Slogans matter more than literature, trials and history.
Distancing oneself from the enormity of Trump having been President and possibly a future President, given his disregard of the U. S. Constitution and his mean spirited character, no prior President having or being so indifferent to law and decency, people like me can do that distancing by turning the current hush money trial into a kind of musical without songs, akin to “Sweeney Todd” or “Guys and Dolls” or “The Beggar’s Opera”, filled as they are with flamboyant characters and dastardly deeds to give a little bite to those middle class audiences out for a thrill and so see “”La Traviata” as a young man who sowed his wild oats before being restored to respectability. So is the case in the Trump trial: a soupcon of tawdriness to make you feel superior to politicians independent of whether you will vote for the sleazebag in chief. Here is Stormy Daniels who turns out to be articulate and feisty, no victim, standing up to Trump’s lawyer, and being won over as a figure of women's liberation rather than why she had to go through with sex with Trump rather than leaving the hotel room. There are the Trump employees still loyal to him but showing in detail just how well organized was the Trump operation in supervising disbursements, he signed the checks, and so the hush money was not inadvertent. There is Michael Cohen, Trump’s Iago or maybe Brutus, turning on Trump perhaps because Cohen got no position in the Trump Administration or because he got cornered by the Feds, or had a profound change of heart, freeing himself of the thralls of being in the Trump ambit and deciding to act in his own interests. There could be an opera called “Cohen'' just as there is no opera called “Iago'', though there should be. Most of all in this cast of sleazy characters, Judge Marcen the exception, but not excusing Susan Nechles, the previously well regarded attorney now representing Trump, who tried to embarrass Daniels, but with no success, and perhaps instructed by Trump to engage in a hatchet job that was damaging to Trump.
And the biggest character in this circus is Trump himself, who would seem very unappealing because he is a braggart, a blowhard, mean spirited and always angry, incapable of offering explanations and arguments rather than assertions, and self admittedly vengeful, while people flock to him, despite or because of his failings, and people in his ambit loyal to him even at their own expense, perhaps believing loyalty will purchase their own interests even if it means selling one’s own soul. I cannot think of anyone in the Shakespearean canon, which covers every sort of character and fashion, has not uncovered a Trump. He is a sport rather than a type, while other strongmen, like Putin or Hitler, are recognizable. Trump is and has become more than a celebrity showman; he is now a force of nature, a presence for as long as he is allowed to be.
The truth of the matter is that fictional people are not as interesting or engaging or momentous as real life ones. Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Donald Trump are singularities who impress the world for distinctive attributes that other people might find strange or possibly ignoble. They have complex and troubling lives, though FDR hid it and Trump does not admit it. So we can’t rely on literature to illuminate life because life is more expansive and surprising and more jarring than literature, and so a limit on its incisiveness.
Another way to intellectualize the hush money episode is to look at it through legal scrutiny, which is go make something complicated when it is not. The legal case would seem to be straightforward. Michael Cohen fronted the money to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels and Trump repaying Cohen was in violation of the laws on campaign contributions. The payment to Cohen was said to be for legal services and it was not. Whether the unprecedented association of falsified business records with campaign finance laws is a different question than establishing what happened. The case might be too jerry rigged to warrant a trial or else too tawdry a matter to involve an ex-President. I am leery of Ken Starr having concocted a case against Bill Clinton and aso leery of the Supreme Court having opined that a deposition of President Clintonwould take only a few days rather than a pre-occupation for years. The Supreme Court is lousy at making predictions, as it is now doing by assessing whether the Trump claim of immunity will work out in future presidencies when it should concern itself what the law says and implies, Justices also not good at political philosophy, such as whether abortion is legal, even though they appropriate those issues because the Congress is not very good at it either.
