Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Well, they got Al Capone for tax evasion, so there’s precedent for this sort of thing.
Not to make light of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels that was mislabeled as Michael Cohen’s legal expenses, but it’s not really on the scale of summoning a mob to keep Congress from certifying the winner of the 2020 presidential election. It also lacks the smoking-gun revelation of Trump asking Georgia officials to “find” just enough votes for him to reverse the state’s electoral outcome in that election.
But you go to war with the indictment you have, not the indictment you want.
Trump was already running a personalist 2024 campaign. Despite a weirdly policy-heavy set of videos and announcements recently, in his kickoff rally for the campaign in Waco, Texas, last week, he promised neither benefits nor tax cuts nor the construction of ten new cities on federal land, but something more self-centered: retribution.
“I alone can fix it,” he vowed in 2016.
“I am your retribution,” he pledged last week.
This isn’t really that much of a change, of course. Trump’s governance was always about Trump. The Waco Manifesto simply raises that to the level of a doctrine.
“I am your retribution” is merely the logical next step in the decades-long campaign by right-wing politicos and media outlets to convince their followers that their lives have been blighted by liberals, or more recently the wokes. To the considerable extent that these followers are white working-class Americans who live outside the nation’s metropolises, there’s no question that their lives have been blighted by a massive disinvestment in their worlds—offshoring jobs that once paid well, abandoning whole regions of the country to capital flight, sinking into the despair of empty Main Streets, vanishing opportunity, and opioids.
That disinvestment was key to Trump’s 2016 election. Several months before that election, the Economic Innovation Group released a study of the past quarter-century of business investment that all but foretold the massive shift of rural and working-class voters to the Trumpian right. Here’s how I encapsulated its findings in an article we ran shortly after Trump’s victory:
In the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, the share of new business establishments created in counties with more than one million residents was just 13 percent. But that share rose to 29 percent in the recovery of 2002 to 2006, and to 58 percent in the recovery of 2010 to 2014.
In counties of 100,000 to 500,000 residents, the share of new businesses was 39 percent in the 1992–1996 recovery, which slumped to 36 percent in the 2002–2006 recovery, and to 19 percent in the 2010–2014 recovery.
And in counties with fewer than 100,000 residents, the share of new businesses created in the 1992–1996 recovery was a robust 32 percent, which tumbled to 15 percent in the 2002–2006 recovery, and collapsed to a flat zero percent in the 2010–2014 recovery.
To reverse such a staggering level of abandonment requires an activist government committed, say, to industrial policy, investment in infrastructure, and Buy American government procurement. As events would have it, we have in the Biden administration just such a government today, with a policy agenda that isn’t one of retribution, but rather of regeneration.
The American right, much less Donald Trump, has no interest in regeneration, of course. That would require the kind of commitment to activist government, skepticism (at least) about the infallibility of markets, and a determination to slow, or even stop, the decades-long upward redistribution of wealth. Empty rhetoric aside, that’s anathema to Trump and his ilk. The war on woke, by contrast, sidesteps all such unpleasantries and offers no prospect of regeneration—nor is it intended to. Rather, it is designed to stoke continual rage and dreams of retribution.
Trump has never had a copyright on these emotions; more “normal” Republicans charted this course before Trump came along, and would-be opponents like Ron DeSantis have perfected it. I even distinctly recall Chris Christie—now, as a subspecies of Never Trumper, widely viewed as a kind of moderate—leading delegates to the 2016 Republican convention in chants of “Lock her up,” as visions of an imprisoned Hillary danced in their heads.
If there’s a Republican agenda abroad in the land, it’s criminalizing the libs: the doctors who perform abortions, the women who receive them, the teachers who offer lessons on slavery, the transgender people who … well, who are transgender. All of them should be locked up, even if we’re not entirely clear on what law they’ve violated. And the district attorneys who fail to lock them up, or fail to over-incarcerate and round up anyone and everyone even thinking about committing a crime? They should be locked up too.
Now, facing indictment from one of those progressive DAs, Trump becomes the right’s premier victim, assailed by the wokesters who stole the 2020 election from him and now by a prosecutor who’s clearly doing the bidding of George Soros. His platform couldn’t be clearer: Vengeance will be his, and through him, vengeance will be yours.
And every Republican, even the ones considering challenging him in the 2024 primary, has lined up behind this Mar-a-Lago martyr, excoriating the indictment as political grandstanding before it has even been unsealed. The idea that any of them will successfully win over a Republican base that has fully bought into the victimization complex against the ultimate victim is risible.
Should, against all odds, Trump actually end up in the clink while waging his campaign, he wouldn’t be the first candidate to face that challenge. In 1918, socialist leader Eugene Debs, then in his mid-sixties, was arrested and convicted for speaking against U.S. involvement in World War I. By the time 1920 rolled around, he was doing hard time in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. He was also the Socialist Party’s nominee for president, and while he couldn’t campaign, he nonetheless won nearly a million votes in a nation that was about one-third as populous as it is today.
Even Debs’s most rabid opponents acknowledged that he was probably the most selfless political figure of his time. Upon receiving his sentence, his statement to the court was, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Not the kind of admission we can expect from Trump, though if he and his retainers aren’t a criminal element, then nobody is.
