When the Elites Declare War

“Show trials, we had thought, were totalitarian relics, a blunt tool wielded by dictators like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in order to show people, quite literally, what would happen to those who dared to defy the regime. And here it was, happening in 2024, in America.”

We still entertained the illusion. Four absurd criminal prosecutions had all been brought against former President Donald Trump within a short span by Democratic-operative prosecutors at a time when it was already likely that he would be the sitting United States President’s chief challenger in the upcoming election. A civil lawsuit for defamation barred by the statute of limitations had already been permitted to go forward against President Trump based on stale—and, therefore, very difficult to rebut—accusations of rape by E. Jean Carroll when New York temporarily suspended that statute of limitations to permit such lawsuits to be filed. The lawsuit predictably resulted in many millions in damages. Another civil fraud lawsuit had already been brought by the Trump-hating activist New York Attorney General Letitia James, charging a bizarre victimless financial crime steered toward its inexorable outcome by a Trump-hating judge and yielding a $355 million verdict against the Trump Organization. President Trump, in the meantime, had become the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President.

In the midst of election season, with a stumbling, fumbling person occupying the most powerful office in the world and lagging behind in all of the relevant polls, the first and silliest of the four criminal prosecutions—based on an invented crime hardly anyone could explain—was set to go forward in New York. The judge was a donor to President Joe Biden. His daughter was a prominent activist and donor to President Biden, with big clients of hers having raised nearly $100 million in campaign donations by using the New York case in solicitation emails. The Manhattan jury pool was overwhelmingly Democratic. The judge was doing everything in his power to ensure a guilty verdict: needlessly permitting purely inflammatory testimony by porn star Stormy Daniels to describe her purported sexual encounter with President Trump, preventing the defendant from having an expert witness testify about the substance of the arcane campaign finance laws the State was trying to enforce, severely restricting another defense witness’s testimony and then lashing out in an unseemly screaming fit and threatening contempt when the witness’s consternation at the court’s rulings called forth the judge’s wounded machismo and, finally, instructing the jury that so long as they find that President Trump falsified business records, they did not have to agree on what alleged predicate crime he was hoping to cover up in the process. The jury was sent off to deliberate.

And yet, though we saw all the ready-to-fall dominoes being neatly lined up in their places by the powers that be, we still entertained the illusion, the fleeting hope that this was not really happening, that political passions would be put aside, that cooler heads would prevail, that these 12 anonymous New Yorkers would rise up to this moment of impending national crisis to play the hero’s role and realize that the cheap thrill of punishing a political adversary was not worth plunging the nation into the maelstrom all-but-certain to be sent spinning as a consequence of a guilty verdict. But on the afternoon of May 30, 2024, our fleeting hopes were dashed; the final domino fell: The guilty verdict was proclaimed throughout the land.