Try Again

Democratic strategists, media boosters and party loyalists would like us to view Trump's new status as felon as Joe Biden’s golden ticket to re-election. This is the Dem wet dream: victory without effort, with no promises to excite on-the-fence voters with, allowing the Biden team to pretend that history will merely behave as they would command it to, and leaving them free to pursue their usual strategy of implementing Trump's border and trade agendas in order to try to court the handful of centrist asshole Republicans who could be courted to the exclusion of everyone else.  And if it doesn't work out for them, at least no one got too excited in the process.  

We have to eat so much shit in order to keep voting for dems that it’s easy for some of us to understand why the majority of Trump supporters are unlikely to be fazed by a little thing like their man’s conviction on 34 felony counts.  The rest of Dem boosters might be just a little bit deluded.  Their giddiness has gone to their heads, leaving their sobriety in doubt.  To be fair it is a heady thing.  A historic first:  Trump is the first president to be convicted of a felony.  Put another way, he's the first to have gotten caught committing an act that happens to be plausibly in the contemporary legal category of a crime.  He's the Al Capone of ex-Presidents, tripped up on the technicality of sloppy creative bookkeeping in his 2016 cover up of using campaign funds to buy the silence of one of his indiscretions -- a move intended only to allow him to come away untainted from the vanity exercise of an election everyone including him expected him to lose.   If he'd known he was actually going to win, he might have forgone the image maintenance.  Richard Nixon had Gerald Ford to pardon him before he could beat Trump to the distinction.  Others have simply taken advantage of the executive privilege our elite grant to each other in order to let them get away with whatever they can.  Trump's alienation of every potential peer who could have saved him is how he got in this position in the first place.

It should gall anyone with a conscience that of all the things you could pin on Trump-- how about his fascist appeal? -- Democrats opt to politically exploit the mere fact of Trump's conviction as though it means something that should alone be enough reason for the average person not to vote for him.  On the contrary, our selective, arbitrary, partisan, activist, corrupt and debased criminal justice system is in smithereens.  After witnessing or taking decades of abuse from it, our low esteem of it is well deserved.  We expect nothing from it ...  except in the case of Donald J. Trump?  Come on, man!  Call me cynical, but I've been well trained by reality to be.  This is aside from the fact that bigotry against criminal justice system losers is just plain sleazy.  

Something about the Stormy Daniels affair never added up.  In a moment of more typical over-confidence, Trump accurately predicted he could shoot someone in the face on 5th Avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would stick with him. This is the key to and the danger of Trump. But many Democrats do not seem to understand the problem.