It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? And it’s only Thursday!
I am sorry to say that I was right on target, in my post at the end of February, to argue that the long-awaited Trump trials would do nothing whatsoever to impede his Retribution Reelection, and that you could safely ignore all the drama over them. At this writing, the case against him for the January 2021 putsch is on indefinite hold because his hand-picked Supreme Court is seriously entertaining his claim that he is immune from ever being prosecuted for anything; his trial for stealing beyond-top-secret documents and doing God knows what with them is on indefinite hold thanks to his hand-picked judge; and the Georgia election tampering case is a mess because of the irrelevant, not-very-dirty dirt one of his co-defendants managed to dig up about the prosecutor.
Only the hush money case is proceeding, and if I were a betting man, I’d wager that it will end in acquittal, due to one or more holdouts on the jury, or a mistrial. But even a conviction may not seriously harm Trump’s chances, because every “swing voter” who is driven away will be replaced by another, non-MAGA voter who sees the sentence (which will definitely not include prison) as political persecution. I agree with those who say that many voters may see Trump’s conviction as a replay of the Clinton impeachment, in which his Republican political opponents targeted an extramarital affair that most Americans did not view as a crime. That Trump is allegedly guilty of business fraud, not of having extramarital sex, will be seen as hair-splitting.
The only law-based hope I held out in that February article was that the half-billion-dollar fine Trump owes for his massive business fraud in New York State, plus the money he owes for defaming his “sexual assault” victim E. Jean Carroll, would bankrupt him. But even this hope has proven misplaced, as we saw from the aftermath of the fraud trial. Trump did not have the money to put up the bond required for him to hold onto his ill-gotten gains while he appeals the case, until the head of an insurance company had his firm provide it. Should Trump lose that appeal, it is now clear that his fellow billionaires who became so much wealthier thanks to his first-term tax cuts will not let him fail this time for want of capital.
So barring an impossible-to-foresee major surprise, it is hard to see how Biden can overcome all the factors working against him by Election Day. Fundamentally, his polling approval numbers have not budged in well over three years, with percentages in the high fifties giving him a thumbs down. The laughable narrative that Biden is a doddering an old man while Trump is still as sharp as a stiletto has taken firm hold in more than half of the electorate. On top of which, a lot of normally reliable Democratic voters seem to blame him for his inability to make good on all his campaign promises, discounting the implacable opposition he has faced from the MAGA Party in Congress. So he gets no credit for any good economic news, and meanwhile, the Free-free-Palestines are spoiling for a major riot outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August.
Underlying all this public discontent, as Trump’s niece and devoted enemy Mary Trump says, is unprocessed anger and grief over the COVID pandemic, for which Biden has been scapegoated. It is enraging that a majority of Americans seem to have forgotten about Trump’s “drink bleach and don’t wear a mask!” approach in 2020 — his deliberate and malicious sabotage of public health measures that might have saved half of the one million Americans who died of the new disease. But it’s all part of the public oblivion, or extremely selective memory, about that terrible year. And there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way Biden can fix that, although psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman, writing in The Atlantic, suggested that the president schedule public commemoration ceremonies (Mary Trump drew on their article in her own piece). I doubt that Biden will take this advice, and I’m not sure it would help if he did.
What ‘Retribution’ Will Look Like
So here we are, barreling down the track toward another election disaster, with nothing in sight to stop the runaway train. Neither I nor anyone else can tell you exactly how hot “the fire next time” will burn, but remember, half a million Americans died because of Trump last time, so even if it’s no worse than that, what rational person who had any choice would want to stick around for it?
Certainly, the straws in the wind are all burning and giving off toxic fumes. Trump has so accustomed us all to his constant outrages against decency that many of the things he says and repeats, things that would once have brought the country to a screeching halt, now pass all but unnoticed. Refusing to say he’ll “accept” the election results, and threatening mass bloodshed if they don’t go his way? Yawn! Heard that one before!
But notice how his threats of violence are becoming more specific. He has promised to ensure the prosecution of Biden and everyone else he imagines is responsible for putting him on trial, on the grounds that “turnabout is fair play.” And now that the American public swallowed that with no noticeable fuss, he’s escalated to threatening assassination. Of course, he already did that way back in 2016 with his “Second Amendment people” menace against Hillary Clinton, but she wasn’t the sitting president. Now he’s concocted the bold, new, shiny Big Lie that Biden tried to “take him out” during the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover those beyond-top-secret documents. As is very often the case with these seemingly delusional accusations Trump flings in every direction, he’s really talking about what he intends to do, while attributing it to his opponents. Many have pointed out that in psychology, this is known as “projection,” but it has the added advantage, for Trump, of claiming that he’s only adopting his opponents’ vile tactics out of self-defense when he carries out the very actions he’s denounced.
