The last few days are a preview
Rich Lowry
If Donald Trump’s Truth Social post about his impending arrest made it feel like our politics was about to reach another level of insanity, just wait.
The impending Alvin Bragg
prosecution offers a taste of what our national politics will be like post–November
2024 if Donald Trump wins the presidency again.
The Left freaked out in 2017,
and that was before the Trump attempt to overturn an election, before January
6, and, we can presume, before he was indicted, perhaps more than once.
If Trump wins again via the
Electoral College while losing the popular vote, it will be considered a
damning indictment of our constitutional system, and there will be some new
reason — some equivalent of Russian election interference in 2017 — for
progressives to deny the legitimacy of his victory.
There will be large-scale
street protests, making good on the threat that had cities around the
country boarding up prior to the 2020 election.
The atmosphere will be
fevered, and however much people lost perspective in 2017, the reflex will be
to lose it even more.
The notion of national divorce
will gain more traction on the left.
Trump will probably be in personal danger, and so will nearly anyone associated with him.
Security around cabinet
officials will have to be beefed up, and the question won’t be if White House
staff members will be harassed in restaurants and other public places, but how
threatening it will be.
For his part, Trump would
certainly be running an ALL CAPS presidency.
He promised as much at CPAC earlier this month: “In 2016,
I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your
justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your
retribution.”
When Hugh Hewitt pushed Trump
on this point in an interview, asking if he would “use the powers of the
presidency to punish people who punished you,” he denied it.
“I would be entitled to a
revenge tour, if you want to know the truth,” Trump replied, “but I wouldn’t do
that.”
Why? Because he is so beholden
to propriety and institutional constraints?
The revenge tour isn’t a new
thing, by the way. During his first term, Trump demanded the arrest of his enemies. Why would a
second term be any different, especially given that he is angrier and more
aggrieved than a few years ago?
What is likely to change is
that the administration will be stocked with officials more likely to act on
Trump’s worst instincts and half-baked ideas than the first time around. After
seeing how many of the officials from the first term had bad ends — cashiered
or insulted or both — the pool of people willing to say, “Thank you, sir, may I
have another,” will be much smaller.
Republicans on the outside
will surely find themselves often forced into the same position as this week,
when they’ve tamped down Trump’s call for PROTESTS of his prospective arrest.
Of course, the wilder a Trump
administration gets, the crazier the opposition becomes, and vice versa. Energy
that in a different Republican administration could be devoted to moving the
ball forward will be dissipated in an endless cycle of chaos and drama.
It would be profoundly
irresponsible of Alvin Bragg to go forward with the indictment and arrest of
Trump. The only upside is providing a preview of a future that Republicans, no
matter how much they oppose Bragg’s prosecution, should want to avoid.
Rich Lowry, National
Review, March 21, 2023 7:11 AM
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