimes put themselves forward as champions of democracy, tribunes of the people against elites or the managerial class, etc.:

 

Can these two seemingly contradictory conservative strains—Buckley’s “phonebook” populism and the longstanding skepticism of democracy—be reconciled? It is best not to even try, nor indeed to grant much coherence to the practice of right-wing politics. Ultimately, the American right shifts between populist and anti-democratic arguments depending on which is appropriate to achieve its political goals. [Emphasis added]

 

On the surface this is an attempt to indict or charge the Right uniquely with incoherence, hypocrisy, or stupidity. But in fact, this is the inevitable condition of all thinking political actors whose politics have been formed by and must be expressed in a mixed regime like that which exists in the United States. It just so happens that, living under our Constitution, the shortest path for protecting the First Amendment protections of speech and religion is not democracy. Yet we hardly get long-winded diatribes against the ACLU for pursuing privately funded legal strategies rather than popular apologetics and campaigns.

 

Anyone claiming, as conservatives do, to operate with some fidelity to the American Constitution and the Founders will not be entirely democratic or anti-democratic. They will find some decisions of democracy harmful to other values that are protected by the Bill of Rights, or by republican institutions. Just as everyone else does.

 

Tait’s only substantive critique is that conservatives have too often resorted to anti-democratic means for racist ends. True. But America’s racist past doesn’t cut in only one direction. The same charge could be hurled at progressives who went about sterilizing those they deemed unfit, disproportionately non-whites, into the second half of the 20th century. Similar charges of anti-Catholic bigotry could be hurled at the same and their predecessors in the Liberal Leagues and supporters of Blaine Amendments in the 19th century. Like conservatives, American progressives are Americans. That is, they are both formed by our legacy of a mixed regime, loyal to it, and not 100 percent democrats or anti-democrats. And sometimes, they share American prejudices, too.

Nothing Is Ever the Palestinians’ Fault

By Mike Coté

Saturday, June 01, 2024

 

The Palestinian cause has existed since 1948, with rarely even a half decade of quiet during that time. Oddly enough, in all of the media coverage and activism around that cause, Palestinians themselves seem to have no agency. In the pro-Palestinian narrative, things simply happen to the Palestinian people, entirely caused by outside forces. In psychology, a concept called “locus of control” describes how individuals perceive their own control over events and behavior. Those with an internal locus of control feel they have a great degree of influence, while those with an external locus of control view their fate as determined by forces outside themselves. Generally, an internal locus is psychologically healthier than its opposite, as it allows the individual to own his choices and make positive changes in his life.

 

The Palestinian cause, its leadership, and its foreign backers fully embrace the psychologically unhealthy option — a totally external locus of control. Everyone else, but particularly Israel and the Jewish people writ large, is to blame for the woes of the Palestinian people. In reality, however, the Palestinians have a great deal of control over their situation. The self-abnegation of their agency is a tactic meant to camouflage consistently poor choices and overwhelming hatred of Jews, while garnering sympathy from useful idiots in the West.

 

This pretending at a lack of agency has been the narrative core for the Palestinians from 1948 onward. The Palestinian narrative of the events of that year, which they call the “nakba” (more on the evolution of this word below), is the origin story for the myth of Palestinian helplessness. In their telling, the disaster of 1948 simply befell the Palestinian people, with the Jews forcibly evicting them from their land, making them into refugees, and committing war crimes against them. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” speaks to this lack of control. It presents the events of 1948 as fully externally driven, without Palestinian involvement. This pat story, however, could not be further from the truth.

 

In the historical record, it is clear that these events were driven primarily by the Palestinian Arabs themselves, along with their backers among the Arab nations. The U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in British Mandatory Palestine, was accepted by the Jewish population, even though it would result in a smaller state than initially promised. The Palestinian Arabs, however, refused the partition and launched a war of extermination against the nascent State of Israel. Seven Arab armies invaded alongside local Palestinian Arab forces, seeking to deny any homeland for Jews in the Levant.

 

Palestinian Arab leaders were so confident in their eventual success that they pushed for Arab inhabitants of the area to leave their homes to simplify the military operation. Many did so. To give their people motivation to evacuate, the leadership exaggerated battles like Deir Yassin into so-called massacres and demonized the Jewish people. A glorious Arab triumph would soon allow them to return to their homes. Yet many of those who left would later come to regret it, as the Jewish forces emerged victorious. Originally, the term nakba was used to lament this defeat — it described the Arabs’ own ignominious military failure — but it morphed into its current meaning in the 1990s as part of the denial-of-agency strategy. Activists now claim that the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs and the creation of Israel was not only a catastrophe, but one completely out of the Palestinians’ control.

 

The next step in the abdication of agency came with the interminable perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee issue. The families that left during 1948 were made into refugees by the war. This was not at all uncommon for the period, with large-scale population transfers occurring in East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Eastern Europe — as well as the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews across the Middle East. None of those peoples were turned into permanent refugees, but the Palestinians claimed special status, seeking a bogus “right of return” to the homes they fled. This unique status earns the Palestinians a large number of extraordinary benefits. The U.N. has a special agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), to provide these forever refugees with significant benefits meant to entrench the idea that the Palestinians are not the authors of their own fate. Again, this is a blatant falsehood.

