The Great Anti-Climax
Why I Can't Get That Excited About Trump's Indictment
I’ve always been a strong proponent of using the criminal justice system and the state more broadly “politically” against Donald Trump, but I have to admit that I find these indictments brought down yesterday by Alvin Bragg in New York to be somewhat unsatisfying. Had it been an earlier era, I think the political class would have had less scruples and been a lot better at doing this sooner. We know now that Franklin D. Roosevelt probably sicced the IRS on Huey Long and he definitely ordered the FBI to go after fascist groups in the United States, even though these appeared politically insignificant in the scheme of things. Still, F.D.R. took them very seriously, which I think is a testament to his political sagacity and foresight. A lot of great political leaders—great here donating “significant” not “moral”—are charged with “paranoia.” Well, how do you think they got on top to begin with? Because they had a consciousness of being in a world with real enemies. Maybe not such a bad thing to remember sometimes.
What if the Democrats or, yes, the Republicans, taken Trump seriously from the beginning? What if some move had been made against Trump when he was just a sideshow with political aspirations? He has been an obnoxious and even toxic part of our national life for a long time, so why had no ambitious prosecutor decided to reallzy go after him until now? It would’ve been “political” then as it is now, but less baldly so and he would have been able to garner less support. People were complacent about Trump, thought he was just a clown, and they are trying to play catch up now.
Trump slithered through our culture that tolerates for its own amusement the manifest corruption of the rich and powerful. He is the product of New York City’s backslapping patronage system that blurred the difference between the mob, ordinary business, and city governance. The lesson should be that we should be more aggressive from the start with these criminal magnates that want to pervert the public order for their own interests. In a world where institutions worked properly, Trump should’ve been in prison sometime around 1989, forever disgraced and no longer a potential public menace. Or rather, he would have been forced to content himself, like many more or less decent people do, with some modest office in Queens, and be noted as a piece of local color rather than as a national disgrace.
Still, even though this feels too little and too late, I have very little time for the argument that this will “help” Trump or contribute to civil unrest. Civil unrest like January 6th? Civil unrest like the largest mass demonstrations in American history that occurred under his watch? Civil unrest has occurred because Trump was permitted to get so far as the presidency in the first place. It should be clear that no amount of placation or appeasement will abate this. His continued political career is simply a recipe for more civil unrest. Dealing with Trump through the criminal justice system is a return to, in his favored phrase, law and order. Trump would rather remain in the anarchic world of mere opinion and public passions, but a trial, even when we can recognize it as fundamentally political, is a regular, orderly, and deliberative process. And, for what’s worth, all trials are political: they can either reinforce or subvert the existing order. Or, they help establish a new one, by making it clear that old privileges of wealth and power, which allowed some to act as if they were above the law, will no longer be respected.
In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli writes:
To those who are posted in a city as guard of its freedom one cannot give a more useful and necessary authority than that of being able to accuse citizens to the people, or to some magistrate or council, when they sin in anything against the free state. This order produces two very useful effects for a republic. The first is that for fear of being accused citizens do not attempt things against the state; and when attempting them, they are crushed instantly and without respect. The other is that an outlet is given by which to vent, in some mode against some citizen, those humors that grow up in cities; and when these humors do not have an outlet by which they may be vented ordinarily, they have recourse to extraordinary modes that bring a whole republic to ruin.
So maybe the sense of anti-climax, the lack of dramatic denouement, the slight air of boredom around the whole thing is actually a positive sign. After all, a proper trial should lack the satisfactions of vengeance. It should dissipate rather than concentrate public passion. It’s notable that there were no really significant mass public demonstrations either for or against Trump yesterday. I just don’t think they will happen. I don’t think there will be a wave of terror. I don’t think this will generate much public enthusiasm in any direction at all. Good! This all should and will become even more boring.
Solid piece, thank you.
I feel much the same. More than anything, the action by Manhattan just highlights the failure of previous prosecutors and especially our federal DOJ. It was obvious to me in 2016 (and 2006 and 1996) that Trump is a serial criminal - and now so much damage has been done by the failure to prosecute this man ages ago.
I worry a bit this prosecution gives Trump a bullhorn again. I worry we’ll have some limited terror incident(s). Not worried about Jan 6 style attack. Most important, some accountability under the law more than outweighs these risks and starts setting our system back on its tracks, hopefully.
I think the election of Trump may turn out to have been a blessing in disguise.
His nature and experience as a purebred con man, “criminal syndicalist,” and gifted carnival barker brought out into the open the deep disaffection of so much of the working and middle class and in America. He hitched this to a nihilistic agenda of self-dealing and cultivated a cultish adoration. He drew out into the open the links between the shadow networks and initiatives of America’s home-grown and global plutocrats as well as the thuggishness of . He attracted to himself and thereby introduced to us a despicable cabal of miscreants whose un-American activities are now in the spotlight.
He (mis)led hordes of his followers to think that the militant embracing of illiberalism and bigotry were solutions to their grievances; and, having not succeeded outright in his serious but clumsy attempt at re-election-by-insurrection, managed to get many of his most devoted acolytes and himself into considerable legal jeopardy.
The result of all of this malfeasance and outright “criminal syndicacy” is that Trump has revealed the cohort of Americans who are hurt, fearful, and now outright angry, and to whom a great deal of attention needs to be paid by all of us who care about protecting and promoting the future of democracy.
Let’s take the arrest and charging of Trump as the signal that we can and that we MUST go on the offensive to proactively confront the thuggish and seditionist Republican Party while simultaneously “centering” the wellbeing, economic and otherwise, of the working and middle class.