Waiting for Godot
We’ve been through this before. A million years ago there was Oliver North and Iran Contra. Back in the Bush era, progressives followed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s every move as he sought to render justice to Valerie Plame. The hope was that the law, with its magisterial rules of evidence and august impartiality could do what politics had failed to, and hold the reigning war criminals to account.
Then there were the great expectations that went along with the endless Mueller investigation and Trump’s first and second impeachments. I listened to Rachel Maddow’s “The Bagman” all the way through during a late night drive between New York and Boston, and was moved despite myself by the implicit parallels it drew between between Elliott Richardson, George Beall, Ron Liebman, Tim Baker and Barney Skolnik, staunch institutionalists all, who unhesitatingly put country over party to bring down Agnew, and Rod Rosenstein, who, it was hoped, would do the same with Trump and his corrupt minions. Alas, it was not to be.
And now our eyes are turned to 100 Centre Street, where, it is hoped, a conviction for misdemeanor bookkeeping fraud, upgraded to a felony because the intent was election interference, may put a dent in Trump’s 2024 electoral prospects.
Trump will likely never be tried for his most serious crimes—his brazen attempts to steal the 2020 election and his mishandling of confidential documents and the lies and coverups that went along with them, and if he is, it will be in the wrong venues. I mean, it would be a welcome thing if a Washington, an Atlanta, or a South Florida jury found him guilty, but half the country would see that as proof that the system is irredeemably corrupt. How could urban jurors ever render justice, when they’re all either illegal immigrants, dope fiends, smug liberal elitists, minorities, woke students, or bought-and-paid-for Soros shills (read: rich Jews who don’t support Israel or the minorities that said rich Jews have historically weaponized against Christians)?
The brouhaha over Alito’s upside down flag and Clarence and Gini Thomas’s highjinx should send the same message to liberals that Trump’s indictments send to MAGA people—that our legal system is as flimsy a bulwark against a tyranical minority as our federalist system turns out to be. Institutionalists schminstitutionalists: give them enough money, a national platform, and a charismatic psychopath to lead them and a determined and angry enough minority can and will seize control.
I’m betting that Trump will be convicted next week, and that as seamy as his behavior was, and as fair-minded and evidence-driven as the judge and jury are likely to be, it won’t put a dent in his prospects for the fall. The Trump lackeys who need to believe that he didn’t have sex with that woman or pay that perfectly legal NDA will believe that he didn’t have sex with that woman or pay that perfectly legal NDA; the rest will be satisfied that the NDA—which Trump had nothing to do with—was both right and proper, that Michael Cohen is a Judas for what he did to Trump, and that the jury and the judge were New Yorkers, with all that that implies.
The problem with MAGA isn’t that they don’t know that Trump is corrupt. It’s that they don’t care. As far as they are concerned, the country was stolen from them, and Trump is taking it back. He is their liberator—their Lenin, their Che, their Mao. Progressives may have truth and justice on their side, but MAGA has its passionate intensity. And that’s all it will need if the majority doesn’t read the writing on the wall.
Maybe even if it does.