Friday's postcard, and Donald Trump's 35th felony

May 31, 2024

The “Kissing Camels” formation in Paleozoic limestone at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO

Come what may, it’s hard to overlook the drama delivered by the historic verdict of a Manhattan jury, yesterday, in the waning minutes of Thursday afternoon. No sooner had the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, signaled he was ready to excuse the 12 jurors for the day when a note arrived with the news the jury had reached its verdict. Guilty on all 34 counts, all felonies. It was stunning.

Maybe Gotham and American democracy won’t need Batman after all.

Hours earlier I’d been listening to a recording of the gifted documentarian, Ken Burns, as he gave a predictably eloquent commencement address at Brandeis University a few days ago. Burns has a talent for spinning gold out of American rust—acknowledging the pain and horror of our history while delivering stories that endeavor to remind us that, through it all, we crawl and sometimes leap toward a better union. When I think of Burns’s work, I hear the poetry of historian David McCullough’s narration against Jay Ungar’s spare and wistful composition, Ashokan Farewell—sprigs of hope rising from blood-soaked ground.

With the rise of Trumpism, that’s all in doubt now. And who better to deliver the news than Ken Burns? He borrowed from the Old Testament, Mark Twain, Lincoln, I.F. Stone, James Baldwin, and philosopher Mercy Otis Warren. And then he said this:

There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, "The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed." The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, "a bigger delusion", James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.

I agree. We keep looking for heroes but we don’t find many. Witness former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley who (finally) cleared her throat in February to denounce Trump as “unhinged,” only to announce, last week she would vote for Trump in November.

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That said it’s important to recognize the resolve and skill of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, his prosecutors, and the poise and presence of Judge Merchan—all of whom faced, and will likely continue to absorb—threats of harm from outraged Trump supporters.

The Trump regime does seem to roll with oversized characters right out of a Batman movie—Rudy Giuliani, Elon Musk, Matt Goetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Alex Jones, J.D. Vance, etc. The myth is they’re all fighting a deep state that is out to materially and culturally dispossess ordinary Americans, and that the legal trouble confronting Trump is just part of a broad conspiracy to keep him from a return to the White House.

Trump pushes this self-serving fiction constantly at his rallies and on-line. And it works, or at least it has worked well enough for him to have clobbered Haley in the Republican primaries. It’s a repulsive lie—the evidence from Trump’s presidency is he was using his power to try to corrupt the Justice Department: among other purposes, to turn it into an instrument that would validate the bogus accusations of voter fraud that he and his allies use to continue to try to discredit the 2020 election that removed him from the White House.

Metaphorically, at least, this is Trump’s 35th felony—not just the baseless accusations that all of the nation’s institutions who resist him are corrupt, but the power he wields to adorn the Republican Party in the fabric of toxic fictions.

It has been one thing to have the Manhattan courtroom be something of a casting call for prospective Trump running mates. It was comical, and provided plenty of fodder for late night comedy. But there was also Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and the nominal leader of one of the three branches of government showing up to simply mouth the Trump toxic talking points. Here’s part of what Johnson said just outside the Manhattan courthouse in mid-May: ““These are politically motivated trials and they are a disgrace.”

Johnson essentially repeated that, yesterday, minutes after the jury’s verdict claiming, without evidence, that the trial was a “purely political exercise, not a legal one.” To which he added: "The American people see this as lawfare, and they know it is wrong -- and dangerous.”

He then predicted Trump would reverse the verdict on appeal.

There is a clear historic contrast here, with Republicans and former President Richard Nixon, where Republican leaders compelled Nixon’s resignation and his permanent departure. Yesterday, they re-financed their fate with Donald Trump.

In the Manhattan case—the so-called “Stormy Daniels” trial that was actually rooted in fraudulent records used to conceal hush money payments for political purposes—Trump conspicuously chose not to testify in his own defense after telling reporters he would. To no surprise, he denounced the verdict as “a disgrace” adding “(t)his was a rigged decision right from day one with a conflicted judge who should never have been allowed to try this case, never. And we will fight for our Constitution. This is long from over.”

It may take a while to tell if yesterday’s verdict is a turning point, not just in the Trump saga but as a window into the underlying health of American politics, media and governnance. Trump’s winning strategy, thus far, has been to double down at each turn. It is the “head I win, tails you lose” approach to elections where the only legitimate outcome—for him and the MAGA-dominated Republicans—is when the votes add up to a Republican victory.

And, now, the same perverse ruse goes for the courts—where the only legitimate decisions are those that vindicate Trump and the policies (such as they are) that he endorses. It’s either a Trump victory, or someone else’s treason.

—tjc