Trump Being A "Convicted Felon" Does Not Magically Make Him A Mortal Enemy Of "The Establishment"

Trump at the Manhattan Courthouse on the day of his “Guilty” verdict — May 30, 2024. Photo via GettyImages

Just hours before the verdict in Trump’s NYC trial came down last month, reports had begun to circulate that Joe Biden “secretly” authorized the deployment of US weapons to strike inside Russia. That this was characterized by POLITICO as a closely guarded “secret,” despite it having been telegraphed from a mile away weeks ahead of time, with a barrage of frenzied Ukrainian lobbying, flamboyant Congressional demands, and the usual choreographed parade of media leaks, only added to the predetermined absurdity of the development. 

Germany, assuming its now-default posture of pliable American sidekick, followed almost immediately with an announcement of its own, declaring that German-provided weapons, such as they exist, can now likewise be used to strike Russia. German and American munitions flying into mainland Russia? One could hardly imagine a more inspiring display of transatlantic unity. Which had long been Biden’s much-fetishized diplomatic goal: ensuring that every war-escalating move he makes is done in concert with a resolutely “united” bloc of loyal NATO subordinates. Shortly thereafter, Putin would warn that this move had finally destroyed Russian-German relations — which sounds like a bit of an ominous omen, at least if you’re into those handy World War II analogies.

In years and months past, Biden had steadfastly assured the public that US arms would of course never be authorized to strike inside Russia, because this would of course be an unacceptably dangerous escalation, perhaps even leading to World War III. It’s hard to fathom a more consequential act of official deception in recent history, given the enormity of the stakes.

So without denying that the first criminal conviction of a US president in history was a significant development, compare the relative attention paid to the Trump verdict with the amount paid to Biden blowing past years of knife’s-edge nuclear brinksmanship into a brave new era of direct warfare against the world’s largest nuclear state. You might argue that the comparative media priorities are somewhat askew — but there’s an even more under-covered aspect: every last American bomb that henceforth drops on Russian military installations will have been delivered in large part thanks to the generosity of (gasp) Donald J. Trump. Yes, it was Trump who played a critical role in facilitating the passage of the latest round of $61 billion in Ukraine war funding — the same funding which will now be used to pay for the Russia-bound munitions. As I recommended in a previous article, fairness and justice dictates that the signatures of both Trump and Biden be emblazoned across the cross-border missiles in gaudy gold lettering — ideally the same bold-faced TRUMP style that’s plastered on his hotels, golf courses, and assorted tchotchkes.

Hilariously, Trump bolted straight from the Manhattan Courthouse on Verdict Day to his next scheduled donor appointment at an undisclosed luxury location, conveniently located somewhere nearby in the City. Attendees reportedly included private equity tycoon Steve Schwarzman, who had just announced his lucrative endorsement of Trump. The intimate dinner was helpfully narrated after the fact by grocery chain proprietor and 77-WABC Radio owner John Catsimatidis, who relayed during a touching on-air segment that the fifteen or so “A List” donors — not just “A List,” but “Triple A List” — who had assembled that evening were united in their staunch agreement that unless Donald Trump gets back in power, the country will dissolve into… something very bad. Chaos? Socialism? The platinum donors were also surveyed for their VP picks, “Cats” added, which has reportedly become a regular donor perk at these endless money-grubbing confabs. Top choices that night included Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley.

While it has long seemed unlikely that Trump would actually make Nikki his VP, you don’t have to be a master political strategist to surmise that he’s been looking for someone who can placate the GOP donor class — whose soirees Trump has been darting around to at a far brisker pace than in 2016 or even 2020. This coincides with Trump predictably announcing that Nikki will once again be joining his “team,” not to mention Miriam Adelson’s selfless disbursement of (at least) $100 million to a Trump-backing SuperPAC. (It could well end up being significantly more than that. As the inheritor of her late husband Sheldon’s casino fortune, she certainly would be honoring his legacy by dumping even more “pro-Israel” millions into GOP coffers than had been initially intimated. After all, that’s what happened vis-a-vis Trump/GOP during the 2020 and 2018 election cycles.) 

