The aristocrats who martyred Trump (2024)

Trump in New Jersey at the weekend (Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

When Joe Biden mishandled classified documents in an apparently egregious manner, he attracted the attention of a special prosecutor. The ensuing investigation proved without a doubt that Biden had violated the law. If I had done the same thing, and stashed government secrets in my garage near my trusty Rav4, I would never see the light of day again. But again, I’m not Biden. He belongs to a special class. The prosecutor’s report admitted Biden’s guilt but refused to prosecute because the president of the United States, leader of the free world, was too old and dotty to be held accountable.

Then there’s Trump. The New York State district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat with powerful political motives to bring down the likely Republican nominee. That should be a scandal but, in the ethical muddle of our age, it seemingly isn’t. The actual charges concocted by Bragg against Trump I leave for the legal experts to parse. None of them rose to the level of Clinton’s server or Biden’s garage sale of secrets. But Trump is the monster that haunts the nightmares of the privileged class. He must be prosecuted in multiple times and places, convicted, fined hundreds of millions, imprisoned, annihilated, pulverised.

The whole process stinks of desperation. If the progressive elites who run the Biden administration felt confident they could defeat Trump at the polls, we would hear Homeric laughter ringing from the White House and its pet organs in the news media. But Biden is terribly unpopular, even among his base. America’s elites fear and mistrust the American voter. They have lost faith in democracy, a system that in 2016 delivered the power of the presidency to the monstrous Trump, and they dream of a rising class of Platonic guardians, people exactly like themselves, with the right pedigree, the right opinions, the right manners, who rule not because they have won an electoral lottery but in perpetuity, as a reward for their superior virtue.

Convicting Trump as a political insurance policy brings us a step closer to a fatal turning point in American history. This country, Abraham Lincoln said, was founded on a proposition: that all are created equal. That proposition has liberated millions from within and attracted millions more from abroad. For most of us, it meant little more than being left alone by the cops and the structures of power. But for others, evidently, there was an expectation of utopia, of perfectly proportional equality in every dimension and transaction, that has failed to materialise. Dismayed, the progressive elites have turned their backs on representative democracy and now seek an aristocracy of virtue. The forms will remain the same but the substance, with a wink and a nudge, will respect caste and breeding.

Can this really happen? To an alarming extent, it already has. A single monolithic class controls most of the key institutions of American life. Between a high official at the State Department or the FBI, an executive at Google or Nike, and an editor at the New York Times or NPR, the difference is scarcely noticeable. Conformity in word and gesture is mandatory. And these people have persuaded themselves that contemporary society is too complex for the public to navigate safely. Given the madness of social media, the prevalence of fake news and disinformation, the appeal to simple minds of post-truth populists like Trump — given all the chaos, there’s a need for stern measures. Information must be controlled. Prominent dissenters must be cowed into silence if they wish to keep their jobs. The cops must go after the populists and haul them off to prison.

In the present case, however, such tactics may backfire. It is remarkable to note how much of Trump’s popularity is a function of the intemperance of his enemies. After his defeat in 2020, Trump drifted downward in a semi-quiescent state. The announcement of his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination wasn’t greeted with wild enthusiasm. This exhausting reality show had been cancelled for a reason. Few were begging for a new season.

Then Biden sent the FBI to Mar-a-Lago, and the whole dynamic of the race changed. Trump was once again the centre of attention, the master of ceremonies, as he had been in 2016, and no one else could get a word in edgewise. His Republican opponents felt obligated to stand behind him. Trump crushed them without difficulty in the primaries. So it boiled down to a choice between Trump and Biden – and the latter is perceived by the public to be an inarticulate failed president, ageing badly, whose minions are attempting to cheat their way into another presidential term. A wistful nostalgia for the Trump years now permeates a large segment of the population.

Conviction could boost this trend by another level of magnitude. Trump is no longer Trump: he has been transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elites’ abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality. The MAGA faithful are beside themselves with rage – but rank-and-file Republicans, who have always been ambivalent about Trump, are just as livid. Ordinary voters who lack strong political inclinations can recognise in Trump’s persecutors the traits of the class enemy. Many who embrace the American tradition of rule of law may overcome their distaste for Trump the person and align themselves with Trump the symbol. The political consequences for Biden would then be the opposite of what was intended by that first raid at Mar-a-Lago: devastating defeat.

“He has been transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elites’ abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality.”

I don’t give a hoot about Trump, but I care a lot about my country. I find elite pretensions to be a kind of self-deluded nihilism: they are not as smart or as capable as they imagine, and they are willing to bring down the temple of democracy so long as it buries their enemies. An Ivy League education has apparently bestowed on them no understanding of history — no clue of how hard it is to fix a nation once it has been broken.

Imprisoning political opponents is what the Putins and the Castros do. It shouldn’t be allowed to stand here — it isn’t who we are or have ever been. As our Founders understood, the aristocratic principle invariably fails because the aristocrats are unworthy. Outside the courthouse, after his conviction, Trump said that the true verdict would be delivered by the American people on Election Day. I can only hope that he’s right.