Donald J. Trump has been indicted on 34 counts of felony. The charges, according to all but the most partisan hacks, are overblown. At the core of the litany of accusations arrayed against the forty-fifth (the first former president to be indicted in our history) is the claim that the former president paid $130,000 to the pornographic actress, Stormy Daniels, to remain quiet about an evening they spent in flagrente delicto as Donald Trump prepared to run for president in 2016.
While that is not necessarily a criminal offense, lying about the purpose of the payments on one’s tax forms—as the Trump Organization, the entity that allegedly paid the money to Stormy Daniels via Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen—is a crime.
The French Wouldn’t Care
Still, that crime is essentially a nothingburger. No one has actually been sent to prison for fudging payments to a mistress (let alone a supposedly sloppy one-night stand at Lake Tahoe) by claiming it was attorney’s fees. If that were indeed a criminal offense, most of the men in France’s political class would have been locked up long ago.
Je te dis merde!
Then again, the French have always been better at living than we Americans. They do not suffer from our vestigial puritanical and hypocritical standards (yes, the fact that Trump is being subjected to this inquisition by the very same people who turned a blind eye to Bill Clinton’s dalliances or who took flights aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s creepy sex plane is the definition of hypocritical).
Alas, Trump is the Emmanuel Goldstein of our time. Glenn Beck and virtually every other Right-wing pundit are quite correct when they say it no longer matters whether one likes or dislikes the forty-fifth president. He has become a symbol. It really doesn’t matter anymore if Trump is guilty or not. What will define people going forward into 2024’s contentious election is whether they stand for or against Trump.
Democrats and Their Double-Standards
There will be no referendum in 2024 on President Joe Biden’s shambolic policies. No discussion of how everything has collapsed for this once-mighty country in just three short years. We will be engaged in full-blown symbolic and memetic warfare designed to sway voters to voting for or against the forty-fifth president.
This is the greatest tragedy of all.
Because there are real issues that we as a nation must discuss and determine in a rational way. All that is gone with the former president’s show trial (which is set to continue December 4, meaning that the Left is going to drag this out over the course of the presidential election).
What the Left never fully understood about the former president is the fact that he was the most honest huckster of our time. Loud, brash, lacking all nuance, and totally full of it—the man could sell the dream better than anyone— Donald Trump was like every realtor I’ve ever dealt with.
Except, to his credit, the man was incredibly successful in a very cutthroat world of Manhattan real estate. He leveraged his wealth and salesmanship to parlay into an even more successful career as shameless celebrity. Yet, the man whose separation from his wife and subsequent extramarital affair with a dancer was called the “divorce of the century” that supplanted even some major international news at the time, was a known quantity to the rest of us voters.
Yes, he was unapologetic in his ability to obfuscate and gaslight audiences into believing whatever product he was peddling was going to solve their woes. But, like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, most of us understood he was just selling the dream—and most of us were fine with it because that’s what successful people do.
The Democrats don’t understand the way that this indictment will blow up in their faces.
Donald Trump Was Who We Thought He Was
Regardless of whether they win in 2024, the fact remains that the MAGA side of the Republican Party is about make their lives a living Hell. The country’s politics will be in even more chaos going forward and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s (R-GA) highly irresponsible rhetoric about a “national divorce” might suddenly become palatable to many more people the longer the chaos reigns.
The Democrats have made Donald Trump stronger. Most voters already knew what Trump was, and they didn’t care. Some won’t vote for Trump out of sheer spite and that may be enough to stop him in a General Election—maybe.
There is evidence to suggest, however, that while most Americans believe Trump committed the crimes in question, an equal majority think the prosecution against him is purely political. This means that they don’t want to see this trial going forward. Trump may suddenly be the beneficiary of unexpected voter sympathy.
What’s more, this trial will lay bare whatever secrets he was holding onto. Trump was a unique figure to run for president. His dirty laundry was well-known to the public and he had no inhibition about sharing his innermost thoughts and feelings with the world via his social media app. Since his arraignment, it has been revealed that Trump was covering up more than one affair and he may have had a secret love child.
Who cares?
If it were Mike Pence who was the subject of these accusations, the whole country would be piling on because Pence wears his Christian morality on his sleeve.
But Trump?
Did anyone honestly believe the man wasn’t always tomcatting and likely had a small army of illegitimate children lining every dressing room from Burbank to 30 Rock?
More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine
Now that Trump’s secrets are out in the open and he is still running his campaign, what else does the man have to lose? The elite has lost their leverage on him. They can only make his remaining time on this Earth a living Hell—and he has shown a penchant for doing the same to them (which is why they are attacking him with such vitriol).
Trump is going to go for the political jugular. Whether he can draw blood is another matter entirely.
But try for it he will.
The elite haven’t damaged the former president at all. They’ve just empowered him more. The next year is going to be one helluva ride. The tragedy in all this is that there is a candidate in Ron DeSantis who actually could easily win a General Election against the Democrats and get this country moving again. Biden and Trump, the two geezers in the room, won’t let that happen.
Expert Biography
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
