The manifest delight among the anti-Trump camp over his conviction
in the hooker payoff case will be short-lived.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s pursuit of Trump on the flimsy
case of felonious falsification of business records in furtherance of some
vaguely defined higher crime has produced a frisson of satisfaction among
assorted Democrats, liberals, and those who find the man appalling for a
variety of good reasons. But it will undermine the case against him that really
matters—his conspiracy to steal the election of 2020.
Among the people I have seen send cheers heavenward at the
jury’s multiple guilty verdicts, remarkably few—none in fact—can explain to me
the details of the accusations or the legal reasoning behind condemning him 34
times for essentially a single episode. To all appearances, they don’t really
care. He’s guilty, he's a felon, and that’s that.
His supporters, equally removed from or uninterested in the
tedious minutiae of the case, think he’s being prosecuting for paying off a
hooker, which they don’t see as a crime (correctly) and are easily persuaded
that he’s being singled out in a political vendetta. The convoluted reasoning that convinced a
jury to convict escapes them, as well it might. I’ve read a lot about it, and
it escapes me.
As for criminalized sex, Bill Clinton pretended not to know
where his cigar ended up, and Republicans made endless damp hay out of that. In the
end, nobody really cared.
Yeah, I know, it’s not the sex per se but Trump’s signature
on documents that called the payoff legal fees—the sort of thing that Hillary’s
campaign did to obscure its role in the origins of the Russiagate hoax.
As CNN summarized, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton
campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier,
masking it as ‘legal services’ and ‘legal and compliance consulting’ instead of
opposition research.” The DNC eventually coughed up $113,000 in fines, but no
one faced prosecution over it. Given the number of documents signed by various
DNC officials covering up the oppo research as payments to lawyers, the
Clintons’ allies would certainly be looking at hundreds of felonies under the Bragg
jurisprudence.
But the hundred grand was worth every penny as the Steele
dossier, secretly funded by the Clinton campaign, led to years of propaganda
over Trump’s alleged “back channel” to Moscow and “Russian interference” in the
2016 election, fact-free concepts most Democrats still revere to this day, their
team’s happy BlueAnon conspiracy.
The Clintons got off Scot-free after years of peddling these
far more consequential falsehoods, utilizing the full power of the surveillance
state to do so. Do we think dumb middle Americans didn’t notice?
Unfortunately, a whole slew of Trumpians also think that
some combination of phony absentee ballots and computerized vote manipulation
caused Trump to lose several key swing states in 2020, that he really won, and
that any attempt to disprove their paranoid certainties is bogus, biased,
partisan trickery.
Given the partisan trickery involved in the Bragg
prosecution, they have a point. When the Dem-leaning establishment gets around
to their criminal cases against Trump and his minions for things like
organizing fake slates of Republican electors for VP Pence to accept as valid,
egging on the Georgia secretary of state to “find” Trump another 18,000 votes
and flip the state, and encouraging his loyal yahoos to break into the Capitol
to intimidate congress members into voting their way, the whole thing will fall
flat. It will look like yet another lame excuse to “get” Donald Trump and
prevent him from staging a comeback campaign.
Trump deeply discredited himself with the post-vote events
of 2020-21, and a disciplined political and legal team could have pursued Trump
for trashing our electoral process. He and his sleazebag lawyers did plenty, and there was no need to make shit up.
Instead, they put on a series of judicial spectacles so that
they can label Trump a felon during the campaign and thereby can keep their
jobs for another four years.
Ever since Trump sailed down the escalator to announce his
bid in 2016, we have relentlessly heard how his candidacy was a joke, how the
“walls are closing in” on his fake presidency, and how his comeback for a second
term is doomed. The chorus of imminent victory over Trumpism is now about as
credible as the Ukrainian vow to retake Crimea.
Any American not living in a cave knows that there is plenty
of felonious behavior taking place around us, especially at the top of our
get-it-while-you-can political establishment. A few of us even think things
like instituting a torture regime, sending off troops to conquer foreign countries
for no reason, smashing the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to bits, and
presiding over a genocidal slaughter of defenseless civilians are also arguably
criminal acts. Slamming a political enemy over crimes of the willie while
ignoring the mountainous slurry of sleaze threatening to drown our fragile
polity is a good way to discredit everything for which we once held a modicum
of respect.