 

Arab leaders deliberately chose this permanent displacement instead of taking the time-honored approach of integrating long-term refugees. For the past 75 years, Palestinians have lived in segregated ghettos around the Arab world. In Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, they are not citizens and have no political rights, even after decades of residence. This clearly seems suboptimal, so why would Palestinian leaders choose this fate for their charges? The answer is simple: It allows them to garner undue international sympathy and blame Israel for the predicament they put themselves in.

 

Insisting on a permanent refugee status for Palestinians serves several purposes for Arab leaders. It grants the Arab world a cudgel by which to attempt to force Israel into unilateral concessions. The refugees are a major topic in every round of negotiations, with maximalist demands for a full “right of return” used as leverage against the Jewish state. Another reason Arab states refuse to integrate their Palestinian refugee populations is that, after decades of radicalism, the refugee population is quite politically disruptive. In the most extreme cases, Palestinians have attempted to overthrow the governments of their host nations, including Jordan and Lebanon, to push them into existential war with Israel. Making these radical refugees into citizens would disrupt the tenuous control Arab dictators have over their polities.

 

Paradoxically, this is a highly beneficial arrangement for the Palestinians as well. The Palestinian people, en masse, have embraced a near-religious devotion to the idea that they will be able to recapture the status quo ante bellum of 1948, returning to their homes and undoing the State of Israel. One would think that living in long-term refugee camps would be a miserable plight, but these are not the tent cities that the term conjures up in the mind’s eye. They are large-scale, concrete apartment blocks that look no different from any other residential neighborhoods of the region. And they’re paid for by international relief dollars. That enormous flow of funds through the United Nations and its NGO partners enriches the Palestinian leadership through corruption, provides jobs for large swaths of Palestinian society, and funds the terrorism meant to destroy Israel. It pays the families of terrorists, provides construction dollars for the building of tunnel networks, and funds salaries for Hamas cadres. No wonder the refugee issue hasn’t been resolved; it’s entirely within Palestinian interests to keep the scam going indefinitely.

 

The flip side of that coin is the failure of Palestinians to achieve statehood, something that is depicted as being stymied by Israel. In the Palestinian telling, Israel refused to countenance a two-state solution, allow Palestinian self-determination, and grant Palestinians the territory they deserved. This nefarious Israeli role in “suppressing Arab democracy” is a repeat theme in pro-Palestinian activism, with no acknowledgment of any Palestinian role in the process. Once again, this flies in the face of reality. Historically, the statehood problem was driven almost entirely by Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of terroristic violence. Every time statehood has been offered to Palestinian leadership, it has been rejected. Israel has consistently made unilateral concessions — withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, allowing the Palestinian Authority to run a government in the West Bank, and offering to divide Jerusalem for a future Palestinian capital — with no commensurate response.

 

Instead of choosing the arduous task of state-building and governance, Palestinian leadership has chosen terrorism, eliminationism, and statelessness. And that choice has been repeatedly ratified by the people they lead. The first and second intifadas were widely popular among Palestinians, being viewed as righteous resistance against Israeli oppression. The latter terror campaign, one joined by thousands of ordinary Palestinians, was a direct response to the generous offer of statehood that Yasser Arafat turned down at Camp David in 2000. Arafat himself was recognized as the leader of the Palestinian nationalist cause largely owing to his support for violent attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza precisely because it is a terror organization. It was not expected to govern but to carry out terror attacks against Israel. Indeed, the barbaric October 7 attacks are supported by the vast majority of the Palestinian public. In this, it seems as though the Palestinians care less about gaining their own state than they do about destroying someone else’s.

 

The final, and most relevant, false denial of Palestinian responsibility is the blaming of the military conflict with Israel and the blockade of Gaza purely on external forces. This is exceedingly clear in the rhetoric and activism around the current Israel–Hamas war. The pre-war blockade of Gaza is presented as a cause of the conflict and is ascribed entirely to uncontrollable outside powers: imposed by Israel for no reason having to do with Palestinians’ own actions, an arbitrary and capricious exercise of oppressive power against a helpless people. In reality, the limitation of supplies into the Hamas enclave was imposed because of chronic terrorist rocket barrages and the importation of weapons and military components from Iran and other malign actors. And it must be remembered that Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza, imposed its own blockade in 2013 — a cordon sanitaire intended to reduce weapons smuggling and prevent Hamas-linked terror attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

 

The war in Gaza is a case in point when it comes to the Palestinian external locus of control. The Palestinian line on the war, which is echoed by international media and NGOs, is to portray the airstrikes causing destruction in the Strip, the consequent deaths of civilians, and the ongoing dislocation of civilians as being carried out by Israel with the malicious intent of maximizing harm to Palestinian innocents. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the deliberate co-location of Hamas military assets within, underneath, and around civilian infrastructure. Hamas, backed by most Palestinians, sparked this war with its despicable terror massacre and kidnapping of innocent civilians, from babies to grandmothers. Hamas has continued to hold hostages, make ridiculous demands in negotiations, and steal humanitarian aid for its own use. The extension of the war is entirely Hamas’s responsibility. But it’s We blame Israel all the way down.

 

The full-scale abdication of agency is exceedingly maladaptive for a people or a nation-state. A victimhood mentality is at odds with a society that controls its own destiny: Sovereignty entails responsibility. Palestinians need to learn that their choices are their own and have consequences that they must live with. Blaming everything on external forces outside of their control has created a version of learned helplessness among the Palestinian population, one that speaks poorly of their ability to run a successful nation-state. Combining that victimhood mentality and repudiation of control with the widespread approval of terrorist violence is hardly a recipe for peaceful self-determination. Though international voices are calling for a Palestinian state, the Palestinians themselves must adopt a new mindset and accept their own agency. Unless and until they do, the creation of a Palestinian state would be a grave mistake.

