by Matthew Boose
If the last seven years of constant anti-Trump intrigue have shown anything, it’s that America’s liberal so-called elites want to govern a certain way and will not tolerate being told otherwise. Given Donald Trump’s recent arrest, they could not make themselves any clearer apart from possibly having the man killed. If he goes to prison, he very well may die there.
These kinds of dramatic outcomes to political battles are supposed to be precluded in a government of consent, which allows for a peaceful transfer of power (another phrase, like Our Democracy™, that has been bastardized in the mouths of the elites). Uprisings, show trials, assassinations, and the like are not supposed to be necessary when the people can choose and remove their rulers.
But the recalcitrance of the elites has pushed the country into a political crisis. Their refusal to be restrained by popular opinion has left a large swath of the population with nothing to lose.
Trump’s supporters are the regime’s helots, the “deplorables” consigned to sweat and toil for a government that openly hates them as they are gradually wiped out by an endless stream of more compliant foreign replacements. They have no reason not to support Trump because the alternative is to be governed like vassals.
When Biden hung the banner of “Pride” from the White House balcony, he was merely making formal the implicit. It was received like the taunt that it obviously was. These humiliations are now a normal part of daily life for the Christians and downwardly mobile middle-class whites who comprise the core of Trump’s base, and who are increasingly unable to recognize the country of their birth.
One needn’t be a fire-and-brimstone type to see a spiritual aspect in the grotesque spectacle that has become of the United States. There are neighborhoods in our cities that resemble scenes from Dante’s Inferno. But as in any oligarchy, the world of fabulous privilege is just a short distance from the mad hell of chaos and disorder. The elites live secure from the evils they midwife, leaving the innocent to face the penalty while they collect their rewards.
The White House is occupied by a venal, sleazy puppet whose sordid crimes have been covered up by the “free press.” The law is deployed to harass and terrorize people like Daniel Penny, the former Marine who was indicted (just a day after Trump was arrested by his political opponent) for restraining a deranged vagrant from attacking bystanders. Penny is no radical ideologue, but he didn’t need to be to provoke the regime. It was enough for him to have attempted to do the right thing.
A regime that treats good people like criminals and criminals like “public servants” exposes its own iniquity. But try explaining that to Jill Biden, who expressed “shock” that Trump still has supporters despite being arrested by her husband’s government for something no worse than something her husband did (and, unlike Trump, he did it without the power to declassify documents). Don’t Republicans realize, she told a room of wealthy donors in Manhattan’s Upper East Side last week, what a serious matter this is?
The Left isn’t trying to persuade anyone of Trump’s turpitude. Their own hands are far too dirty for that. They just want to crush him and demoralize those who find hope in his spirited war with the deep state that has worked endlessly toward his destruction and the ruin of liberty in America.
But until they actually lock him away, Trump will continue to dominate the scene. Strongmen thrive in times of decadence. When disorder becomes unbearable, and the government is neglectful, corrupt, and abusive in turn, people naturally look for protection elsewhere. This is as true today as in any period of political turbulence of the past.
Where others see a wrecking ball to a treacherous oligarchy, the oligarchs naturally see an emergency, a would-be tyrant who threatens the supposedly lawful system of “norms” they claim to uphold. They are willfully blind. In times like these, a charismatic populist like Trump will have appeal no matter how many times he is indicted, or what “crimes” the kangaroo courts can contrive.
To millions of Americans, nothing that Trump has done with any porn star or “classified” briefing measures up to the betrayal of having their country taken from them. Indeed, to earn the proscription of such “elites,” as we have, is its own honor.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
