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

I have no wish to add to the existential howl attendant on Donald Trumpās conviction in a Manhattan courthouse for a crime that I, like most Americans, would be hard pressed to explain. I donāt like Trump as a politician or a human being. Heās an agent of chaos and a narcissistic vortex of attention.
But I want to say a few things for the record.
When Hillary Clinton, from sheer paranoia, set up her own private server to conduct business as secretary of state, the FBI naturally took an interest. I worked for many years in a classified environment. If I had done anything similar, Iād be writing this from my austere prison cell. But Clinton wasnāt me. She belonged to a different class. The FBI rapped her knuckles gently, called her out as a bad example, but refused to prosecute.
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, Iām not Biden. He belongs to a special class. The prosecutorās report admitted Bidenās 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 thereās 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 isnāt. The actual charges concocted by Bragg against Trump I leave for the legal experts to parse. None of them rose to the level of Clintonās server or Bidenās 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. Americaās 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.
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