Coups and Norms

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 31, 2024

 

Last night, a friend and I were discussing The Event and he threw a hypothetical at me.

 

What if Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, had brought charges there this year against Joe Biden similar to those Donald Trump was just convicted on? And what if a jury in Paxton’s solidly Republican state had found Biden, a Democrat, guilty months before the election?

 

How would Biden voters feel about that?

 

I take his point. In some ways, the analogy understates how dubious Trump’s prosecution was.

 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg didn’t just indict him in the thick of a presidential cycle, he indicted him for something that happened eight years ago, before Trump became president. The only reason the statute of limitations didn’t bar him from doing so is because of an esoteric legal theory Bragg used to elevate misdemeanors to felonies by dint of a related but unproven “second crime” that Trump had supposedly committed. The offenses with which Trump was charged are rarely used in New York to support an indictment, too. Typically they’re lesser charges in a case alleging more serious crimes.

 

And Bragg isn’t any random Democratic prosecutor. During his campaign for district attorney, he implied that his office would make holding Trump “accountable” a priority. That sales pitch ended up getting him elected in 2021 in a district dominated by liberals. Realistically, you couldn’t ask for more evidence of a political motive.

 

“It is fundamental to our American system of justice that the government prosecutes cases because of alleged criminal conduct regardless of who the defendant happens to be. In this case the opposite has happened,” Sen. Susan Collins said last night. “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”

 

That’s the whole argument against Bragg’s case in three sentences. A few days ago in a piece for National Review, former Bush official John Yoo went a step further by quoting a famous line from Stalin’s notorious capo, Lavrentiy Beria. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” Yoo wrote, imputing that attitude to the various prosecutors who have charged Trump over the past 15 months.

 

Weeks before he was indicted in Manhattan last spring, I laid out my own misgivings about the charges. If you’re going to drop a legal atomic bomb on an already fraught presidential race, it has to be for something graver than falsifying business records nearly a decade ago. There’s no better way to cultivate the sort of contempt for institutions on which Trumpy populism thrives than for its opponents to treat respect for civic norms as conditional.

 

A conscientious citizen is obliged to worry about this. But a conscientious citizen is not obliged to sit quietly while post-liberal cretins in Trump’s cult disingenuously lecture them about it.

Let’s talk about Ken Paxton.

 

***

 

Show of hands: Who thinks Ken Paxton, out of solemn respect for civic norms, would decline to indict Joe Biden if he had probable cause to believe Biden had committed a crime?

 

Paxton is the same Trump sycophant who filed the inane lawsuit after the 2020 election that sought to exclude the electoral votes of swing states won by Biden. Had he prevailed, America would have faced a constitutional crisis unlike any since 1860. Paxton also happens to be so corrupt that he came this close to being impeached and removed as attorney general by a legislature dominated by his own party. He avoided that fate only because Trump himself intervened on his behalf.

 

It’s not “norms” that’s stopped him from prosecuting Biden in Texas. It’s the fact that, unlike Alvin Bragg, Paxton doesn’t have evidence of a crime. The same goes for House Republicans’ endless investigation into the president. If Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan had the goods, they would eagerly impeach Biden in an election year. In fact, refusing to do so out of concerns for “norms” would likely mean the end of their careers once Trump got wind of their “disloyalty.”

 

They haven’t impeached Biden because they can’t find anything to pin on him. Full stop.

 

Bone-deep dishonesty about respect for norms is the first thing to recognize in the dark warnings today that “two can play at this game!” from people who enthusiastically supported a coup attempt three years ago. Coup apologists do not care about norms, by definition. They’re not angry that Democrats haven’t shown proper respect for electoral fair play by convicting Trump, they’re angry that this was something done to their side rather than something their side did to the other.

 

The entire point of Donald Trump’s worldview is to be unapologetically ruthless in seeking advantage, norms be damned. And from the jump, the right has embraced it. “The party that has thrice nominated a greedy, prideful, mendacious, wrathful, bigot who gleefully slanders others, admitted to sexual assault on tape, [and] defrauded poor people who attended his fake university somehow believe they have been taking the moral high ground?” an astonished Tim Miller asked today about the sudden Strange New Respect for norms on the right.

 

I think they do believe it. I get the sense from many Trump supporters that they’d be willing to go much further than a coup or putting Joe Biden on trial in the name of excluding leftists from power permanently and should be appreciated for the “restraint” they’ve shown thus far. The sentiments we’re seeing on social media today, e.g., “I used to hate Trump but then he got convicted for a crooked cover-up of a hush-money scheme so now I’m a fascist,” suggest that the verdict in Manhattan has become a timely excuse to shed a little more of that restraint.

 

Being MAGA means forever blaming others for your own illiberal impulses.

 

Another strain of dishonesty in the backlash to Trump’s conviction is the particular focus on Alvin Bragg. As noted, there are sound reasons to find his handling of the case problematic. It smells of politics, it’s legally shaky, and it’s caused an enormous amount of civic tumult already over crimes that simply aren’t that serious. He didn’t need to bring these charges.

