Trump’s trial and the will to power

"You know they’re not going to let you go,” an old friend told President Donald Trump in an intimate Oval Office meeting during the summer of 2020. “They’re going to come after you, after your kids; they’re going to come for your money; and they’re going to try to put you in jail.”

The president, he told me later that day, look frightened, even startled, as if he hadn't considered there could be anything worse than defeat at the ballot box.

"Unfair” is a child’s protest. “Hypocrisy” is the adult version — a fine word for the powerless to hurl against the powerful (to no avail).

Underestimating just how far his opponents across all strata of society would go to hurt him was a frequent tic of Trump’s first term. The 45th president of the United States was slow to realize position and power are not the same thing. And now, four years later, he’s been convicted of a bogus crime by a man who won office by promising to lock him up.

It can feel cathartic to point out that Trump has been found guilty of disguising hush money as "legal expenses,” while Hillary Clinton did the same to hide payments to a British spy to compile the far more insidious Russia dossier. You can yell “Hypocrisy!” on a friendly network and the host might nod along.

It can feel witty to explain how clearly the judge violated Trump’s Sixth Amendment right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” Judge Juan Merchan actually told the jurors they didn’t need to agree on what “unlawful” act Trump might have committed to upgrade a misdemeanor outside the statute of limitations to a felony charge. You can write “Unfair!” on X, and your friends might retweet you.

It can feel like a relief to know the Supreme Court will likely intervene and might even do so quickly. Merchan’s obvious work to assist the prosecution, undercut the defense, and gag the Republican candidate for president makes a strong case for appeal. The prosecution’s “novel legal theory” is fair game, too. Merchan might even face review and censure. Phew!

But in the words of Clinton herself, “What difference does it make?” “Unfair” is a child’s protest; my 8-year-old sometimes yells it to no avail. “Hypocrisy” is the adult version — a fine word for the powerless to hurl against the powerful, also to no avail.

Democrats were never going to let Trump go and were leaving as little as possible to chance, launching cases up and down the country. They weren’t even hot on Bragg’s “novel legal reasoning” until it appeared likely to deliver while the other cases faltered. “Whatever they can get him for,” the noisy NeverTrump lawyer George Conway said last week, “is fine with me.”

It's about power and the will to use it. Merchan did not lack the will, even if it means short-term suffering for it. “Merchan,” Federalist CEO Sean Davis wrote, “is going to get his bogus conviction, retire, get an absurd amount of left-wing money laundered to him in the form of a book advance, and become a CNN/MSNBC contributor.”

Trump’s legal team will quickly appeal to the New York Appellate Division to try to keep their client out of prison, though he isn't likely to see justice before Election Day. In the meantime, Joe Biden’s social media team is planning to change his political opponent’s title to “Convicted Felon Donald Trump.”

Given the reaction so far, it could backfire, but they’re still going to give it their best. For them, this is all about the election — and an election they are deeply worried about. Or more plainly: It’s about the power — power they intend to hold tightly.

BlazeTV’s Mark Levin to Trump’s attorneys: Next stop? The Supreme Court!

The Federalist: Judge Merchan’s jury instructions prove Trump’s trial is about power, not the law

Blaze News:Biden bets big on Trump conviction

Blaze News: What happens if Trump gets convicted?

Blaze News:Stefanik files misconduct complaint against Judge Merchan, says his selection for Trump NY case was 'not random at all.

Bedford:There’s a reason DC Democrats are always winning, even when they lose

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IN OTHER NEWS

Biden goes full race war in desperate appeal for black votes

The White House knows it’s in trouble. Poll after poll shows black and Hispanic voters are leaning toward Trump, the Republican just held a Bronx rally so successful that even CNN and MSNBC had to take notice, and every week a new article drops on the growing panic among professional Democrats.

It’s rare the president appears anywhere alongside his earnest VP these days, but in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris was once again useful, or at least the campaign hoped as much.

“What would’ve happened if black Americans had stormed the Capitol?” Biden asked the crowd. “I don’t think [Trump would] be talking about pardons.

“This,” he continued,

is the same guy who wanted to tear-gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd’s murder. It’s the same guy who still calls the “Central Park Five” guilty, even though they were exonerated. He’s that landlord who denies housing applications because of the color of your skin. He’s that guy who won’t say “Black Lives Matter” and invokes neo-Nazi Third Reich terms. We all remember, Trump is the same guy who unleashed the birtherism lie against Barack [Obama].

