First Thoughts On Trump’s Guilty Verdict
I assume he did it, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on the relevant laws, or even to know exactly what he is accused of having done. But I base my good-faith assumption that the New York jury of his peers got it right on the reflection that Trump is a conniving, two-faced, self-serving New York real estate liar who has done so many things over the many years of his very public life that were obviously seedy and corrupt that it is very easy for me to believe that he would make hush money payments and use illegally diverted funds to do it.
On the other hand, I really don’t care what he did with a pornographic actress, or how he got his creepy lawyer to help him cover it up. And I know that his millions of slavering true believers will care about it even less than I do, and if anything will see this conviction as yet more evidence, as if they needed more, that Trump is the Second Coming, whereas I see it as evidence of nothing I didn’t already know, and — like so much related to Trump — of things I would certainly be better off not knowing.
How will this conviction affect Trump’s chances of getting elected president in November? Not at all, I suppose, since the lines are already drawn as clearly as can be on Trump, and therefore, as with all rabid tribalism, any new information is merely absorbed as more proof of what “we” already believe, and of how evil “they” are.
Republicans of all shapes and sizes are leaping forward as we speak to show their support for Trump in this terrible miscarriage of justice, because they lack the foresight to imagine their country’s future or their own in the post-Trump world, and therefore act and speak only with a view to what they see as their immediate and superficial political advantage, personal legacy and national well-being be damned.
Democrats are leaping forward to exploit this moment as part of their campaign to persuade Americans to re-elect a senile idiot whose life-long congenital lying his supporters are now finally able to obfuscate (quietly and implicitly) as mere dementia, and hence to leave their national security, in a time of grave international threat, in the hands of a man who probably has to be reminded where he is and why he is there at least five times each day, or — which is at least as bad — in the hands of a secret group of unelected subversives and usurpers who are obviously and of necessity the actual president-in-practice during Joe Biden’s mentally incapacitated first term.
“Binary choice!” Fools.
