Lawfare Follies
Wherein the distorting lens of subjective truth subverts reality
In their advertisements for themselves, progressives like to present themselves as the party of facts, evidence, logic, reality and, of course, “the Science.” There are many reasons to doubt this claim, ranging from the comrades’ fervent embrace of gender ideology to their kooky notion that Trump is the American Hitler. And speaking of the Prince of the Golden Escalator, Trump’s enemies are currently beclowing themselves over Alvin Bragg’s three-ring circus of a trial in New York City.
Bulletins emanating from the fever swamps of the Left are celebrating the fact that the Ogre Trump is finally being brought to book by Bragg for committing a heinous crime: the hush money payment to a pornographic actress with whom Trump is alleged to have had an affair, the lovely and talented Stormy Daniels, birth name Stephanie Clifford. Trump’s attempt to prevent the story from going public is said to have constituted “election interference.”
Now certainly, this a sordid tale of adultery and deceit that perhaps would have influenced the 2016 election had it been made public. Then again, perhaps not; Hillary Clinton was that bad a candidate. But here’s the thing: Paying hush money to the pornstar with whom you had an affair is not a crime. And a perusal of Alvin Bragg’s ludicrous indictment will disclose that Trump is not charged with paying hush money to Clifford. How could he be? There’s no law, state or federal, that prohibits anyone from paying someone off to prevent embarrassing information from becoming public.
When the story first came out, there were suggestions that the payment to Clifford might have violated federal campaign finance laws. Both the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department looked into the matter, and both concluded that there were no grounds for prosecution.
In 2018, Clifford sued Trump for libel after he called her a liar for Twitter posts charging that a man acting on his behalf had threatened her over her decision to go public about their affair. Her lawsuit was soon dismissed, and Clifford lost all subsequent appeals. Though the courts ordered her to reimburse Trump’s legal fees to the tune of $600,000, to date she has paid nothing.
What Alvin Bragg is trying to do is give the impression that by paying off Clifford to keep her mouth shut, Trump somehow committed a crime. This is nothing more than prosecutorial sleight of hand. The actual charges against Trump involve falsification of business records, which under New York State law is a misdemeanor—unless the falsification took place in an effort to hide some other crime. But there is no other crime. Campaign finance violations? Nope. Tax fraud? Nope. Witness tampering or intimidation? Nope. Election interference? Nope. Trump is charged with none of these crimes.
When I pointed this out in a Substack Note, however, I got immediate pushback from the comrades. Here are five examples:
(1) Unless the money was used for the purpose of influencing the campaign, in which case it should’ve been filed as campaign contributions. He’ll contend he did it to protect his wife, not to prevent voters from hearing about it.
(2) Try again, boy… He is charged with 34 counts of election interference.
(3) You are correct. Paying money to a porn star that you hosed while your wife is at home with your new born is not a crime. The problem here is how that money was paid out to keep the porn star hosing quiet, and covered up, while running for POTUS. It's the little things that voters might want to know about. It's the ‘Hush Money’ that corporate media is slinging that confuses the situation.
(4) As a matter of fact, that is exactly what the case is about. By paying off a porn star to keep her quiet about their affair so that voters would not know about it, he was interfering in the presidential election. I'm sure he wonders why he bothered, since I don't think it would have mattered - it certainly doesn't matter to his loyalists now. Just like the fact that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll doesn't bother them.
(5) That may be your opinion, but Bragg's charge is election interference. That's a fact. Time will tell if the jury agrees.
Claim (1) is flatly incorrect. It’s not a crime for a candidate to try to keep negative information from becoming public, unless some other law is violated. In this case, no other laws were violated.
Claim (2) is simply wrong. Trump has not been charged by Bragg with “election interference.”
Claims (3) and (4) falsely allege that the public has a legal right to know negative information about political candidates. If this were true, a lot of people who worked hard to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story would be guilty of criminal election interference. But it isn’t, so they’re not, and neither is Trump.
Claim (5), like Claim (2), is simply wrong.
When my original Note was met with this barrage of misinformation, I first assumed that its purveyors were a bunch of bare-faced liars. Progressives are not known for their fidelity to the truth, after all. But now I’m not so sure. While there are certainly journalists and legal experts on the Left who understand exactly what kind of a con Bragg is running, it does appear that the lumpen-Left—low-information progressives, let us call them—genuinely believe that Bragg is prosecuting Trump for election interference. There’s a certain willfulness in their ignorance—a resolute refusal to peruse the details of the case—but they seem sincere in their various delusions.
And this, I think, represents a practical application of that core progressive value, my truth. In this telling, truth is not an objective value, measurable against a set of facts. It is, on the contrary, a personal possession, a construct based on personal preferences. In the case of Donald Trump, the preference of progressives is not that he’s simply a bad man but that he’s the focus of evil in the modern world. Viewed through the distorting lens of their truth, Trump appears as a Hitler, a Vlad the Impaler, a ravening monster intent on the destruction of all that is good and virtuous. And from this it follows that there is no crime of which he could possibly be innocent.
This is, as noted above, a delusion. And because it’s a delusion, the lawfare campaign against Donald Trump will not produce the outcome that progressives desire. It may indeed keep Trump out of the White House, but it won’t usher in a Radiant Future of progressive government—on the contrary. Whatever happens, America after this election will be an angrier, more bitterly divided country than ever before. There’s no alternative now to a disastrous 2025-29 presidential term, a genuine Time of Troubles, with the Oval Office occupied by either a cowardly and increasingly senile old fool or a mercurial ignoramus of spectacularly bad character.
Their truth blinds progressives to this grim reality.
The U.S. has had many miscarriages of justice, but they were almost exclusively the work of isolated individuals (prosecutors, lab technicians, poor defense lawyers, and judges).
Americans realize that justice is not perfect.
Four separate but contemporaneous criminal trials (all instigated by Democrats), many of the charges seemingly a stretch, against a man who has a very good chance of becoming president smacks of banana republic, not justice.
Society survives because of a compact between citizens to follow a certain set of rules. If these rules are broken - especially by the ruling party - Americans start to question the value of that compact.
Right now, perhaps 40% of Americans question the justice of these criminal charges. That is a huge percentage (Eugene Dobbs at his peak got 6% of the vote).
But worse than that, are the thinking Democrats (yes, I know), who understand the situation, and willingly allow the degradation of our justice system in order to bring down a man that they perceive as a tyrant.
Moral expediency is corrosive.
Once moral expediency is normalized society is on the down slope. Imagine how many Republicans are dreaming of regaining power and payback.
But once moral expediency becomes the societal norm, ordinary Americans will question the social compact that rules our country.
That is the real cost of what the Democrats are doing.
I must disagree with you on two points: that Stephanie Clifford, aka “Stormy Daniels,” is “lovely and talented.”
To be fair, I can’t account for her talent, having never seen her, uh, body of work.
But lovely? Hard pass on that. Audrey Hepburn, even in her later years, was the image of grace and beauty. Stormy, on the other hand, reminds me of something my late father-in-law would say: “She looks like she was rode hard and put up wet.” He was referring to horses, but in her case it’s probably literal.