Thoughts On Trump Verdict

Anyone who thinks this case was about the rule of law is lying to themselves.

I’ve always tried to stay away from the bluntly political here on this blog. This has always been a space for better understanding current events in order to become better prepared for the future, not for indulging grievances or railing against politicians. Sometimes, I do, but only because there’s no way to separate politics from current events.

I’d hadn’t intended to weigh in on the conviction of former President Donald Trump, as other matters took precedence and, up front, I don’t think anything’s going to really come of it. However, after a brief, yet heated, exchange over the weekend with family on the topic, I feel compelled to speak out.

I’m going to keep this as short and to the point as possible. Here’s my reaction to the Trump verdict:

Trump Was Always Going To Be Found Guilty

But he would’ve never been tried had he not become president.

Anyone who thinks this case was about the rule of law is lying to themselves. Full-stop. The only way his 34 convictions for “falsifying business records” means anything at all is if you truly believe Trump was being judged for the crimes he committed. But we all know, if not for a fact, then certainly by intuition, that he would’ve never been tried had he not ran and become president.

Yes, Virginia, this was a political prosecution. No amount of shrieking “But he was found guilty!” is going to change that. If Trump is truly a flagrant criminal, they clearly had years and years to go after him, but never did. Apparently, they didn’t see any need to do so, until, one day, Trump decided to run for president and win the 2016 election. The reality is, there are only two crimes the Regime truly regards as beyond the pale: blasphemy and standing up to the bully that is the managerial state. Trump was certainly guilty of both.

Did you know the District Attorney who prosecuted Trump was Alvin Bragg? If his name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the same DA who’s now prosecuting Daniel Penny for the death of career criminal Jordan Neely on a New York City Subway. The former was attempting to subdue the latter who was terrorizing and threatening passengers. Bragg is also notorious for taking it easy on criminals, releasing them regardless of the severity of the crime, and contributing to growing disorder in New York.

Is this someone you think is trustworthy?

Over at The Organic Prepper, a reader commentating on the case summarized the circumstances surrounding the prosecution of Trump (subject to fact-checking):

– The [George] Soros funded DA elevated a misdemeanor to a felony despite lowering 60% of all felonies for actual criminals in his jurisdiction

– The lead prosecutor resigned his position as the 3rd highest ranking member of Biden’s DOJ to join Alvin Bragg’s team going after Trump.

– The judge donated to Joe Biden and has a daughter who raised millions of dollars for Democrats off the Trump prosecutions

– The other lead prosecutor also donated to Joe Biden

– The lead witness that the whole case relies on is a convicted perjurer and serial liar who admitted during the trial to stealing money from the Trump organization

– The judge put a gag order on Donald Trump for pointing out the political conflicts of interest of the people prosecuting him

– The “crime” relies on the idea that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels to conceal another crime, which is not mentioned in the indictment.

– The judge barred Trump’s defense from explaining to jury that no campaign finance violation occurred but allowed prosecutors to assert as fact in their closing that there was.

– The judge cleared out the court room when Michael Cohen’s former attorney was exonerating Trump but allowed the prosecution to bring in Stormy Daniels to talk about whether or not Trump used a condom.

– The judge barred a former FEC commissioner from testifying that Donald Trump did nothing wrong.

– The judge is allowing the jury to not have to reach a unanimous verdict on the underlying, unnamed crime Trump committed.

I’m interested to see if anyone can refute any of these points. Regardless, it’s true that the case against Trump is one without virtually any precedent. Associating the falsification of business records with campaign finance violations is really how this case could even be built against Trump. Which in turn reveals what this whole thing is all about.

This is an attempt to eliminate political opposition. I don’t know how good Trump’s chances in November really are (I think they’re worse than his supporters believe), but he’s still the biggest threat to President Joe Biden’s re-election prospects. Given how poorly Biden’s presidency has gone, reflected on opinion polling, taking the direct challenger off the table would certainly increase his re-election prospects.

Or would it? Going to prison doesn’t stop Trump from continuing to run for president, aside from the fact he can’t campaign. But that probably won’t stop his most fervent supporters from voting for him. I find it highly unlikely the conviction will change the minds of many about Trump, for better or for worse. I don’t see this as a dagger in the heart of Trump’s re-election prospects, nor do I see this as a boost. Both sides are engaging in some tremendous amounts of wishful thinking concerning the outcome of this case.

