Roger Kimball

Human beings are animals that often operate by proxy. Here’s a familiar example from the world of — well, I was going to say “the law,” but what I have in mind is not the law but its perversion, so let’s say “the legal bureaucracy.” Everyone has heard the phrase “the process is the punishment.” It covers a multitude of sins. In its core signification, the phrase describes an increasingly common situation in which the machinery of the law is deployed to harass, enervate, stymie and otherwise hobble someone the regime does not like but whom, for the time being anyway, it chooses not to incarcerate. Sometimes it is easier to bankrupt and demoralize an opponent into submission.

If you squint, I reckon you could see two bloody corpses that the Secret Service turned over on that roof in Butler, Pennsylvaia. It was not only twenty-year-old loser Thomas Matthew Crooks; hovering right next door is the mangled corpse of the bureaucratic monstrosity that the Biden administration has been wielding against Donald Trump. There it lies, broken and inert.  Crooks tried to murder Trump with a AR-15. He almost did so, too. Had Trump not turned his head at the last moment — ironically, it was to look at a chart mapping the tsunami of illegal immigration swamping the country — Crooks’s bullet would have pierced Trump’s brain instead of merely nicking the top of his right ear.

Yesterday, reviewing last week’s Supreme Court decisions, I noted that the court would probably issue its final opinion of the season, on the question of presidential immunity. So it turned out to be. Yesterday, ‘Trump v. United States’ dropped. For the first time, the Court pondered the question, ‘Does a president have immunity from prosecution?’ or, to use the language of the opinion, ‘Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.’ The answer was more or less what I predicted.

"What happens now?” The question flooded my inbox and what used to be called the Twittersphere. Why? Because shortly after 5 p.m. on May 30 came the verdict in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial: Donald J. Trump was guilty on all counts in the so-called “hush-money trial” in New York.So now the proximate legal fate of Trump, former and very possibly future president of the United States, is settled. What happens next? Trump appeals, but that case is not heard until after the election. What happens then? As many instantly observed, Trump wins in a landslide.

My favorite line in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard comes midway through the first chapter. The times are unsettled. The Risorgimento is sweeping Sicily. Prince Tancredi, the idealistic young nephew of the book’s protagonist Prince Fabrizo, is bantering about the political situation with his uncle. He suddenly waxes serious: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change” (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi). Most readers will understand that the whiff of paradox points not to a contradiction but to a profound truth. There are plenty of historical situations in which fundamental assumptions about society are disrupted and can be restored only by something like revolution.

“What happens now?” That was the question flooding my inbox and what used to be called the Twittersphere. Why? Because shortly after 5 p.m. on May 30, Anno Domini 2024, the verdict in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial came down: Trump was guilty on all counts in the so-called “hush money trial” in New York. I always say “so-called” hush money trial because it was really designed to be a "hush Trump" trial. Rather, a “hush Trump” inquisition. So now the proximate legal fate of Donald Trump, former and very possibly future president of the United States, is settled. What happens next? Trump appeals, but that case is not heard until after the election. What happens next?

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans. I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration. What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm. It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness. Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.