What is Wrong with This Picture?

Look at where the country is headed in the next few months.  Donald Trump is the popular choice for president with about half of the voters in the United States.  And he is almost certainly going to be convicted of felonies in up to four different state and federal court legal trials.  Theoretically he could be given a combination of sentences that easily exceeds his life expectancy.

Now what is anyone to make of this?  It’s patently absurd.  Without even going through the charges like the hush money trial which obviously stretches the underlying statute completely out of its jurisdiction, all the charges are political prosecutions that have never been used in the way they are being presented.  An obvious example is the case involving classified documents.  Joe Biden had many classified documents in his possession and was in fact proven to be allowing someone without a security clearance to access these documents and he has been completely exempted from criminal penalties.  The naked fact that these are political prosecutions is impossible to obscure from insiders or the general public.

If Trump loses or is excluded from the presidential race then his future looks to be as a political prisoner in the banana republic jail that the Democrats now maintain for their enemies.  But even if he wins the election there may be state charges that even as president, he cannot pardon himself from.  What are we to imagine about the legitimate president of the United States officiating over his office from a state penitentiary?  Will he be allowed to leave the jail cell for the State of the Union speech?  How will his secret service detail spend their time behind bars?  Will they have to spend time watching over him in the dining room, the prison yard and in the workshop making license plates?

The blatant overreach and the pretense that all of this is legal and measured will probably strike anyone who isn’t a Democrat partisan zealot as proof that we’ve completely left equal treatment under the law far behind.  And that is the part that I believe makes this present situation novel.

What we will see will be the delegitimizing of the claim that this is a nation of laws.  There will be an ironclad example that proves that justice in present day America is no different than what existed in Stalin’s Soviet show trials or Mao’s Cultural Revolution struggle sessions or the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror.  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

So, this is a lesson that I learned over the course of the last four years.  Now the rest of America, even the most brain-dead will get a clear view of this on display.  I suppose the rest of the world will see it too.  And the myth of equal justice will be laid to rest.

But there’s a follow-on test we will observe.  What happens after this lesson is learned.  If the Left gets away with this and Americans just knuckle under to it, then we’ll also see another myth exposed.  That’s the one that says that Americans are proud of their freedom and won’t tolerate a tyrant.  That’s the one I’m waiting to find out about.  I can’t say I’m overly hopeful about this second one either.