When he's not fetishizing fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter – “a wonderful man” – Donald Trump gushes over gangster Al Capone.
“It was very hard, wasn't it?” Trump said about the murderous pimp smuggler and drug dealer. “If you looked at it the wrong way, it would blow your brains out.”
Daydreaming, however twisted, is appropriate.
Although Capone left a bloodthirsty trail wider and wider than the Windy City, the Chicago mobster landed behind bars only after being convicted of tax evasion, undoubtedly the least of his crimes.
The same goes for Trump's conviction in New York for falsifying business records: “just pieces of paper,” in the words of his frustrated defense attorney.
It's possible, amid all the disgust and disgust—too much information about Trump sleeping with Stormy Daniels, mocking accounts of the defendant's courtroom naps—to lose sight of the irregularities at the heart of the case.
Trump paid $130,000 to conceal his extramarital affair with Daniels, knowing that the facts would most likely cost him the 2016 presidential election if voters found out. (His wife, Melania, was at home with her newborn when Trump abandoned her.)
It's not the most egregious of Trump's countless crimes: stealing highly classified documents from the White House; trying to pressure Georgia's secretary of state to steal enough votes to overturn Trump's loss; provoke a deadly mob at the Capitol to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.
But thanks to a Florida judge evidently in Trump's pocket, a Georgia prosecutor's blunder and a docile U.S. Supreme Court, none of the former president's other criminal cases are likely to reach the jury in time for a verdict. before November 5th.
Therefore, Trump's conviction of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury is nonetheless an important and welcome political marker.
Imperfect justice. But justice anyway.
The response of many of Trump's fellow Republicans was no less sad or pathetic for its complete predictability.
Lining up while kneeling, a parade of vice presidential hopefuls (Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik among them) denounced the verdict as a cosmic miscarriage of justice.
When Larry Hogan, former Republican governor of Maryland and candidate for the United States Senate, called on Americans to “respect the verdict and the legal process” (a statement that is not only reasonable and respectful but a kind of political repetition), the response Trump World was saying.
“You just finished your campaign,” responded the consigliere, that is, Trump's main campaign strategist.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Trump's conviction marked “a shameful day in American history,” which certainly puts things like the Dred Scott decision and the Wounded Knee massacre into perspective.
Like many, including the humiliated Rubio, Scott and Stefanik, Johnson was once a critic of Trump. Now Johnson resolutely embraces it, whiplash being a common condition in today's Republican Party.
Trump is not just the Republican nominee-in-waiting, Johnson said at a weekend fundraiser in Peoria, Illinois, “but a symbol of someone who is willing to fight…corruption, the deep state and everything else”. .”
Republicans have long opposed the administration and its perceived overreach, but the strategy has reached new heights in recent years. The Party of Lincoln, which appealed to the better angels of our nature, has become the Party of Trump, which panders to the most basic instincts of his aggrieved followers.
If elevation is what you want, take an elevator.
The country needs a strong, vibrant and serious Republican Party to compete against the Democratic Party and keep it in check. A see-no-evil cult of personality dedicated to the presidential restoration of a vengeance-minded, crooked criminal is simply not enough.
The party and the country need to purge Trump once and for all, and the only way to do that is a resounding and unequivocal defeat at the polls.
Again.
Trump has been a loser in three consecutive elections starting in 2018. Even the most zombified Republican politician will eventually realize that the party needs to move on.
More broadly, the November election amounts to a test of character. Not Trump's. It's about the character of our country.
In 2016, many voters chose to overlook Trump's serial bankruptcies, his mendacity, his extravagant malice, and his complete lack of qualifications, assuming that he would “pivot”—to use a fashionable term at the time—and become more sober and responsible once he became president.
Eight years later—after two impeachments, four criminal indictments, two defamation verdicts, a civil conviction for corporate fraud, a judge's finding that Trump committed sexual assault, and now his felony convictions—there is no doubt about the fundamental rot festering in Trump's house. center.
Will voters return him to the White House? And what does that say about America's values, let alone the country's judgment, if so?
Every four years, a candidate from one party or another (whoever is out of power in the White House at the time) describes the upcoming election as the most important of our lifetimes.
It's such an old cliché that it has wrinkles on top of wrinkles.
But this time it turns out to be true.
