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Commentary: The Fifth Estate
Trump wants you to know he's a felon
As you have no doubt heard by now, former President Donald Trump is a convicted felon. A jury of 12 New Yorkers listened to weeks of testimony and decided, unanimously, that he falsified business records to cover up an adulterous interlude with a porn star, news of which may have derailed his 2016 campaign mere weeks before the November 5, 2016 election.
It’s worth mentioning that his wife Melania, at the time of this interlude, was at home with their 4-month-old baby, Barron. When the hush money payments in question were in progress, Trump’s campaign was reeling, owing to the release of an audiotape that captured him bragging about grabbing women by the genitals.
Of course, Trump went on to lose the popular vote, but win the election (with an assist from Vladimir Putin). He then became the first president in American history to be impeached twice: once for attempting to extort the leader of Ukraine, the second time for fomenting a violent insurrection to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. And now, in addition to being the only U.S. president ever indicted or convicted of a crime, he faces three more criminal indictments, two stemming from his failed coup and a third from his theft of classified documents. It’s hard to keep it all straight.
Most Americans recognize Trump’s essential criminality. And yet the base voters of the Republican Party, and therefore the rest of the GOP, just can’t quit him. They love that Trump continues to flout the law. His shamelessness energizes them. Lawlessness is his brand. Why lament his arrests when you can put his mugshot on a t-shirt and trigger some snowflakes?
Soon enough, the media hubbub about this latest degradation will die down, as it always does. But Trump himself won’t let us forget that he’s a felon.
On the contrary: His conviction will become a centerpiece of his campaign. And it will further radicalize him, and the party he controls, because he will now have a new enemy. Forget Biden and the Democrats. Forget the immigrants he wants to round up en masse. His target will be the rule of law itself.
In the weeks and months to come, you can count on him to ramp up his attacks on judges, prosecutors, the very concept of a trial by jury. His allies and enablers will ape his rhetoric and any Republican who urges Americans to trust the justice system will be swiftly purged.
The hypocrisy is especially Orwellian among the GOP’s law-and-order candidates, who have been left to insist, however absurdly, that a man granted his day in court, and duly convicted by a jury of his peers, is a “political prisoner”— the same term applied to the January 6 insurrectionists who beat cops with metal flagpoles and terrorized Congress.
Trump will be campaigning for a fundamental shift away from the rule of law that just held him accountable, and toward a “rule of men"
To be clear: Trump will be campaigning for a fundamental shift away from the rule of law that just held him accountable, and toward a “rule of men,” in which guilt or innocence is determined by an authoritarian leader.
This is precisely what’s happened in Putin’s Russia, and European countries such as Hungary, whose dictator, Viktor Orbán, is revered by conservatives.
Trump’s rhetoric will continue to be paranoid, self-victimizing and violent. And he will start to sound more like Adolf Hitler — another demagogue who rose to power only after a failed coup—than Ronald Reagan. Just as happened in the Germany of the 1930s, Republicans who felt they could control Trump’s authoritarian impulses will find themselves engulfed by them.
Mainstream media outlets will speculate as to how Trump’s conviction will play among the undecided voters in a few swing states, who, thanks to the perversity of our presidential electoral system, will likely decide the fate of our country.
But that’s the wrong question to ask, in my view.
The question citizens of good faith should be asking right now is this: What am prepared to do, over the next five months, to preserve democracy and rule of law? How can I convert my understandable anguish into meaningful political action?
If we simply sit back and watch in horror as an angry felon assaults democracy, future generations will be right to ask: Didn’t you see this coming?