I hope the Secret Service is paying attention, and that Biden and his family have contingency plans in place if he loses the election, as Trump could order their Secret Service protection withdrawn. We already know from experience how dangerous the immediate run-up to the November election and the interregnum between then and Inauguration Day next January will be. If Trump prevails, he may not allow Biden to serve out those final two-and-a-half months of his term.
After he takes office, he will probably declare some form of martial law, as his aides are not-so-secretly plotting through “Project 2025.” He may start openly promising to do it after the free-free-Palestine riot in Chicago. The point would be to head off any repeat of the 750,000-strong protest march on Washington that took place the day after his first inauguration, and any other form of organized resistance. We may well see MAGA mobs attempting to storm statehouses, as happened before the 2021 putsch. Having already stated his eagerness to use the military within U.S. borders, Trump will then have every legitimate excuse to do that in order “to restore law and order” in the besieged blue state governments. Should any rogue governor or state legislator try to make a stand, all the advantages will be with the MAGA-tized federal forces.
Next, we have the enormous, again openly vowed, project of deporting all 11 or 12 million undocumented migrants. This will require a massive new concentration camp system, which will also be of use for rounding up all the homeless, as Trump said he wanted to do in 2020, and God knows who else after that. Thanks to Trump and the MAGA Party relentlessly propagandizing on the “issue” of the undocumented since 2015, half or more of Americans now tell pollsters that “the border” is the most urgent crisis facing the country, that they want all those millions deported, and even that “internment camps” are fine with them.
Actually carrying out this monstrous crime will provide a temporary economic stimulus for segments of the population that are not (yet) targeted, since there will be jobs a-plenty, first for the construction workers and then for millions of camp guards and other staff. To finance this while handing out tax cuts to those grateful fellow billionaires, Trump and his new regime will merrily take out hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt, which is the kind of massive borrowing that every economist points out will worsen inflation. For which Biden and “profiteers” targeted for political reasons will be forced to take the blame, of course.
Beyond that, the course of the Trump-MAGA-“Christian Nationalist” regime becomes impossible to predict in any detail, because totalitarian regimes are always in a deliberately created state of turmoil. There will be a constant churn of denunciations and purges, of that you may be sure. Perhaps the star of “The Apprentice” will monetize these as a new reality TV show for the ultimate stakes: Watch this week’s cabinet meeting to find out who gets FIRED and then GETS IT IN THE NECK!
The most momentous changes, though, will be global in nature. Ukraine will have to sue for peace as Trump pulls U.S. support and dismantles NATO. However, the Europeans will not want to become Putin’s slaves, so they will have to overhaul their societies for a massive military buildup while building a new alliance. Putin, flush from his conquest of Ukraine, will have his eye on the Baltic states and Poland, and will not take the European opposition seriously. So, I’d expect a massive European war that quickly turns nuclear, which in turn may set off the long-threatened Chinese invasion of Taiwan. What happens at that point depends a great deal on whether Trump or a MAGA successor occupies the White House, rendering the outcome even more uncertain. I would only observe that some historians used to object to calling MAGA a fascist movement, on the grounds that all the historic fascist movements were extremely bellicose, whereas Trump is an “isolationist.” But MAGA-fascism doesn’t need an external war, because it will be so energetically “cleansing” America. A continental space provides more than enough room for all the combat one might wish for.
A lot of that strife will be religion based. Muslims will be in the crosshairs from day one, their indirect assistance in the glorious Trump revolution notwithstanding. (Really, whom will all those angry, angry Iraqis and Syrians in Michigan who have turned on Biden find to blame when the Donald sends the black-shirted secret police he successfully tested in Portland, Oregon in 2020 to kick in their doors? Survey says, the Jews.)