 

The dishonest part is that most Republicans whining about Bragg today would be whining just as much if Trump had been convicted in one of the other three cases pending against him. And those cases are considerably stronger on the evidence and significantly graver with respect to the crimes they allege: One has to do with Trump’s chicanery in trying to overturn the election, another has to do with his election tampering in Georgia, and the third has to do with him obstructing the Justice Department’s effort to recover classified material stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

 

All of those speak directly to his fitness as president. Someone who cares earnestly about norms and good governance should want him to answer those charges. His supporters emphatically do not, needless to say.

 

Even conservatives who should know better, like John Yoo, aren’t above trying to delegitimize the other three cases by lumping them together with Bragg’s much weaker indictment. “In bringing a series of deeply flawed cases against Trump,” Yoo wrote, “both federal and local prosecutors have … targeted an unpopular figure first and looked for the crime second.”

 

Pure nonsense. The truth is literally the opposite: Trump’s coup plot was so egregious, and his concealment of classified documents so brazen, that he all but dared law enforcement to hold him accountable for either. No one had to “look” for the crimes; he committed them in plain sight, seemingly believing that his political stature would shield him from accountability.

 

His fans seemed to believe it too. Their problem with the Bragg case fundamentally isn’t that it’s too weak to justify prosecuting him, it’s that they regard any attempt to hold Trump criminally accountable as per se unfair so long as he’s active in politics. The tantrum they’re throwing today would hardly have been different had he been convicted in the January 6 case or the Georgia case or the classified documents case. They want Trump placed above the law, not just in Manhattan but everywhere.

 

Sometime soon the Supreme Court will rule that, no, of course presidents don’t enjoy “absolute immunity” from criminal charges for anything and everything they might do while in office. When that ruling is issued, pay attention to how the MAGA droogs screeching about a “banana republic” today react. Are they pleased that the judiciary struck a blow for the rule of law by refusing to grant monarchical privileges to the head of the executive branch?

 

Or are they screeching again?

 

***

 

Another question: Does Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump gain any legitimacy from the fact that it ended with a conviction?

 

One can argue that it doesn’t, as Americans have been lawfully convicted of all sorts of dubious crimes over the last 200-plus years. Rosa Parks was found guilty of disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to someone white, entirely by the book at the time. I don’t think the fact of a conviction redeems Bragg’s decision to pursue a case whose civic cost will grossly exceed the benefit of holding Trump to account for falsifying business records.

 

But most of us would agree that the case would have lost legitimacy from an acquittal, no?

 

Some Trumpers are putting on a brave face today by boasting that his conviction will end up helping him in the polls (it’s certainly helped his fundraising!), but that has a doth-protest-too-much air about it and not just because it makes his determined efforts to delay his other trials hard to explain. The obvious truth is that an acquittal would have been a tremendous political victory for him. He’d have beaten “the deep state” at its own game; the verdict would have been seen as validation of the right’s critique that Bragg’s case was a castle built on sand, illegitimate to its core. The jury had seen through Democrats’ “lawfare” and repudiated it, we’d be told.

 

Acquittal would have almost guaranteed a Trump polling bounce, I think. It would have cast doubt by association on the merits of the other cases pending against him and given undecided voters moral cover to conclude that civic concerns about a second term for him must be overblown.

 

Instead, we have a conviction. And insofar as a conviction does anything to redeem Bragg’s case, it’s this: Twelve citizens who aren’t part of “the deep state” looked at the evidence and concluded, “Yep, he did it.”

 

Wade through right-wing social media today and you’ll find endless comparisons between Trump and famous martyrs of oppressive legal systems, each one stupider and more offensive than the last—Alexei Navalny, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the apostles, even Jesus Christ himself. The wrinkle in Trump’s case is that he was prosecuted using the same procedures that Republicans typically take for granted as hallmarks of due process. He was indicted by a grand jury; he had the right to remain silent; he mounted a defense, albeit not very effectively; and not until 12 Americans drawn from outside the justice system said so was he held responsible. 

 

When Lavrentiy Beria said “find me the man and I’ll find you the crime,” that isn’t what he had in mind.

 

If they can do it to him, they can do it to you, some Trump apologists warned after the verdict, neglecting to explain why “they” haven’t “done it” to all manner of other prominent Republicans like Ron DeSantis. But it’d be truer to say that if they can do it to you, they can do it to him. That’s what it means for someone to not be above the law: Trump gets the same rights and procedures in court that you would if you were charged with a crime. How else should a country that doesn’t recognize titles of nobility operate?

 

Frankly, you’ll get less due process than he got. If you’re ever on trial and the presiding judge finds you in contempt 10 times, the penalty will be more than a fine and a lecture, I promise.

 

Had Trump been acquitted, the idea that if they can do it to him, they can do it to you would have been more potent. It would have been outrageous that Bragg had brought a case like this to trial that couldn’t withstand a jury’s scrutiny. The DA would have smeared the Republican nominee for president with allegations of crimes that the evidence ultimately couldn’t prove. In the middle of a national campaign, he would have abused the power of the state to baselessly impugn a political figure despised by his party.

 

But it wasn’t baseless, it turns out. Trump did it. Does that count for anything?

 

It does not, it seems. The jury’s verdict means so little to Trump supporters that Larry Hogan, the GOP’s nominee for Senate in Maryland, was all but excommunicated from the party by Trump’s campaign manager when he tweeted that Americans should “respect the verdict and the legal process.” Literally overnight, believing that no jury in a blue district can fairly convict a populist hero has become a Republican litmus test.

