As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden's uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found "guilty on all counts" - a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse.
Just twenty-four hours ago, my friend John Hinderaker was writing:
Experience has given me a lot of faith in the basic fairness of juries.
Late yesterday, he remembered - oh, yeah, I've been here before:
It is very much like the lawsuit that Michael Mann brought against Mark Steyn and others, of which I observed some of the latter stages. The defendants were properly happy about how the trial had gone, but the facts didn't matter. The Democrats had chosen the right venue, Washington, D.C., and a biased jury found for Mann. Same thing here.
John Hinderaker is, as I have written, the soul of moderation, and no rah-rah Trumpy cheerleader. But, when the ruling party criminalises opposition and thus makes "normal" politics impossible, you got no choice:
What to do now? First, it is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president. The Democrats cannot be allowed to get away with this effort to turn America into a banana republic.
The first part is correct. The second is not. As I've been saying for months now, a "banana republic" is by definition an irrelevant peripheral basket-case on the fringe of the map: yes, yes, I know, if you're watching that pier break apart off Gaza and US navy vessels wash up on Israeli beaches, what's left of America may increasingly seem like that, but it is still in theory "the leader of the free world". The expression "banana republic" was coined for Guatemala and Honduras; it's a problem of an entirely different scale when a great power does it, and it doesn't portend anything good about where the world's headed. A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it's prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you'd want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war.
True, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation". But not this much.
So, just to extend Mr Hinderaker's conclusion, right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you're just part of the problem. Here, for example, is all too typical wanker Republican senate candidate Larry Hogan:
Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation...
— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) May 30, 2024
I loathe the likes of Hogan far more than I loathe Alvin Bragg: The latter campaigned for office on a promise to get Trump, and delivered to his voters. The former, in pretending that there is anything "great" about this that should command our "respect", is making evil and corruption respectable and bipartisan.
Oh, and I see that "former federal prosecutor" William Otis has just filed a column headlined "Why a Trump Conviction Will Be Reversed". (Also "Leader McConnell", whom I feel we don't talk about enough, briefly unfroze to say he "expects" the conviction to be overturned.) As to Mr Otis's credibility in such matters, one notes he estimated the chances of guilty-on-all-counts at "about five per cent".
Be that as it may, his legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it's a land of men: whether for the forty-fifth president or a "niche Canadian", we're in basic "Who? Whom?" territory, as the Leninists would say. After my own experience of both the New York and Washington appellate benches, I would rate the chances of Trump getting this reversed at the state level as way lower than Mr Otis's five per cent. It's the same in my own case: all involved know the DC Court of Appeals is merely an interlude in order to get it wafted up to the US Supreme Court. Likewise with Trump. So we're betting the farm on John Roberts and that rock-ribbed six-three "conservative" majority on which Republicans have expended so much energy to the exclusion of every other societal lever. And, even were they minded to intervene, as I remarked on-air to Tucker a fortnight before the last so-called election, "A judges' republic is a contradiction in terms."
So Mr Otis's legal arguments have very little real-world meaning in terms of November's exercise in republican self-government. Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. So, for viewers of English courtroom dramas on PBS, there's none of the traditional "Take him down!", with the guilty party being led down the steps ten minutes after the verdict to be driven away to begin his sentence. Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February, but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.
July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.
Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.
In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn't do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. If you don't get that, go over to Larry Hogan's pad and start cooing over your "respect" for "the rule of law".
How will the people react to whatever happens on July 11th? Riots in Milwaukee? One can't help noticing that, since the brutal January 6th prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law and then bulked up with "terrorism" charges by DC judges just as bad as this New York guy, there is little appetite for what Orwell called "turbulence".
But, either way, Democrats figure that, however Trump supporters react, they can make this work for them ...and awful pathetic hollow husks such as Larry Hogan will be happy to string along.
So, right now, they're making their plans for July 11th. Is anyone on the other side?
I will add one final thought born of my own experience. I am about to begin my thirteenth year in the foetid septic tank of the District of Columbia courts. My finances are ruined, and so is my constitution. By the latter, I mean my health, not the United States Constitution, which is already dead. By contrast, I'm just about hanging on, although I very much doubt I will live long enough to be vindicated at the Supreme Court. Which is bad news for my heirs and relicts. As one of the lawyers taunted me last year, "This doesn't end with your death."
I'm sad about that, and would much prefer to devote the time that remains to playing music and enjoying the sunsets. I am worn out, and bitter about the books I'll never get to write because of the way American litigation has consumed what should have been my most productive years. I have a theological objection to suicide, but would not be averse to dying in my sleep.
And that's just with two rinky-dink cases on the go.
Trump, on the other hand, is barraged at all turns - here, there, state, federal, civil, criminal. He has been subjected to all manner of indignities - such as, just this week, having to sit in the crappy courtroom while the jury deliberates, which Judge Irving did not force me to do in DC.
Trump is (or was) a mega-rich American and he has the habits of the mega-rich, and they are rarely attractive in close-up. Personally, I would have no desire to find myself in a room with Stormy Daniels, and I cannot imagine that whatever transpired was other than mechanical and perfunctory and instantly forgettable. On Fox, at the height of his presidency, Greg Gutfeld used to say, "Trump banged a porn star and we got world peace." He was making explicit the trade-off that large parts of the GOP coalition had made in 2015 and 2016: yes, he's a flawed man, but the republic is so crapped out that a house-trained Republican like Jeb Bush or Larry Hogan isn't going to cut it.
Yet days such as yesterday have turned Trump into something that the Gutfeld formulation never could: it has made him noble and heroic.
The mega-rich guy from Mar-a-Lago and Miss Universe and Trump Tower and The Apprentice decided to dedicate his final years to doing something for all those forgotten men in towns no one knows where all the factories got shipped to China and replaced by meth labs. And in return the worthless US establishment - the guys who took America's post-war dominance and gave it away to the Politburo in return for "ten per cent for the big guy" - set about destroying him: a half-billion appeal bond in New York, an eviction from the ballot in Maine, a lawyer forced to cop a plea and turn state's evidence in Georgia...
As I said, I've got just two lousy cases, and I'm ruined by it - because utter ruination is the difference between the American legal system and the rest of the west. I have no idea how Trump withstands the assault - a Gulliver besieged by litigious Lilliputians on all sides.
Much of the United States - certainly the bits that matter - is now institutionally evil, and I am not sure that evil can be reversed, whether we're talking about the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls or the sacrifice of a generation of a distant nation's men in the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war. On America's watch, the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast - which is all anyone will remember about it.
And yet any alternative to the Uniparty consensus is not to be permitted, and must be hunted down and crushed. There is no future in the post-constitutional polity the Democrats are constructing. "Decline" is a choice - in the Austrian or Portuguese sense. But that's not in the offing here: America's death will be bloodier and more convulsive than anything seen in post-imperial Europe. Check back with me in ten years, and see who's right.
For the moment, the Dems are, as always, three steps ahead. A lot can happen between now and July 11th, and much of it is undoubtedly already underway.
So, as John Hinderaker says:
It is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president.
Because an act of explicit political hygiene is the bare minimum necessary.
~Programming note: The verdict will crowd out all other news today, so tonight's new Tale for Our Time will be postponed until a point when it is less likely to get lost in the kangaroo kourt koverage.
However, do join me tomorrow, Saturday, for a musical preview of next week's D-Day observances on Serenade Radio. The show starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
