The Mandela Effect
The Mandela Effect
Even after Trump ascends from his political prosecution, will the country be better off?
Just as Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House seemed to be dropping drastically—amid low-energy opening performances in Waco and elsewhere, an absolutely abysmal digital campaign team, and the growing possibility that somebody more lively than the Grail Knight might come up against him in the general election—a Soros-backed D.A. and a grand jury full of Manhattan liberals are effectively handing him the keys to the kingdom.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the grand jury, at long last, had voted to indict Trump on charges of—well, that’s the thing. Nobody knows what the charges are.
Nobody even knows what the charges could be. They are probably related to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claims she had an affair with the 45th president when he was still just the host of The Apprentice.
Michael Cohen, a sleazy New York lawyer who spent a dozen years in Trump’s employ, claims he paid $130,000 of “hush money” to Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) in 2016 to quiet her claims of the affair.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Most of us were clear-sighted enough about the emperor unclothed.
Either way, it would require acrobatics for this to lead to a grand jury indictment. It doesn’t take a lawyer to realize that any charges coming from this grand jury—barring any wild revelations—are going to be ludicrous. If they were legitimate, don’t you think we’d have an idea what they are by now?
If you have to guess and wonder at what criminal charges could possibly have been conjured in the highest-profile case a country has seen in years, it is a safe bet that said country does not have a legitimate and functional justice system—and that the accused has not been treated fairly by the regime.
Even Trump’s opponents know this.
Ron DeSantis, whose own shadow campaign was flagging even as Trump lost steam, issued a strong statement on Thursday:
The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head.
It is un-American.
The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent.
Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.
Even Mike Pence ripped the move as an “outrage” that will appear “to millions of Americans to be nothing more than a political prosecution.”
Nikki Haley stumbled, but got the gist: “I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than to sit there and have to deal with some political revenge by political people in New York.”
Tim Scott might throw his hat in the ring, and so made the obligatory noises about “a travesty [that] should not be happening in the greatest country on Earth. The presumption of innocence is central to our legal system, yet is selectively discarded by those on the far left today.”
He has a point there. Nancy Pelosi tweeted when the news broke that “The Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law. No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence. Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right.”
Mrs. Pelosi, the former speaker of the United States House of Representatives, might know that no defendant is obligated to prove his innocence in the American justice system. It is doubtful that she cares.
Trivialities like the presumption of innocence pale in comparison to the overriding truth of Orange Man Bad.
This religious belief even supersedes practical concerns. The engineers of the regime must know, on some level, that this is a bridge too far—that a blatantly unjust attempt to jail their one true political rival will backfire, maybe badly.
In living memory, the narrative of political prosecution launched the leader of a group of communist terrorists to the presidency of a vibrant, developed nation. It rendered images and arguments and appeals to deep emotion that overrode virtually all other considerations. (In the present, it also seems to have stripped that nation of its vibrancy and development.)
What could it do for a man who has already won the presidency at least once?
In a statement on Trump’s indictment, the New York Young Republican Club—the country’s oldest and largest—wrote:
President Trump embodies the American people—our psyche from id to super-ego—as does no other figure; his soul is totally bonded with our core values and emotions, and he is our total and indisputable champion. This tremendous connection threatens the established order.
This paragraph was mocked relentlessly on Twitter, and not without good reason. But it is a genuine expression of the way a great many people in this country feel about the GOP frontrunner.
The most devoted base claimed by any living politician has just been given the greatest imaginable motivator to make it to the polls next year. A good many fence-sitters have just been pushed violently off to one side.
How does he lose an election now? There is no answer.
Yet the better question is the one Mandela and his backers should have asked: What—today, tomorrow, one or two generations down the road—will a victory like this cost?
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