Then the actual trial becomes metaphysical, meaning that it rests on words that cannot be defined except by applying categorical terms like when life begins. In this instance, “beyond a reasonable doubt” means rejecting all the alternative explanations of motive except for the preferred guilt carrying one. So Trump had to be shown to have known that he was sending the money illegally. That is a heavy burden. He signed those checks and presumably people are responsible for the checks they sign. That is sufficient evidence of intent. The burden of proof would shift to the defendant to explain how , for example, he signed checks in a batch without examining what they were for, heedless of economic good sense, or the checks stolen and the signatures forged. It seems though that Trump’s criminal intent was demonstrated by Cohen saying he was told by Trump to take care of this matter and that supported by the circumstantial evidence of the elaborate chain of custody in the Trump Organization for handling checks and the reports of how frugal Trump was about handling money. But those are general personal and organizational customs rather than a demonstration of what happened in those particular instances of check signing and so only the Cohen testimony is definite, which makes the case metaphysical in that the jury can and must rely on whether Cohen is a liar or not, a difficult assessment to make in ordinary life . Even a liar like Cohen could now be telling the truth now. That is why juries decide. They play their hunches and don’t have to explain their reasoning, only offer a verdict.
A third way of intellectualizing the case is to ask the larger question of how the nation got into the predicament that such a sleazy, stupid and mean spirited person got into being elected not only once as President but has a good chance of being elected again? What are the cultural and political forces that explain it? This is the most hopeless way of engaging the case because it is the most speculative. It might be the anger of the downward mobility of Trump supporters or the anger of the upwardly mobile Trump supporters such as J. C. Vance. It might be a nostalgia for when people were normal, which means when women, blacks and sexual outliers, knew their place, though those people yearn to have but it is a long time since the Fifties and so something must be reinvigorating that anger.
The real reason might be coincidence. Hillary was a weak candidate and there was a backlash against the first Black President. Comey threw the monkey wrench into the 2016 election by reintroducing Hillary laptops that proved without merit a few days later but the effect was to damage what had been Hillary’s lead. Trump never rose to the occasion of being presidential but “the adults in the room” tried to keep him under control which is not likely to happen in another Trump term and his having been president has some legitimacy for him to do what he will during his second term. The single working trial against him is not likely to take him down if the three much more serious trials against him are delayed past the election because the machinery of the law is subverted, as by Judge Cannon, or just because the law moves exceedingly slow.
To put it starkly, history has no revolutionary moments whereby people and nations run away from themselves. They have choices whereby emerging political developments can decide to curtail events or move to more radical measures. Charles I could have negotiated with Parliament but didn’t because he believed in the divine right of kings and so prevented what happened a generation later, which was the Glorious Revolution that eventuated over time into Parliamentary supremacy. The French Revolution could have stopped short of Robespierre and Kerensky might have stopped the very minority Boleshevicks. A Democratic Congress might curtail a Trump second term, but then again it might not. Trump is the singular figure that the Trump supporters are devoted to and to which the Republican officeholders cater to for fear of being primaried even though many of those orthodox Republicans who believe in lower taxes, less government and traditional values advocate or once did, now going into more flamboyant garb. The question is why those Trump supporters con themselves and when they will stop pursuing ever more radical steps.
There is a more reliable way of judging events than by referring to literature, law and history. Look at the actual slogans bantered about in the present time to see what is going on. I refer to a recent New York Times op ed columnist, David Brooks, to tell us what is at stake. Brooks is a Conservative who has read a lot of sociology. He believes many that individual autonomy, the basis of liberalism, has to be buttressed by the institutions of religion and family and, without them, liberalism is a weak reed. The conclusion is that America has gone astray. I would disagree and do so by engaging a different slogan. The liberal idea was that people have a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a goal worth fighting many a war for, and I wonder why people have abandoned that slogan as pusillanimous and consider strongmen like Trump as their ideal. That is the question of our time. Some academicians think that even Ivy League colleges these days are so uneducated that they cannot evaluate the principles of the Founding Fathers, who wished to promote a peaceful transfer of power. Someone said on cable today that Biden shouldn't engage in a debate with Trump because that is to legitimate Trump rather than treat him as the insurrectionist he is, while in a debate insurrection will be one issue, along with taxes and the border, rather than the only issue. I think Biden will debate because he can show Trump up to be a monster, but the comment about Trump's illegitimacy was a fair point.