When news of Trump's sentencing came on the car radio, I nearly stopped. My thought was: “This is Fort Sumter.” As when the South decided to bombard a fort held by the North in 1861, it seemed like the irreversible first shot in an inevitable civil war.
Why was I so shocked? We've known this was coming for weeks and the impeachment trials of Donald Trump have barely affected the polls. But American public opinion has always emphasized that conviction is important, because it changes the nature of the elections.
Two terrible things can be true at once. Trump governed unmoderately, lost the 2020 election, refused to concede, and was at least the inspiration for the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
But it is also true to say that he was the target of a conspiracy to deprive him of his position. Democrats had every opportunity to nominate a competent replacement in 2020. Instead they chose Joe Biden, a zombie they couldn't convince to step down in 2024. Instead of uniting the country, they put Trump back in the contest.
Unsure they could beat him at the ballot box, Democrats turned to the courts, attacking every conceivable aspect of his career — from sex to business to his mishandling of White House papers — in several states. The strategy was ridiculous. It is usually reserved for gangsters like Al Capone.
So, no, I was not psychologically prepared to convict in New York because the case should never have been brought; Tampering with business records should not be related to influencing elections; Stormy Daniels should not have given testimony unrelated to the case.
It all seemed preposterous. Legal experts now say the sentence, which will be handed down on July 11, is unlikely to include prison time – but if prison is a possibility, I'm betting it will happen. Obviously, the point of this exercise is not to prove the hackneyed point that no one is above the law. It's to prevent Trump from serving another full term.
His campaign will not end. He may end up running for president while being barred from voting. Trump vowed to appeal: If he reaches the White House, he will not be able to pardon himself because this is a state issue, not a federal one. At that point, Mrs. Daniels would be the least of his problems anyway. Three new criminal trials may have begun. Trump hopes that the Supreme Court will exempt him from this; His powers to pardon others will be tested.
Either way, given how easily he could be convicted in New York of such ridiculous charges, we can expect him to face continued and violent legal danger.
In short, the November election is shaping up in the mind as not about jobs or war, but about a referendum on whether Trump should stay in prison. Whatever the outcome, America will lose. Either you get an indicted president, which would be a national humiliation, or Trump gets defeated, screams fraud, serves time, and has violence from his supporters. Those who think you can restore normalcy by locking him up are delusional.
There have already been riots on January 6 that harken back to the worst of the 1960s or the racist Red Summer of 1919. Four presidents have been assassinated before. White supremacists bombed buildings and shot school children.
By comparing 2024 to the Civil War of 1861-65, I risk not only exaggeration but sacrilege, because the great cause of abolition is absent – and the conflict is more difficult to define than Confederate versus Union. But it is rural versus urban, working versus educated, Christian versus secular, with issues – such as abortion or immigration – that define identity and challenge compromise. The two parts of the nation hate each other.
Blame Trump for that, okay. But Democrats raised the stakes by calling him a wannabe dictator, implying that a second term would spell the end of the republic. By now classifying him as a criminal, they have placed him completely outside the law.
Why there is this special hatred for him escapes me. The most dangerous thing any president can do is go to war, but Trump avoided it – while George W. Bush declared two wars, killing millions, and this is clearly the acceptable face of the Republican Party. Reality is less important than perception. Trump's team attacks Biden as a far-left failure, yet he emulates Trump's policies on the border and the economy is doing well.
Irrationalism enters Western politics. A recent film by Alex Garland, “Civil War,” depicts the United States divided into factions – and has been criticized for failing to specify how the conflict began. But the battle is the point. All our mindless anger must go somewhere, searching for the release valve of permissible violence, directed by the logic of unbridled rhetoric. In the 1850s, America witnessed a prophetic killing in John Brown's Raid or Bleeding Kansas, but it was the election of 1860 that sparked all-out war – because the South believed that Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln was the devil and that his victory posed an existential threat.
Lincoln would have despised Trump, but he also recognized in the present danger the death wish that had haunted his country since its birth. One day Abe remarked that a country blessed with geography and talent could never be invaded by outsiders. “As a nation of free people, we must live for all time, or die by suicide.”