 

That’s post-liberalism in its glory. One’s respect for the system depends entirely on its ability to deliver the desired outcomes, not the desired procedures.

 

***

 

Every pundit who comments on the trial is professionally obligated to predict whether the verdict will help Trump in the polls or hurt him.

 

There are good arguments both ways. Maybe the supernova of media coverage will reach some of those “disengaged voters” we’ve heard so much about lately and move them into Joe Biden’s column. Or maybe it’ll convince a bunch of partisan conservatives who’ve been looking for excuses to support Trump to finally take the plunge: Thanks to Democrats, their only choice now is to defend the rule of law by reelecting a guy who’s still facing 57 criminal charges related to election tampering and national security and whose last act as a public official four years ago was trying to stage a putsch.

 

Whether you think Trump will benefit or not from the verdict is, I suspect, a function of how civically perverted you believe Americans generally and the right more broadly to be in 2024. Is this country so far past saving that a jury conviction on felony charges might actually increase a candidate’s presidential chances?

 

You can guess my answer to that.

 

I’m okay with it, though. Lately I’ve found that the likelier it becomes that Trump is reelected, the more at peace with it I am. For this simple reason: Those who vote for him will deserve what he does to this country in a second term. Truly.

 

And there’s some moral satisfaction in that. In a properly functioning democracy, the people get the government they deserve. Our democracy must be functioning properly because we deserve Trump and I think we’re going to get him.

 

“If you took a Time Machine and told Republican leaders in 2015 that Trump would end up being convicted on some porny business-fraud stuff, I’m sure they would have been shocked and assumed no possible explanation except the end of democracy,” Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin joked on Friday. But that’s not really a joke. That Trump would get tangled up in all manner of unethical and eventually illegal behavior, that he would turn politics into an authoritarian clown show, that his personality cult would become a cancer on American institutions, was apparent from the start of his political career. The Never Trump faction emerged early for a reason.

 

Republicans either never reckoned with his destabilizing influence or they grew to cherish it, even after January 6 when a credible populist like DeSantis presented himself as an alternative. So, nine years later, the ethos of Trump’s party is a sinister twist on Beria’s sinister quote: Show me the man and I’ll show you why he can’t ever be held accountable for the crime.

 

In the end, I think the only thing to celebrate about the verdict in the Bragg case is that it’ll make a Trump victory in November a bit more embarrassing for the United States. The coup plot, the impeachments, the hide-the-documents fiasco at Mar-a-Lago, the comically over-the-top demagoguery in which he now routinely engages on the stump are all deeply humiliating in The People’s Choice, but “convicted felon” will make the disgrace we deserve that much more robust. 

 

Maybe something good will come from the Bragg case after all.

Crocodile Tears for the Convict

Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 31, 2024

 

Albert Jay Nock was one of the great magazine editors. As I have recounted before, in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he tells a story. 

 

When he was running The Freeman (the first one), a young writer came to look for writing opportunities. The writer-on-the-make asked if Nock had any “sacred cows” that could not be violated in Nock’s pages. “Yes,” he recounted in his memoir, “we had three of them, as untouchable and sacred as the Ark of the Covenant.”

 

“The first one,” I said, “is that you must have a point. Second, you must make it out. The third one is that you must make it out in eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.”

 

“But is that all?” the young man countered.

 

“Isn’t it enough for you?”

 

“Why, yes, I suppose so, but I mean, is that all the editorial policy you have?” the young man asked incredulously.

 

“As far as I know, it is,” I said, rising. “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that — glad to have it.”

 

Now, take it from the editor-in-chief, this is not exactly the editorial policy at The Dispatch. I mean, we do try to live by those three sacred cows, but I don’t think we’d stop there. What I mean is, barring some Swiftian tour-de-force, we would not run a piece defending the strangulation of girl-babies at birth. Or boy babies. Indeed, generally speaking, while Steve and I haven’t put it all down on paper, there’s just an implicit understanding here at The Dispatch that we don’t run pieces condoning strangling babies—or pretty much any other category of human. All I’m trying to say is that while we welcome divergent perspectives, we tend not to run stuff—no matter how well-written—that we don’t think is factually, morally, or intellectually defensible. This doesn’t mean we all have to agree with it, but we set the standards a bit higher than Nock suggests above (though I don’t think he would have actually published a piece advocating wholesale infanticide). 

 

Why do I bring this up? Because while I agree with our policy of not peddling hot takes for clicks or efforts to bend principles to fit partisan priorities, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Nockian approach. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is unwise, reigning pieties do not deserve to reign, and the things that aren’t supposed to be said deserve to be said. 

 

This is all a long-winded way of saying in the matter of the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, I want to make the case for blaming the victim. 

 

Blaming the victim is one of those things “everyone knows” we’re never supposed to do. Interestingly, this is not some ancient biblical or Thomistic injunction. The phrase “blaming the victim” is barely a half-century old. The phrase was almost nonexistent before the 1971 book Blaming the Victim by William Ryan. Angry at the Moynihan Report, Ryan argued that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s diagnosis of family breakdown in the African American community as the driver of urban crime and dysfunction was outrageous. It was a seminal text of the “root causes” arguments we are so familiar with today. It took on added ideological baggage in the context of rape and sexual assault. And—let me just say—rightly so. Blaming women for being attacked because they dress provocatively or get drunk in unwise situations or locations is morally reprehensible. But, as the curmudgeonly father of a young woman, I feel compelled to say that this doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t be mindful of their circumstances. The matter of blame— morally and most emphatically legally—should and must reside squarely on the criminal. 

