“What happens now?” That was the question flooding my inbox and what used to be called the Twittersphere. Why? Because shortly after 5 p.m. on May 30, Anno Domini 2024, the verdict in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial came down: Trump was guilty on all counts in the so-called “hush money trial” in New York.
I always say “so-called” hush money trial because it was really designed to be a “hush Trump” trial. Rather, a “hush Trump” inquisition.
So now the proximate legal fate of Donald Trump, former and very possibly future president of the United States, is settled. What happens next? Trump appeals, but that case is not heard until after the election.
What happens next? Well, as Ann Coulter and many others instantly observed, Trump now wins in a landslide.
As I write, the media is positively atwitter, though the experts are divided on whether their chattering is more like a murmuration of starlings, an exultation of skylarks, a commotion of coots, a trembling of finches, or a murder of crows. No one I know is describing the breath-bated O.J.-Simpson-like circus of a trial as a parliament of rooks.
In The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan offered a sage admonition that the jury as well as the media might have profited by.
In a contemplative fashion,
And a tranquil frame of mind,
Free from every kind of passion,
Some solution let us find.
Let us grasp the situation,
Solve the complicated plot —
Quiet, calm deliberation
Disentangles every knot.
That’s not what has been happening. Frenzy has been the order of the day, not contemplation, not quiet, calm deliberation. Perhaps, now that verdict in The People v. Donald Trump has been rendered, there will be some respite, probably more akin to what the French, in a somewhat different context, call “la petite mort” than the gemlike, clarifying stillness that follows a violent storm.
Do you ever wonder what it was like to live through the fall of the Roman Republic? It took about a century. A sharp rise in street violence in the 130s and 120s BC was a warning sign, but even more ominous — we see this now with the wisdom of hindsight — was the slow draining of public confidence in the governing apparatus of the state. That confidence is the currency that purchases the golden talisman of legitimacy: a big, abstract word that suddenly impinges like a hammer when the streams that feed it fail.
It can be difficult to get one’s bearings in that situation. You look around and, despite the revolution in public sentiment, most of the familiar social paraphernalia persist. See: there are the congressmen and the buildings they occupy. They were in session just last week. The president of the United States was talking, sort of, about… well, we can leave that for another day. But still, there are policemen, the IRS, lawyers — lots of lawyers — schools and colleges, courts and judges.
The difference is that none of these people or entities enjoys the level of public confidence — the measure, again, of legitimacy — they enjoyed even a decade ago. Here’s the dirty little secret: no matter what happened to Trump in lower Manhattan — whether or not he was convicted or walked — the prestige of American justice has suffered a serious attack of scrofula.
Almost every serious legal commentator, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, or Trump agnostic — has weighed in with hand-wringing commentary about the unprecedented, overtly biased behavior of Justice Juan Merchan. Trump skeptics from Jonathan Turley to Andrew McCarthy and Alan Dershowitz have written about the case with a mixture of astonishment and alarm. Trump supporters such as Mike Davis and Julie Kelly have kept up a drumbeat of criticism. Only anti-Trump fanatics like the egregious Andrew Weissmann, the brains or at least the Semtex behind Robert Mueller’s two-year $40 million Russian Collusion Delusion can look upon the witch hunt against Trump with equanimity. Asked about Merchan, Weissmann confessed to having a “man crush” on the jurist because of his overt hostility to Trump.
In our system, the judge is meant to be distinct from the prosecutor. Merchan effectively erased that distinction. The Babylon Bee only slightly exaggerated when it said: “Judge Instructs Jurors They Need Not Believe Trump Is Guilty To Convict Him.” That was meant to be satire. But as the Federalist’s Sean Davis commented, “This is both satire and also exactly what the corrupt New York judge has told jurors.” Immediately after the verdict the Bee weighed in with “Donald Trump found guilty of being Donald Trump.” I can’t improve on that.
What isn’t satire but should be is the fact that notwithstanding the pullulating skein of legal maneuvering on the part of the hermaphroditic half-prosecutor, half-judge amalgam that simultaneously presided over and prosecuted the case, no actual crime was ever specified. That is, the jury was instructed to deliberate, to strive for unanimity, but according to Justice Merchan, a distributed unanimity (I bequeath this neologism to the world) would be enough.
Here’s what it means. Justice Merchan told the jurors that they did not have to agree on what the crime in question was. The case started with a possible misdemeanor charge that, through the alchemy of partisan animus, was ginned up to felony status. Since the underlying tort was like the Wizard of Oz, though, Justice Merchan said it would be just fine if they disagreed about what the crime was just so long as they agreed that there was a crime. Four might say it was this, four might say it was that, four might say it was some tertium quid. Just so long as they agreed that Trump was guilty, guilty, guilty — ex, as if were, officio — that was good enough for government work.
It can be interesting to spend some time picking among the ruins of a once-great civilization. The ruins can be physical, as in they are, for example, in ancient Egypt or ancient Rome. But they can also be as it were metaphysical, as they are whenever a society somehow outlasts is animating vitalities.
The United States was built on the ideal of equality before the law. The very words now ring with a mournful quaintness. Who still believes them? As we troll through the vacated monuments of our civilization, we’ll often be reminded of David Hume’s observation that it is seldom that freedom is lost all at once.
This article will appear in the July 2024 edition of The Spectator World.