Trump Is A Problematic Figure

But he isn’t the problem. He never was.

The popular narrative on Trump was that he was basically a party-crasher, someone who showed up, like Hitler, to ruin everyone’s good time. This narrative is false, a refuge of the history-illiterate

Nobody needs to like Trump (nor Hitler, for that matter). I personally regard him as a deeply unserious figure, a stand-up comedian/professional wrestling personality who became president in an extraordinary turn of events. The Right’s adulation of Trump is highly concerning to me, as it demonstrates a startling detachment from reality. I also find his personal conduct troublesome, particularly his insistence on total fidelity from others, while routinely throwing even his most loyal supporters under the bus.

None of this changes the fact the country has been in serious trouble for some time and that the people really in charge of it have been leading us towards the cliff for a long time. I realize memories are short, but no, not everything was fine before 2016. Trump was just the first person who wasn’t afraid to take the leap and say that America is in danger and he said it in such a way that made it impossible to ignore. Maybe he spoke a little too early, maybe he’s just a charlatan seizing on an opportunity, but eventually, someone would’ve had to say it. There’s never a good time to share bad news, nor does anyone ever like the bearer of bad news.

Does this mean he was right about everything? No, but what politician has ever been right about everything? What Trump’s worst critics fail to explain is why he should be held to a much higher, utterly impossible standard of conduct while we clearly don’t care to hold the current president or any other to the same standard. Yes, Trump lies. He does so carelessly. But how’s that any worse than Biden’s slicker, more sophisticated lies (typically by omission)? Do you really think being a “better” liar makes you a better person? If so, that says more about the corruption of your own personal morality than Trump’s.

Trump was a necessary president. We needed someone to shatter the lies we’ve been forced to swallow about the country, about the world we live in. And I find the hatred of him bizarre in a sense, because he really is the gift that keeps on giving for the Left. He’s the one figure they can project all their failures and inadequacies onto. That’s the essence of the animus they harbor towards him and his supporters: nobody likes the person who exposes the truth about them, especially when that person happens to be of marginal personal character like Trump. But his personal failings don’t make him wrong. They just make him less credible.

Hate Trump if you need to. Just never confuse him with being the cause of our ills.

No, Presidents Aren’t Above The Law

But we all know nobody else will be held responsible the way Trump was.

What bothers me most about the prosecution of Trump is that we’ve never held a president to account for anything in generations. Until now, that is, and wasn’t even related to anything Trump did while occupying the White House.

Yes, we impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 and Trump was impeached twice. However, impeachments are political indictments. How many times has a president been charged and convicted of a crime, prior to Trump? Are we really to believe every single president not named “Trump” were squeaky clean, moral exemplars? There’s plenty of evidence out there of just how dirty the hands of our presidents can be, to say nothing of politicians in general. If we’re really concerned about the moral integrity of our leaders, why has that concern been hyper-focused on Trump and nobody else? Why’d it take Trump for us to start holding presidents legally accountable? And are we going to continue holding presidents accountable? Or only those who aren’t Regime-endorsed?

Trump is probably guilty of the crimes he was convicted of. I’m not interested in debating the merits of the case because it’s of no real relevance. The falisfying business records charge is just an excuse; his real crime is that he is a major threat to the Regime, or at least seen as one. They needed a reason to take him out of play and they found one. Meanwhile, no president has been held to account for failures in war, looting the treasury, failing to maintain domestic order, allowing millions of illegal migrants to flood the country, casually threatening the American people, etc. These are the real crimes a president can commit, yet incorrect classification of hush money payments to a porn star is the red line? Don’t make me laugh.

Really - has any president not named “Trump” paid any real personal price for their failures? George W. Bush went on to be known as a painter and has been re-branded as a “decent man,” though I can clearly recall him being referred to as “Hitler” back in the day. Barack Obama failed to end our wars and routinely contributed to the undermining of civic order in the country. Perhaps these aren’t “real” crimes, but again - where exactly is the line drawn?