This is far from Biden’s first foray into the politics of race hate. Way back when milquetoast mascots Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the Republican standard-bearers, the then-vice president whisper-growled to a black audience, “They want to put y’all back in chains.”

Fauci set to testify on Capitol Hill Monday

The squirmy doctor is back in the hot seat, as Blaze Media launches a new docuseries on all the COVID lies.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill Monday, as more evidence trickles out daily that he and his team sought to hide, disguise, and delete records of their COVID response to protect themselves and their friends from public and congressional oversight.

The doctor went from seemingly omnipresent to quiet and withdrawn as the panic subsided. Monday will be the first chance for lawmakers to question him since closed-door testimony on the origins of COVID-19 in January. It will be his first public testimony since retiring as the highest-paid person in the federal government, with the highest government pension in American history.

For months, BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe and his team at Free the People investigated the lies and cover-ups of 2020, building an incredible multi-part docuseries. “The Coverup,” episode one, is live now. Watch it here.

Blaze Media Original: The Coverup exposes Fauci and his whole cabal

Blaze News Original: Former New Jersey gym owner arrested for staying open during COVID lockdowns wins big in court

The fire rises: City Journal: Can we get back to tougher policing?

This isn’t the first time we’ve experimented with liberalizing policing and sentencing in America. In the 1950s, activists concerned about the United States’ prison population went a similar route to what we're seeing today. The result of their tinkering was the destruction of our cities. By the end of the 1980s, a good summer blockbuster meant some vigilante finally beating up the criminals and punching the reporters for good measure.

We fought our way out of it and ended with a far larger prison population than had originally concerned the activist class. And then, like Alzheimer's patients, we did it again. It won’t be so easy to fix this time, however, because now the police know Americans don’t like them. The Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual reports:

More than 40 years have passed since the publication of one of the most important public-policy essays ever written. Its title, “Broken Windows,” captured the essence of a simple but deeply insightful idea: public order matters. “[I]f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” wrote the late authors, political scientist James Q. Wilson and longtime Manhattan Institute senior fellow George L. Kelling, in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Visible signs of chaos were like warnings: you’re not safe here. If left unaddressed, the chaos made those areas more vulnerable to further disorder, including serious crime. “‘[U]ntended’ behavior,” the authors maintained, “leads to the breakdown of community controls” and causes residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and . . . modify their behavior accordingly.” The areas where disorder festers become more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” than “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls.”

The theory — expanded on by Kelling and his wife, Catherine Coles, in their 1996 book, Fixing Broken Windows — sparked a revolution in American policing. At the direction of innovative officials like NYPD commissioner and later LAPD chief William “Bill” Bratton, and with crucial support from political leaders like New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, police departments across the country would, in the 1990s and 2000s, adopt tactics and strategies that reflected these vital insights. Proactive policing not only drove street crime down but also yielded unexpected benefits — like the illegal firearms discovered during pat-downs of turnstile jumpers in the subways and the outstanding arrest warrants discovered on the street through the enforcement of open-container violations. The historic, generation-long crime decline that resulted as Broken Windows policing took hold widely solidified legendary status for Kelling and Wilson.

Yet this law-enforcement revolution sparked acrimonious pushback from antipolice academics and activists — aided, in no small part, by how often the concept of Broken Windows policing was misinterpreted and distorted, much to the frustration of its originators. These distortions became more influential as crime continued its downward trajectory nationwide during the first decade of the twenty-first century, as large urban police departments focused on developing counterterrorism capabilities in a post-9/11 world and as a new generation of urban residents came of age with little or no awareness of recent history. Progressive critics argued for rolling back proactive policing measures and for lessening criminal-justice penalties; and a series of viral police use-of-force incidents, beginning in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, built momentum for these efforts, while intensifying hostility toward law enforcement. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 served as the movement’s apex, triggering the deadliest urban riots in the United States since the 1960s amid widespread condemnation of police.

Perhaps not coincidentally, 2020 marked the largest one-year homicide spike in at least 100 years. Four years later, with crime — particularly gun violence — still well above pre-2020 levels in many U.S. cities, calls for American police to return to their mid-1990s crime-fighting approach have gotten louder. Unfortunately, this appeal, while entirely justified, cannot be practically pursued in the current environment. Two massive obstacles block the return of Broken Windows-style policing: the police workforce crisis; and the demonization of cops, and of policing itself, as racist. The kind of policing that led to one of the safest generations on record for American cities cannot be revived until these obstacles are surmounted.