 

But let’s set intergenerational poverty and sexual predation aside. As a matter of real life, we all can think of circumstances where we, or people we know, went looking for trouble. I think most reasonable people can hold two independent ideas simultaneously. The person who hurls a string of F-bombs at a cop and gets a beating as a result was behaving stupidly. Indeed, it’s fair to say—not as a matter of law, but of common sense—that he was “asking for it.” But we can also believe that the police officer should not have beaten the victim. We have all sorts of moral intuitions of this sort. The teenager who thinks he’s good at parkour was an idiot for jumping from rooftop to rooftop, and it’s tragic that he fell to his death. But it is not as tragic as the teen who is struck by a stray bullet while doing her homework. The hiker who is mauled by a bear for trying to take a selfie with some cubs does not arouse the same sympathy as the visitor mauled by a bear at a zoo because the zookeeper left the enclosure unlocked.  

 

Donald Trump had sex with an adult film actress while his third wife was nursing their newborn child. He had an affair with a former Playboy model. He denies this, but as far as I can tell no one else does. Even Trump’s staunchest defenders don’t try—at least not very hard—to do so. He falsely recorded his effort to pay off to Stormy Daniels as legal expenses. He spent his entire professional life abusing the legal system, stiffing contractors out of their fees by threatening to bankrupt them in frivolous legal actions. As a landlord, he violated fair housing laws. As a presidential candidate, he promised to put his business interests in a blind trust, but once elected he didn’t and monetized the presidency for his own benefit. Also as a presidential candidate, he led chants of “Lock her up!” about his political opponent. He invited Russia to release information about her.  He was impeached (the first time) for abusing his power in an attempt to intimidate a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden for corruption. When he tried to steal the 2020 election, he pressured his own Justice Department to allege crimes to buttress his false claims that the election was illegitimate. This was also around the time he encouraged a mob that visited riotous violence upon the Capitol in an effort to intimidate Congress out of fulfilling its constitutional duties. He’s promised to pardon people who beat up cops on his behalf. He calls them “hostages” and plays their warbling rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before his rallies, like some weak-tea Americanized version of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” He defended the mob that chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” He’s argued—through lawyers in court—and in his own words that he should be immune to any criminal charges that stem from actions he took as president, and to a certain extent, as ex-president. He’s vowed that when he’s president again he reserves the right to do what he’s outraged is being done to him. I could go on, but you get the picture. 

 

Now, I want to be clear: Except for the misdemeanor of false records, none of these things are proven crimes and some of them are not crimes at all. Contrary to a lot of talking heads, politicians are not legally barred from trying to “influence an election.” That is what running for office is. Nor is paying off parties to adulterous engagements illegal. If it were, I have no doubt many politicians would be in the clink. 

 

But as a matter of common sense, karma, moral intuition, or whatever term you like, I am utterly incapable of mustering the slightest sympathy for Donald Trump. If I were to publish a dictionary of common phrases, I would put his picture next to the entry on “F—k Around and Find Out.” 

 

His entire life has been one extended experiment with testing, violating, and abusing the rules—some legal, some moral, some normative—for his own benefit. The system isn’t supposed to apply to him. This, in almost dialectic fashion, has invited responses that also violate the rules of the system. I’ve been making this point for nearly a decade now. Trump’s violations of norms have elicited countless violations of norms from his opponents. That’s what happens when you break the rules: You give permission to others to break them, too. 

 

The amazing thing is how people go blind to the rule-breaking of their own team. Sen. Mike Lee thinks that the prosecution of Donald Trump is an affront to all he holds dear, invoking A Man for All Seasons with the Democrats as Richard Rich, defenestrating the rule of law not for Wales, “But for Biden.” Trump’s myriad transgressions seem to be utterly invisible to him. 

 

But as I said, we can hold two ideas simultaneously. I think this case against Donald Trump should never have been brought. As a matter of law—not karma—Alvin Bragg is in the wrong. I don’t necessarily believe that he thinks he’s breaking the rules, but there’s a lot of that sort of motivated reasoning going on with rule-breakers these days. This case would not have been brought against anyone but Trump, as Elie Honig and others have argued. I am unconvinced by the argument he committed a felony. I don’t blame the jurors for reaching that conclusion. I might have reached the same given the instructions of the judge, the evidence presented by the prosecution, and the abysmal defense mounted by the Trump team. But I still think the verdict is wrong. 

 

This brings up another reason to blame Trump. He didn’t let his lawyers mount the sort of defense that might have gotten him acquitted. Refusing to give an inch, he wouldn’t let them concede the affairs, or pursue a strategy that didn’t align with what he thinks are his political and psychological interests. “Deny everything,” and “always punch back,” are the Roy Cohn rules Trump lives by, and why not? They’ve worked for him until now. 

 

And they may continue to work for him. One of the problems with the backlash that Trump invites from his enemies is that it often elicits yet another backlash against them. The flimsiness of this case is causing some people—and nearly all elected Republicans and most conservative pundits—to rally to Trump. It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine that Trump comes out of this stronger. Or he might not. No one really knows. But the fantasy that this will be the thing that rids us of Trump has taken many forms and has never paid off. 

