More important than Alvin Bragg's motives

The Very Stable Genius's unfitness is still the main point

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Well, okay.

I’m pretty confident I can avoid hot takes regarding yesterday’s historic verdict. My basic position remains the same. This was merely the kickoff to a long hot summer and an upcoming autumn fraught with a bitter chill. No need blowing all our energy on the various forms of response - exasperation, indignation, smugness, detachment, a yearning for us all to hold hands and celebrate our common humanity, a mad search for effective distraction - on the first of what will be a cascade of ugliness increasing in momentum by the week. Save something for the dark moment in early November when one of the two unfit candidates for president is declared the winner.

B. F. Skinner would surely be proud of the way his theory of operant conditioning is being borne out in the hours since the falsifying-of-business-records jury found the Very Stable Genius guilty. No sooner does some observer of the scene - not a gloating lefty, but a right-of-center-but-decidedly-not-for-Trump figure - state on social media the obvious truth that a jury of the defendant’s peers has unanimously spoken than the responses along the lines of “you call that a fair trial?” come pouring in.

Sure, Alvin Bragg has had the long knives out for Trump since Bragg ran for his prosecutor job. Lots of people have. (Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, anyone?)

But they share something in common with a lot of people who aren’t spurred to employ shady tactics to bring Trump down: an understanding that Trump chose early on in life to be a garbage human being and should be nowhere near any elected office, local, state or federal.

Adam Kinzinger, an actual conservative and someone who’s never made me question my respect for him, covers pretty much what I’d have to say if he hadn’t already said it. He acknowledges that this is the least serious of the cases Trump is dealing with this year, but that the “felon” brand creates a shift in the course of presidential politics that bodes nothing good.

Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, raises the discussion-worthy point that “[a] lot of the people calling the NY prosecution illegitimate also thought the first impeachment, second impeachment, aborted independent commission, special committee, and special counsel investigation were procedurally unsound. A skeptical person might question their sincerity.”

And David French says that Trump’s “best defenses are legal and technical - which are fine to assert and may win on appeal - but the underlying conduct is gross, again and again.”

Again and again.

I saw someone try to assert on Twitter (X, if you must) that it’s never been proven that the VSG had sex with Stormy Daniels.

Oh, please. She testified in ickily granular detail under oath as a witness at this trial. And there’s the matter of the payment. Why would Pecker and Cohen be so keen to keep her quiet if she were a complete nobody spouting ridiculousness?

But there’s the track record. Trump’s second and third marriages were the result of affairs. The Daniels tryst - and, let’s not forget, the months-long Karen McDougal affair - occurred while his third wife was home with their newborn son.

And there’s what McDougal had to say about what Trump did after the first time they did the horizontal mambo. He put money on the counter! (This doesn’t exactly reflect well on McDougal; she told him she “wasn't that kind of girl,” but continued to see him and claimed to be in love with him.)

There’s the Billy Bush / Hollywood Access tape. There are the tapes of Trump’s on-air conversations with Howard Stern about such topics as Melania’s breasts and the sybaritic scene at Plato’s Retreat.

There’s the E. Jean Carroll episode.

So, in the big-picture scope of things, is Alvin Bragg’s zeal to pin something on Trump more important for the spiritual health of America than the fact that Trump is a solipsistic horn-dog man-child with no foundational principles?

I have to wonder what Rich Lowry’s answer to that is, given his New York Post column today. It bears the throbbingly inflamed title “Lefty DA Bragg Did His Evil Job In Bid To ‘Rig’ 2024 Presidential Election.” I’d expect something like that from Julie Kelly, Matt Vespa, Mollie Hemingway or the Gateway Pundit.

But Lowry is editor-in-chief of National Review and oversaw the March 2016 issue of that magazine entirely devoted to the cover story: Against Trump.

That position seems to have come down a few notches as a priority for Lowry. Or perhaps it’s not his position anymore.

No, the long knives are not the most important point here, speaking of priorities. Not that they don’t indicate an erosion of impartiality in the law-enforcement-and-judicial agencies and branches of our government. That’s a big problem, and must be addressed.

But Trump taking over the Republican Party and more likely than not getting re-elected president is a bigger problem.

We can’t go on applying band-aids to our flatlining status. How blunt of an upside-the-head is going to be required to prevent the permanence of post-America’s unrecognizability?