President Felon
Given my belief that Donald Trump is the most dangerous cult leader on Earth, I might be expected to be rejoicing over yesterday’s verdict—which made him the first former president to also be a convicted felon.
But I’m not rejoicing.
This trial amply revealed the venality and squalor of Trump‘s world, but I’m not sure it demonstrated his culpability for crimes that many Americans care about. Of all the cases brought against him, this one always appeared to be the most politically motivated. While any conviction of a corrupt former president might be a triumph for the rule of law, this one seems bound to further divide our country.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see Donald Trump go to prison. One could easily argue that no person in living memory has done more harm to our democracy. The fact that he became president, and may yet do so again, has made the prospect of American decline seem almost inevitable.
But as David Frum once observed, the problem with Trump is that the worst things he does aren’t necessarily illegal. While in the Oval Office, the man extolled our enemies and disparaged our most important institutions. And while campaigning for re-election, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Leaving aside his desperate attempt to hold onto power once he had lost it (which may yet produce further felony convictions), we don’t appear to have the necessary laws in place to hold him accountable for all the chaos he caused. Illegal or not, the real “Trump derangement syndrome” is to imagine that Trump’s malignantly selfish behavior is remotely acceptable in a president.
My concern now is that if Trump loses in November, we will once again find ourselves in a country where half the population feels that a presidential election has been rigged—this time by an unfair prosecution and a spurious conviction.
This is a social experiment that we shouldn’t have been so eager to run.
Unfortunately for those who hate Trump at a human level -- and I count myself among them -- he exists at a time when there are equally existentially concerning forces on "the other side", and he represents perhaps the only instrument for *even former democrats* recently alienated by their own party to send a message to their former party that they're off the reservation.
If you want to eliminate trumps power, eliminate his appeal.
Abandon wokeism.
Abandon the culture of victimhood and the "suffrage Olympics".
Abandon identity politics.
Return to sober science.
Return to reason.
Return to rationality.
Return to meritocracy and the primacy of ideas, themselves, rather than an obsession over the racial and other immutable qualities of thinkers and speakers.
Stop telling us these things are inventions of the white patriarchy just so you can avoid rising to the epistemological standard they require.
Then you may reclaim the "middle", who otherwise are likely to vote for trump in this election simply in order to serve the left a middle finger.
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts Sam on why America seems unable to produce a leader that embodies the principles and moral conviction that built the country into what it is today. It seems too simplistic to blame this mostly on social media.