(Not) Crime, (undue) punishment, and (in)justice in Amerika v2.0
Been looking forward to Steyn’s take on yesterday’s foul rape of “justice.” It was worth the wait, as usual.
Oh, and I see that “former federal prosecutor” William Otis has just filed a column headlined “Why a Trump Conviction Will Be Reversed”. (Also “Leader McConnell”, whom I feel we don’t talk about enough, briefly unfroze to say he “expects” the conviction to be overturned.) As to Mr Otis’s credibility in such matters, one notes he estimated the chances of guilty-on-all-counts at “about five per cent”.
Be that as it may, his legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men: whether for the forty-fifth president or a “niche Canadian”, we’re in basic “Who? Whom?” territory, as the Leninists would say. After my own experience of both the New York and Washington appellate benches, I would rate the chances of Trump getting this reversed at the state level as way lower than Mr Otis’s five per cent. It’s the same in my own case: all involved know the DC Court of Appeals is merely an interlude in order to get it wafted up to the US Supreme Court. Likewise with Trump. So we’re betting the farm on John Roberts and that rock-ribbed six-three “conservative” majority on which Republicans have expended so much energy to the exclusion of every other societal lever. And, even were they minded to intervene, as I remarked on-air to Tucker a fortnight before the last so-called election, “A judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms.”
In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. If you don’t get that, go over to Larry Hogan’s pad and start cooing over your “respect” for “the rule of law”.
How will the people react to whatever happens on July 11th (Trump’s sentencing date, subject to change entirely at the whim of “judge” Mechan—M)? Riots in Milwaukee? One can’t help noticing that, since the brutal January 6th prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law and then bulked up with “terrorism” charges by DC judges just as bad as this New York guy, there is little appetite for what Orwell called “turbulence”.
But, either way, Democrats figure that, however Trump supporters react, they can make this work for them…and awful pathetic hollow husks such as Larry Hogan will be happy to string along.
So, right now, they’re making their plans for July 11th. Is anyone on the other side?
I will add one final thought born of my own experience. I am about to begin my thirteenth year in the foetid septic tank of the District of Columbia courts. My finances are ruined, and so is my constitution. By the latter, I mean my health, not the United States Constitution, which is already dead. By contrast, I’m just about hanging on, although I very much doubt I will live long enough to be vindicated at the Supreme Court. Which is bad news for my heirs and relicts. As one of the lawyers taunted me last year, “This doesn’t end with your death.”
I’m sad about that, and would much prefer to devote the time that remains to playing music and enjoying the sunsets. I am worn out, and bitter about the books I’ll never get to write because of the way American litigation has consumed what should have been my most productive years. I have a theological objection to suicide, but would not be averse to dying in my sleep.
And that’s just with two rinky-dink cases on the go.
Trump, on the other hand, is barraged at all turns – here, there, state, federal, civil, criminal. He has been subjected to all manner of indignities – such as, just this week, having to sit in the crappy courtroom while the jury deliberates, which Judge Irving did not force me to do in DC.
Trump is (or was) a mega-rich American and he has the habits of the mega-rich, and they are rarely attractive in close-up. Personally, I would have no desire to find myself in a room with Stormy Daniels, and I cannot imagine that whatever transpired was other than mechanical and perfunctory and instantly forgettable. On Fox, at the height of his presidency, Greg Gutfeld used to say, “Trump banged a porn star and we got world peace.” He was making explicit the trade-off that large parts of the GOP coalition had made in 2015 and 2016: yes, he’s a flawed man, but the republic is so crapped out that a house-trained Republican like Jeb Bush or Larry Hogan isn’t going to cut it.
Yet days such as yesterday have turned Trump into something that the Gutfeld formulation never could: it has made him noble and heroic.
The mega-rich guy from Mar-a-Lago and Miss Universe and Trump Tower and The Apprentice decided to dedicate his final years to doing something for all those forgotten men in towns no one knows where all the factories got shipped to China and replaced by meth labs. And in return the worthless US establishment – the guys who took America’s post-war dominance and gave it away to the Politburo in return for “ten per cent for the big guy” – set about destroying him: a half-billion appeal bond in New York, an eviction from the ballot in Maine, a lawyer forced to cop a plea and turn state’s evidence in Georgia…
Much of the United States – certainly the bits that matter – is now institutionally evil, and I am not sure that evil can be reversed, whether we’re talking about the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls or the sacrifice of a generation of a distant nation’s men in the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war. On America’s watch, the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast – which is all anyone will remember about it.
Even with the above extended excerpt, there’s still plenty rich, buttery Steyn goodness left, of which you should read the all.
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