 

I have no problem with reasonable criticism of this case and the verdict. Why would I? I agree with much of it. Where I part company is with the idea that this proves Donald Trump was “right” about the system. He’s like a human monkey wrench hurling himself into the gears of the system and then, when mangled by it, crying about how he’s a victim and that his victimhood proves the system never worked. 

 

It is abhorrent and reprehensible to call this case a Stalinesque show trial. If you know anything about Stalin’s Great Terror and say this, you are whitewashing profound evil and slandering the United States. In Stalin’s show trials, the accused were tortured. Their families were tortured. Victims were threatened with death—and the deaths of their families—if they didn’t sign and repeat false confessions. Rep. Nancy Mace plays a similar game. “There’s no difference: Putin silences Navalny, Biden’s DOJ targets Trump. The left’s outrage over Navalny is hypocritical as they cheer on Biden’s tyranny.”

 

If you know anything about Putin or Navalny and can say, with a straight face, “There’s no difference” the best one can say in your defense is that you are a staggering idiot. I don’t think Mace deserves such generosity. This is not like Castro’s Cuba, as Marco Rubio says either. 

 

It is entirely defensible to say that this verdict undermines faith and confidence in the judicial system. That is exactly what I thought it would do, and so I was a skeptic of bringing it all along. But you know what else undermines faith and confidence in the judicial system? Claiming that we are no different than Stalin’s or Putin’s Russia. 

 

Our legal system has never been perfect. It’s produced a fair number of miscarriages of justice. But normally, politicians—particularly ones who claim to be conservatives and admirers of the American experiment—do not respond to such mistakes by defecating from a great height on their country. But they are willing to do so, not for Wales, but for Trump. 

 

A note on Nock.

 

Some readers will recall I am a fan of much of Nock’s writing. My podcast is named The Remnant as a modest nod to his essay “Isaiah’s Job.”  

 

Nock’s self-description to himself as a “superfluous man” was a mild nod to the literary character type found in 19th-century Russian literature. But he meant something a little different. The Russian superfluous man, found in the novels of Pushkin, Lermontov, and others, was an aloof nobleman, sometimes of considerable influence and power, who defied the norms of polite society. Nock’s superfluousness was certainly aloof, but it was aimed more at those in power. The demagogues and politicians who manipulated public passion for their own ends exasperated him, but not to the point where he let their exasperation cause him to mimic their effects. He believed in a remnant of decent, somewhat stolid people who didn’t get seduced by the kulturkampfs of the moment. 

 

Nock is something of a cautionary tale, as he ended his life in anti-democratic crankery and in an antisemitism that betrayed his own previous denunciations of it. Obviously, I don’t subscribe to any of that. M.D. Aeschliman recently penned a fascinating corrective of Nock, William F. Buckley, and the concept of the remnant. I don’t necessarily agree with it entirely, but he’s a brilliant scholar and the piece is worth reading. I think whether you’re using Nock’s version or Matthew Arnold’s, the idea stands on its own. 

 

I bring this up in part to answer some questions posed by readers, but mostly to make a more relevant point. I think it’s fine to be angry about the Bragg case. I also think it’s fine to think justice was done, or that it will be done pending appeal. Reasonable people can disagree. But I think moments like this demand a little of that superfluousness. Watching cable news and perusing social media last night, I felt utterly out of step with the defining political passions of this moment. It was only when I watched the livestream of Advisory Opinions that I heard anyone acknowledge the conflicting truths of this case, the competing shades of gray that define the reality and the facts. 

 

You don’t owe anyone your passion. It’s fine to be loyal to a party or even a politician. But you shouldn’t relinquish the keys to your supply of anger or righteousness. The loudest voices make the same error, but from different directions: They invest in Donald Trump the future of America’s soul. But America is about more than Donald Trump. If he loses in his battles, it will not be proof that America is irremissibly lost. And if he wins, it will not be proof that America is irremissibly lost. Both visions are predicated on a lie about this country and how it works. But that lie can become true only if enough people decide to believe it. So don’t give the monkey wrench that power. 

Now May We Defend Ourselves?

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, June 01, 2024

 

Senator Roger Wicker has an urgent warning: America is at risk of losing a war with another great power. The Mississippi Republican, who sits as ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, paints a dark picture of the global threat landscape. Senior military leaders tell him that our under-resourced and overtaxed military is not prepared for the challenge. “We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated,” Wicker wrote in a widely circulated New York Times op-ed this week.

 

Wicker’s solution is a “generational investment in the U.S. military” that he calls “21st Century Peace Through Strength.” He would spend an additional $55 billion on defense in the coming fiscal year and raise overall defense spending from just under 3 percent of the U.S. economy to 5 percent by the end of this decade.

 

Under Wicker’s plan, the Pentagon would maximize its joint-force capabilities. The Navy would grow to 357 ships. The number of Air Force fighter jets would massively increase. More dollars would be spent on submarines and sub pens. “The plan,” Wicker wrote in the op-ed, “would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.”

 

The money can’t arrive soon enough. Not since World War II has the international scene been as dangerous. Last year, there were 183 active conflicts across the globe, the highest total in 30 years. An axis of Eurasian autocrats endangers individual liberty, free exchange, and consensual government on multiple fronts. Russia fights Ukraine. Iran attacks Israel directly and through proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. North Korea launches missiles and satellites. And China threatens both Taiwan and the Philippines.