Make up your minds: either we hold them all accountable and find crimes they’ve committed, or we don’t. Either we put them all under the microscope or fabricate crimes the way we did with Trump, or we don’t. Don’t talk about the importance of accountability when it’s clear they’re going after an individual, not the office. It was always the plan to sacrifice one to shore up the power of the managerial state.

Still not convinced? Consider that Hillary Clinton engaged in a practice similar to what Trump was convicted over:

Source

Also consider the Steele dossier is hardly an authoritative document, its credibility highly questionable, and its significance since downplayed by the media and officials. Clinton sure paid a lot for nothing, didn’t she? Anyway, the point is that I doubt Clinton is ever going to be raked over the coals for this the way Trump was. If you don’t see the double-standard, there’s no hope for you.

Then there’s this unbelievable bit from Alex Soros, son of George Soros:

Source

As someone pointed out, however:

Source

This is all about the old Marxist principle of “Who? Whom?” There’s not much more to it.

Michael Shellenberger, former candidate for California governor and Trump critic, argued that the Regime is doing far worse to undermine the republic than Trump has:

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential contender nine years ago, America’s most esteemed scholars and journalists have argued that he was violating democratic norms. Trump, they said, was ignoring the stabilizing, unwritten rules and values of American politics. This was evident in his vulgar language, vilification of immigrants, criticisms of the press, lack of cooperation with the intelligence community, and refusal to accept the 2020 election results.

But the Democrats’ relentless effort to imprison Trump has undermined the rule of law, faith in the criminal justice system, and democratic norms more than anything Trump has ever done.

According to multiple credible sources, President Barack Obama’s Director of the CIA, in the summer of 2016, illegally mobilized foreign spy agencies to target 26 Trump advisors to claim, falsely, that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin controlled Trump.

Then, in January 2017, after Trump had been elected but before he took office, the U.S. Intelligence Community falsely claimed that Putin had favored the election of Trump when, in reality, the intelligence showed that Putin favored Hillary Clinton.

After taking office, current and former US government intelligence operatives and Democrats falsely claimed that Russian disinformation on social media had resulted in Trump’s election and worked with the Department of Homeland Security to censor social media platforms.

And:

The recent felony conviction of Trump for falsifying business records relies on the idea that he misclassified campaign payments. Democrats say, “Nobody is above the law,” which is true. But Democrats are wrong to ignore the fact that prosecutors are constantly making choices about whether to pursue certain cases over others. Indeed, Hillary Clinton was found to have mislabeled payments related to the Steele dossier during her 2016 campaign, and she was never prosecuted. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) merely fined Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC)) for this misconduct.

In fact, everything about New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s recent conviction of Trump is abnormal. For starters, Bragg campaigned on the promise to prosecute Trump. He turned the misdemeanor of falsifying business records into a felony by tying it to election interference. The case was so weak that both the Department of Justice and the former DA refused to prosecute it.

The judge in the case donated to Biden and his daughter is the president of a Democratic Party fundraising firm whose clients include Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the Russiagate hoax. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to agree on what crime Trump intended to commit by falsifying records.

The case confused even legal experts. “At the start of closing arguments,” wrote legal scholar Jonathan Turley, “most honest observers were still wondering what the prosecutors were alleging as to the crime that Trump was allegedly concealing with the falsification of business records.”

Even CNN’s top legal scholar, Elie Honig, who is also a former colleague of Bragg, said the trial violated norms. “Prosecutors Got Trump But They Contorted the Law,” explained Honig in New York Magazine. “The charges against Trump are obscure and nearly entirely unprecedented,” he said. “In fact, no state prosecutor— in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime against anyone for anything. None. Ever.”

Shellenberger says a lot more. Anyone who still thinks this is about punishing wrongdoing has a lot of growing up to do. This isn’t the system operating as we were taught it does.

We’re Headed Towards Autocracy

But it’ll be a struggle between autocrats who increase the power of the state versus those who remove power from the state.

As I said earlier, this is all about eliminating Trump as political opposition. And the next time someone stands up to the Regime so bluntly as he did, mean tweets or not, you can bet they’ll be given the same treatment. Every administration wants to maximize power for itself. But it’s a whole different ballgame to make it impossible for effective political opposition to exist in a so-called “democracy.”