The same goes for Pompeo: an unlikely VP candidate himself, but Trump did explicitly tell radio host Hugh Hewitt that Pompeo was in active consideration for a return to some high-ranking National Security Job in the next administration, which makes all the sense in the world given that Pompeo was one of the vanishingly few Top Cabinet Officials who did not have a petulant personal falling-out with Trump in the first go-round. Rather, by all accounts, Pompeo skillfully nurtured warm relations with Trump throughout, as he diligently implemented their shared agenda as Secretary of State. If there was ever an instance of major policy disagreement between Pompeo and Trump, it’s yet to be reported anywhere, in contrast with the shit-storm that erupted between Trump and Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, whom Trump eventually fired by tweet.

In any case, here’s the crux: anyone who tries to argue that the mere fact of Trump’s criminal convictions necessarily makes him a mortal enemy of the “Deep State,” or “Establishment,” or [insert your preferred nebulous term here] needs to have their head examined. This fantastical caricature simply does not comport with Trump’s actual record, statements, or actions. It’s a fictitious self-soothing narrative that a certain faction of Trump supporters, mostly located online, frequently tell themselves to add some excitement and rebelliousness to their support for the three-time Republican nominee and undisputed kingpin of one of the two major “establishment” parties.

Take, for instance, Trump’s position on the Israel-Gaza War — to the extent that he can occasionally be prodded into semi-articulating one. Israel would be well-served by pulverizing Gaza even quicker and harder, Trump has basically said, and must do a better job restricting images of the destruction from getting out into public view, because they’ve been shown too much on television and look terrible. Trump’s primary critique of the Israeli war effort has thus been one of suboptimal PR management, which he accurately observes has resulted in world opinion shifting decisively against the Jewish State. There has not been a single instance of Trump articulating a substantive critique of the war effort as such. If anything, he’s gotten progressively adamant on the subject since locking up the GOP nomination (and the Adelson bucks) — lately adding to his talking point repertoire a strange lament that he’s been hearing more and more from people who shamefully “deny” the October 7 attack, just like how bad people also “deny” the Holocaust. 

If Trump’s view of the Israel conflict is in any way incompatible with “Establishment” interests, someone’s going to have to explain that minor conundrum in a bit more detail. That he’s now technically a convicted felon doesn’t magically change his policy positions on anything, but it does reliably feed into the interminable Trump Martyr Myth: the enduring conceit that because Trump has been relentlessly hounded by norm-obliterating liberal antagonists, that must therefore mean he’s some Establishment-busting persecuted savior figure, even if his words and deeds never actually align with this silly depiction. The NYC verdict in practice has meant that Trump supporters care even less about quaint concepts like his actual record in power, or his substantive policy agenda, because what really matters is that Trump has been grievously wronged by… Alvin Bragg. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: like most myths, there are elements of potentially conceivable truth to this one. The Manhattan DA preposterously stretched a trifling misdemeanor into 34 felony counts by invoking federal election law violations, and then didn’t even bother to specify what the enhancing crime supposedly was. As noted by Elie Honig, the CNN Commentator who formerly worked with Bragg in the Manhattan DA’s office, the day after the verdict:

But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

And yes, it’s true that Bragg’s office clearly did not care to even prudentially avoid the appearance of undue influence from the Biden Administration, as evidenced by their hiring of Matthew Colangelo, the third-ranking DOJ official under Merrick Garland, to spearhead the Trump case. Colagelo was one of the lead prosecutors at the trial itself, alleging in opening arguments that Trump was guilty of a “criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election.” This makes absolutely no sense as an actionable criminal offense, hence the prosecution’s need to concoct a bespoke series of charges tailored to Trump’s idiosyncratic conduct. Such a prosecutorial strategy is a disastrous menace to civil liberties in general, irrespective of Trump.

The question is then invariably asked: if Trump poses no meaningful threat to “The Establishment,” why are “they” going after him so hard? First off, there should be a “New Rule” that prohibits making broad political statements by reference to some ill-defined “they,” which is most often used as a stand-in for lazy and disorganized thinking, often laced with an undercurrent of scattershot paranoia. Who specifically “went after” Trump in the Manhattan case? Well, the charges were brought in ridiculous fashion by the elected Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who won a Democratic primary for the position in 2021 by touting his zealous commitment to holding Trump “accountable” — which in “progressive” parlance means: confecting an innovative crime to charge Trump with, because members of the Democratic Professional Class have been hysterically obsessed with retribution against Trump for ages. Is this some surprising turn of events? When did it become a big, inscrutable mystery that Democratic elites really dislike Trump, and that scores of them, including those with prosecutorial power, are willing to toss their supposedly cherished “norms” in the dumpster to punish and politically hobble Trump?

