Cheap Thrills

 

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.