Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump walks out of the courtroom to make comments to members of the media after a jury convicted him of felony crimes for falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election, at Manhattan Criminal Court, May 30, 2024, in New York.
Not even Roy Cohn, Donald Trump apparently failed to realize, could save Joe McCarthy from his own vile slanders. Bluster, belligerence, and bullshit only get you so far. In the end, history weighs your deeds, and every now and then, a jury of your peers steps in to help history along.
What makes Donald Trump so exceptional is that he has never once admitted error in his error-filled life. It’s not only that he thinks doing so would make him look weak, though the fear of looking weak stalks him night and day. It’s that this fear is so devastating that he long ago denied the very existence of error—of a Donald Trump error—as a category of human action. Neither truth nor error, neither truth nor lie, exist in the former president’s mind. There are only assertions, his assertions, which are valid no matter their accuracy or errancy, valid beyond such trivialities as good and evil, fact and deliberate distortion. His assertions are also beyond consequence—or were until shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time yesterday.
The political consequences of yesterday’s verdict won’t be clear until after November’s election, if then. While Trump’s bluster, belligerence, and bullshit may have failed him in court, they have also created his political base, made him MAGA’s man, and recentered the Republicans around a new constituency: millions of young men lashing out in all directions against, as Tom Edsall described it in his Wednesday New York Times column, their “precarious manhood.” Younger working-class men of all races, marginalized by a de-unionized economy that no longer rewards their work, by an increasingly robotized and digitized economy that no longer needs much physical labor, and by a culture many see as devaluing them as much as the economy does, found in Trump a kindred soul. Here was a guy who lashed out as they lash out: blaming their problems on outsiders and anti-macho ideology, on feminized work rules, on capitalists and communists so long as they were Jewish, on novelty, on empiricism. When Trump lost, he lashed out as they do; denied he had lost, said his enemies had cheated. When he was found guilty, the system had been rigged against him. Trump can never be wrong; he can only be wronged. To the remade Republican Party, the party of precarious manhood, he is the victim of the same outsider-controlled system that victimized their young men; he is the martyr of Mar-a-Lago.
Now, at least symbolically, Trump joins America’s greatest democratic socialist, Eugene V. Debs, as a candidate seeking the presidency from a jail cell—though Trump’s appeals will surely delay his serving his sentence, whatever it turns out to be, for years. Debs was convicted in 1918 for delivering a speech in which he devoted one sentence to hailing the bravery of young Americans who risked imprisonment by failing to serve in World War I, that most pointless, bloody, unjust, and avoidable of wars. For this, the 63-year-old Debs was sentenced to a decade in maximum-security prisons. In 1920, two years into his time behind bars, the Socialist Party ran him for president, and he received 900,000 votes.
At his sentencing, Debs spoke these words: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
What might Trump say at his sentencing? Perhaps, “While there is an upper class, I am in it—actually, I’m above it; while there is a criminal element, it’s not white-collar—everyone knows it’s Blacks, Latinos, immigrants (they’re all terrorists), Sleepy Joe, Crooked Hillary, the lamestream media, that judge and that fucking jury; while there is a soul in prison, I’ll pardon my supporters (those January 6 guys, really great Americans, really great) and execute everyone else. Fry them. I’ll fry them.”