The prosecution in Manhattan was always a complete mess, and it’s near-impossible to believe the convictions will hold up on appeal. But someone’s going to have to walk me through the logic that says because Trump was charged and convicted of asinine offenses stemming from his personal attorney paying off a porn star before the 2016 election, this necessarily and obviously makes Trump some existential foe of the “establishment.” What exactly are these “establishment” interests that Trump is believed to so ruinously threaten? Name them, please. The only existential threat Trump manifestly poses is to the sanity of paranoid liberals, but again, that’s hardly some breaking news development — and as Trump’s actual record in office thoroughly demonstrated, enraging liberals is not a panacea for challenging any “establishment” interests.

By the way, I actually spent a day or two reading through some of the Manhattan Trial Transcripts, and while I continue to agree that the offenses alleged cannot plausibly add up to 34 felonies, the underlying conduct is practically beyond dispute as a factual matter. And much of it is eye-poppingly sleazy — yes, beyond the standard sort of political sleaze. Trump and his one-time loyal hatchetman Michael Cohen secretly recruited the head of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, to become a hit-factory for Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, and even to squash any unflattering stories from women that may arise, which eventually did happen by way of a payout from the Enquirer’s own funds after one particular woman, former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, was judged to be credible and her story of a love affair with Trump in 2006 was deemed to be true. I discussed that in some detail here.

Partisan brains apparently just cannot handle that “the establishment” is a constantly-evolving theoretical construct that’s meant as a simplified short-hand encapsulation of various interlocking sectors of political, economic, and cultural power. If we’re using that definition, it’s a sheer absurdity that the three-time Republican Nominee (essentially unprecedented in American political history) could at this point be heralded as some avatar against the “establishment,” especially with Trump’s actual record in power being what it is.

Part of the confusion stems from the facile over-reliance on “establishment” as an abstract analytical shortcut, which people often just use synonymously with “bad.” You can throw in “deep state” as a related term that has lost much if not all descriptive value, since around the time Sean Hannity started using it constantly.

The partisan system in the US subsists on both parties constantly pumping out stupendously exaggerated caricatures of the other. Trump, as you may recall, was wildly accused of being a “fascist,” and there’s even a half-hearted attempt to resurrect some of that nonsense now, despite four years’ worth of contradictory data from when he actually wielded power. Likewise, Trump spent the 2020 campaign accusing Joe Biden of being a communist, “Antifa,” and similar overblown stupidities, and that’s carried forth uninterrupted into the current campaign despite making approximately as little sense as the “fascism” histrionics.

By now, any effort to cover Trump with a shallow veneer of “anti-establishment” credibility mainly serves to benefit Trump by deflecting from his actual record and actions. He just signed off on FISA warrantless surveillance and Ukraine funding. He brags about how he was the most “pro-Israel” world leader since King David. He’s hobnobbing with hedge fund sleaze-bags every chance he gets. He’s the head of the Republican Party, for Pete’s sake — not some crazed “insurrectionist” underground movement, as much as liberals might want to convince themselves otherwise, and as much as certain segments of MAGAs might want him to be leading some earth-shattering “insurrection.” An insurrection against what, exactly? Anti-Semitism on college campuses?

A common fallacy of discombobulated, conspiracy-tinged thinking is to assume way too much centralized organization behind the nefarious forces accused of wrongdoing. Yes, Trump is still despised by numerous factions of “establishment” power, including: the Democratic Party, much of the media, various liberal-oriented cultural institutions, the non-profit scam sector, and more. But he’s also fanatically backed by numerous factions of “establishment” power, including: the Republican Party, the conservative media ass-kissing complex (which insulates him from scrutiny with a tenacity that would make Mao blush), myriad Big Business interests, “pro-Israel” hardliners, and now increasingly Wall Street. This might make for a slightly less scintillating election-year contrast, but it happens to be the reality, whether or not Trump has the phrase “convicted felon” preceding his name.