Donald Trump Was Convicted. What Does It Mean? Good Question. I'll Tell You What It Means.

The normie take.

I am legally required as a pundit to write a take about Donald Trump’s conviction in New York, so here it is. But to be honest, I don’t have that many interesting thoughts about it. I imagine the next few thousand words are pretty much the normie conventional wisdom about all of this.

He was obviously guilty of these acts. We’ve known that for years. But it’s also not something that I find hugely outrageous. The question of whether the acts could fairly get turned into felonies with the sort of novel usage of the statutes in New York is just beyond my expertise. If the appellate court thinks it was not kosher, they’ll do what they do.

The people attacking the jurors are disgusting. All they did was their job: look at the facts and take the whole thing seriously.

The right-wing freakout is unsurprising, but it makes me totally roll my eyes. The idea seems to be that it is totally beyond the pale because someone not named Donald Trump would not be charged this way. I don’t know if that’s true since I don’t think this has happened many times in the past—John Edwards was tried and acquitted for some similar things, but that was in federal court, and his acquittal is probably one of the reasons the DOJ didn’t pursue the campaign finance side. But even if it is true, I just don’t care?

Hunter Biden is on trial right now for something that also rarely gets prosecuted, and that is just a consequence of his being the president’s son. I don’t care.

I live in a small town. I drive by the same five police cars every day. If I constantly played “Fuck The Police” as loud as possible and flipped them off as I drove by, if I were ever pulled over for speeding, I would not expect them to let me off with a warning.

Trump, more than any politician in my lifetime, chose a political strategy that involved him antagonizing half this country. From day one, he “owned the libs.” He made himself the main character in our culture. And he won a personality cult on the right that loves him. But, he earned the intense disdain of the other half of the country.

There are lots of reasons why I think that was bad for this country and the world, but one reason you shouldn’t do it out of self-interest is that a lot of people are going to be rooting for your downfall. And they are going to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And if you are a criminal who has broken/does break the law, your chances of getting away with it are going to drop precipitously.

If you have a person bound and gagged in your trunk, you probably shouldn’t speed.