Like its fascist predecessors, the regime will also target the Jews, whom Trump has repeatedly, and with a worrisome increase in obsessiveness over time, called “disloyal.” The fact that he is supposedly “only” talking about those American Jews who vote against him, which is the vast majority, is a detail that makes no difference to minds already primed to hate Jews and blame them for everything they don’t like. And as recent months of the burgeoning free-free-Palestine movement have shown, such minds are by no means confined to MAGA circles, which have actually been happy to rush to the Jews’ defense, if only for tactical reasons and only for now. The anti-Jewish animus of a regime headed by Trump and staffed with senior figures like former General Michael Flynn, who has declared that in the future all Americans will have to follow “one religion,” cannot be doubted, though it may wax and wane depending on what other axes the powerful have to grind. But even if they take few active steps, these figures will find it convenient, like the Czarist Russian regime of old, to let the restless masses commit antisemitic violence, as a social pressure release valve. The reaction of American Jews and a future Israel that may still be fighting for its life against Iran is unknowable.
When the supply of readily targeted Jews and Muslims runs low, Christian sects that had imagined themselves living in Paradise may find out how mistaken they are. After all, “one religion” can hardly be stretched to accommodate weirdos like the Mormons, or maybe even the Catholics. But we have far exceeded our speculative allowance at this point.
The Jewish Question
To return to the present, on Monday, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court branded Israel an outlaw state, no better than the Hamas terrorists who invaded that country and slaughtered twelve hundred innocents while kidnapping two hundred fifty more, touching off the current war. And Americans thought the Japanese were dastardly for bombing Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war!
Formally speaking, of course, Karim Khan merely asked that the ICC put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on trial for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, charging that they have deliberately plotted mass starvation in Gaza as a tool of war and also deliberately killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians there. Khan wants to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas “leaders,” of course, so as to give the appearance of being impartial. More than this, Khan explicitly blamed Hamas for starting the war and also said he is not drawing a moral equivalence between it and the state of Israel. But that is the political effect of his move.
It is also a grievous failure on Khan’s part not to call for the prosecution of Iranian supremo Ali Khamenei and his henchmen, for all the support and encouragement they have given to Hamas to attack and slaughter Israelis of all ages and conditions. One suspects that this is partly because of a general flaw in the entire concept of international law, wherein its practitioners pretend to ignore the political ramifications of what they are doing while in practice they are forced to play politics. So assorted pundits now gravely inform us that if Netanyahu and Gallant are not hauled in, this will be a failure of the “international order,” which is apparently the very latest thing those filthy Jews and their filthy state are accused of threatening. Never mind that it is Khamenei’s Iran, which flaunts its contempt for any international rules, that along with its terrorist franchises all over the Middle East is actually trying to destroy the international order.
By the by, Netanyahu ought to thank his lucky stars that he was unsuccessful in his attempt to destroy the independence of the Israeli judiciary throughout 2023 until the October 7 attacks. Had he and his co-conspirators succeeded, his chances of actually going to trial and being convicted at the ICC would be much greater, because the legal principle of “complementarity” requires the court to turn away cases against leaders of a country with an independent judiciary willing and able to prosecute any crimes those leaders are alleged to have committed. The stern-faced Mr. Khan has no real argument against the independence of an Israeli judiciary that has openly defied Netanyahu, which will hopefully lead the three-judge panel hearing his request to turn him down.
Anyway, that was just Monday! On Wednesday, we had Ireland, Norway, and Spain announcing they would “recognize” a Palestinian state. Like everything else in this conflict, this issue is impossibly convoluted, but the accused war criminal Netanyahu is not wrong to point out that the political upshot, given the current context, is to reward Hamas for its terrorism. Spain in particular is playing with fire, since jihadis have already staged attacks there as part of their campaign to reconquer the country once ruled by North African Muslim Moors as “al-Andalus.” If they proclaim a new caliphate under that name, how will the Spanish government respond to pressure to recognize that? After all, from a jihadist point of view, “Spain” is an illegitimate occupier of a Muslim land!
And then there’s this little “detail of history,” as that ever-charming Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen might call it: At the same time the modern nation-state of Spain came into existence through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castille in the resonant year 1492, it expelled all the Jews who had lived there since before Christianity even began. One begins to suspect that the heirs of those super-duper-Catholic monarchs resent the fact that the Jews didn’t just disappear after their exile. As the late arch-liberal Israeli writer Amos Oz said in 2002, those oh-so-cultured Europeans’ true sentiment seems to be, “Jews, don’t be here, and don’t be there. JEWS, DON’T BE!”
The trouble is, those awful Zionists won’t just sit there and take it while telling themselves it’s God’s will. An approach I would not recommend to you either, dear reader.
Emanuel Goldstein 