 

These are not isolated fights. The overriding goal is displacing the United States as guarantor of international order. Where once rogue states individually probed and prodded U.S. alliances, looking for fissures to exploit and holes in which to burrow, the axis of autocrats works together. Russia provides the brute force. China delivers financing and technology. Iran and North Korea supply drones and missiles. The arc of war begins in Ukraine and extends south-southeast through Israel and the Red Sea before bending in the Indian Ocean and traveling north-northeast through Taiwan in the South China Sea.

 

The level of coordination is unprecedented. Since he took power in 2012, China’s Xi Jinping has met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin some 43 times. In 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Xi and Putin inked a “no limits” partnership and celebrated, in Xi’s words, the coming “great changes in the world not seen in a century.” When Putin paid a state visit to Beijing two weeks ago, the two men physically embraced. The Russian autocrat’s trip coincided with his forces nearing the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Not long after Putin returned home, Chinese vessels surrounded Taiwan in a huge invasion drill.

 

Deterrence has failed. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea act with impunity, confident that President Joe Biden will acquiesce in or react incompetently to their misdeeds. In this environment, where Biden’s passivity and ineptitude entice aggression, there is no painless way to restore America’s edge. We will have to pay in either blood or in treasure.

 

I choose treasure. Better to avoid direct intervention by scaring your enemies with overwhelming strength than to fight them directly at the cost of American lives. The way to avoid a ruinous global war is through a concerted strategy that revitalizes our conventional and strategic warmaking capacity, speaks boldly and frequently about the threat that the axis of autocrats poses to our freedom, security, and way of life, enhances our technological prowess, and launches an ideological-political offensive aimed at opening spaces for political alternatives within the adversary regimes.

 

That is why the Wicker plan, while costly, is preferable to the status quo. The chaos you see in the world today is the bad return on decades of privileging welfare over national security. The problem may not have started with Biden, but he’s done nothing to address it. On the contrary: He’s made things worse. His requested defense budgets have been so paltry that bipartisan majorities in Congress routinely upsize them. Inflation eats away at the purchasing power of these nominal gains. The military is left scrambling.

 

Yes, Congress faces fiscal constraints. Entitlement programs are on autopilot. Green subsidies are out of control. Interest on the debt crowds out spending of all kinds. But there would be no greater blow to the national prospect, financial and otherwise, than a military defeat that shattered confidence in America. The Wicker plan is also a test for the “reprioritization” school of national populist Republicans: If China truly is the overriding threat, then they should have no qualms with backing a defense buildup of this magnitude.

 

April’s bipartisan vote for military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan was a crucial endorsement of American leadership and defense of freedom worldwide. Congress should build on that success by adopting Wicker’s proposal. He would have us pursue a time-tested means of national revival: a towering defense-industrial base, technological innovation, patriotic renewal, and deterrence through superior lethality.

 

Mitch McConnell is on board. Other Republicans — and more than a few Democrats — will be, too. And they better move fast. Time is not on our side.

Trump Is Winning in the Most Absurd Way Possible

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, May 31, 2024

 

Since 2015, a great deal of the American chattering class has wished to turn the page on Donald Trump, to get to the final moral of the story. Somewhere in their imagination, they fantasize about a moment in which Trump casts off all disguise and reveals himself definitely as evil incarnate, and at that moment the forces of light, led by someone like Robert Mueller or Merrick Garland, will assemble and cast him and his people into the outer darkness forever and ever. They live to see the walls closing in.

 

And consequently, their brains have adapted to operate on a deficit of oxygen.

 

This week in a Manhattan court, this group of fantasists got as close as they’ve ever been to the dramaturgy they want. The New York Times graphics department made the most boring infographic ever created to represent the 34 individual counts, and to indulge in the exquisite pleasure of printing the word “Guilty” 34 times in red. And this pleasure wasn’t reserved to the infographic department. Reporter Shawn McCreesh also began his news report with the word “Guilty” printed 34 consecutive times, adding: “For the first time in his 77 years, Mr. Trump was a felon.”

 

It might as well say “Expelliarmus” or some other wizard’s command from the Harry Potter universe. The likeliest result is not to disarm and harm Trump, but to expose that our institutions now operate on magical thinking.

 

If polls are to be believed, Donald Trump is winning the 2024 election in the funniest way possible. The country’s mood is not febrile, as it was in 2015 and 2016. It is not manic, anxious, and desperate, as it was in 2020. The public and the press are inured to Trump’s rhetoric, when he bothers to offer any. The political temperature in the United States is icy. It’s defined by familiar, cold hatreds.

 

In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s candidacy represented an ideological takeover of his party. It fit in with a global wave of populist-right insurgencies from Brazil to Poland. For two decades, politics had been cocooning itself in triangulation, spin, euphemism, and poll-tested phrases. “We’re going to build an infrastructure to the future of opportunity zones of tolerance,” a politician might say, trying to hide the reality that it all amounted to a tax break and regulatory change to help a politically connected landlord kick out a black church from a storefront in favor of a Starbucks franchisee. Trump reminded people that politics is also about boldly ventilating emotions like anger, and demanding allegiances.

 

Trump 2024 is succeeding in an entirely different way from Trump 2016. Now, instead of polarizing the country, driving people insane, and saying crazy things on a live feed of CNN all day, Trump has been thriving just by sitting in court while his opponents play fantasy games of defeating him forever. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are just silently and sullenly concluding that Trump may be a fraud, may be a “felon,” and may be a fool, but he’s still better than what the Dems are offering. Trump, with a whimper.