Just as someone like Trump doesn’t show up when times are good, careless lies and “dehumanizing” rhetoric don’t make a dictator. What makes a dictator is the abuse of power and the elimination of political opposition. This means Biden, not Trump, is the real dictator. He may be just a proto-dictator, but Biden is definitely the beginning of a long line of increasingly autocratic leaders. The reality is, this is hardly a constitutional republican order we’re living under and our politicians at all levels of governance are acting with virtual impunity.

Biden recently bragged about canceling student debt in defiance of the Supreme Court:

Source

Then, after once claiming he had no authority to close the border, he suddenly issues an executive order to do just that:

Forget how much you love or hate Biden or Trump: if you see a politician behaving like this, what’s your impression of them? Are they answering the will of the people? Or are they just cynical players, doing whatever it takes to hold onto power?

Certainly, politics is ultimately a cynical game and the objective of any politician is to retain power. However, don’t confuse this with democracy. It’s not. America was never meant to be a democracy, but that’s not the point, either. What we see today isn’t what the Founders intended. They definitely never intended for someone like Biden to act in defiance of the Supreme Court, against the best interest of the American people, while calling the charade “democracy.”

Perhaps this is all part of the evolution of a state. As far back as circa 375 BC, Plato was arguing in Republic that tyranny is the evolutional end point of a state. What precedes tyranny? Democracy. Likewise, German sociologist Max Weber argued over 100 years ago that all democracies eventually transform into autocracies. Why this is is somewhat beyond the scope of this piece, but it suffices to say that it’s impossible to satisfy the will of hundreds of millions of people. At this point, it’s impossible for America to even be a democracy, because the managerial state has become so powerful, it’s interest - self-preservation - has diverged from its supposed purpose, which is to implement the will of the American people. More than ever, the state and the citizenry have an adversarial relationship, one that’ll become more dysfunctional and hostile in the coming years.

When people like Biden talk about “protecting democracy,” what they really mean is increasing the power of the managerial state. But two can play that game. We’re entering a period where the Regime will have virtually no political opposition, making America a de facto single-party authoritarian state under leftist control. However, this also means a day will come when the Left can no longer blame its troubles on the Right nor Trump.

When that day comes, the opening for a right-wing autocrat will become available. The struggle between Left and Right won’t be over who gets to be tyrant, however. It’ll instead be a struggle over how much power the managerial state gets to have. The Left will attempt to maximize the managerial state’s power for its own designs, while the Right will attempt to take power away from the managerial state. One of the reasons the Left, the media, and scholars constantly beat the drum about “fascism” coming to the U.S. is to legitimize their own pursuit of total power, since the Right’s criticism of the Left is that they hold too much power.

The one dictator Anglo-Saxon civilization produced, Oliver Cromwell, took power away from an autocrat and gave it to the parliament, with the monarchy abolished for a time. Imagine that: a dictator made his people more, not less free! Not only is dictatorship of the type seen in Nazi Germany or even in the communist Eastern Bloc totally alien to Anglo-Saxon civilization, it’s not the Right taking the first attempt at transforming the U.S. into one. It’s the Left and has always been the Left. If authoritarianism means trying to take power away from the government, then is authoritarianism really a bad thing?

Bottom line: if the Left wants to turn politics into a Machiavellian, zero-sum game, both sides can play that game. I’ve heard Trump compared to Gaius Marius and Sulla of Ancient Rome; I don’t know Roman history well enough to comment on the comparison. However, I do know Marius and Sulla were later proceeded by Caesar, who was then proceeded by Augustus. Trump isn’t the right-wing dictator of the Regime’s fever dreams, but that man, along with the more transformational figure, may very well be on the way.

One day, the Regime may wish they just left well enough alone.

But… But… TRUMP!!!

What are your thoughts on Trump’s conviction? Is it on the level, or is it the Regime flexing its muscles? Do you think it’ll have any impact on the outcome of the elections? Do you think we’ll see any other government official held accountable the way Trump has been? What are the long-term ramifications of this verdict?

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!