Trump's Last Battle

Down But By No Means Out

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

On the surface, it’s not been the greatest of weeks for Donald J. Trump. After all, it isn’t every day that a former president of the United States finds himself indicted on four separate federal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruct the electoral count during the 2020 presidential election, with another indictment likely to follow regarding Trump’s machinations in Georgia that year.

This follows 37 charges in June relating to Trump’s handling of classified docs, and a $250 million law suit from New York attorney general Letitia James against Trump and three of his children. This is enough criminality to make Watergate look like a minor traffic infraction in comparison.

It’s all looking a bit grim for the Emperor of Mar-a-Lago, or at least it should be. This really ought to be the moment - belated to be sure - when the scales finally fall from the eyes of all but the most corrupt , the most depraved, and the most manipulated of Trump’s supporters; when the politicians who finally jump off his bandwagon scattering mea culpas for the monster they created.

But 2023 is not 1972, and the baseline threshold of acceptable political behaviour in the United States long ago collapsed like so much rotten wood under the weight of monstrosities who make the Nixon era look like a golden age. And even though Trump has been indicted for grievous crimes against American democracy, millions of Americans with eyes are not willing to use them, or will only see what they want to see.

No one can be surprised to find Trump boasting of the indictments as a ‘badge of honour’ or describing himself as a victim of political persecution comparable to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This is what he will always do, and he isn’t the only one.

Polls show that Trump’s support within the Republican Party actually increased following Jack Smith’s indictments. As a presidential nominee, Trump is miles ahead of his nearest challenger, the absurd coward Ron DeSantis. Some polls for the 2024 election have him tied with Biden on 43 percent, while others give Biden a 44 percent lead.

Don’t these voters have a moral compass, you might ask? The answer to that would be a resounding no, at least not when it comes to Trump. After all, these voters include people who believe that the rapacious pussy-grabbing sociopath is Jesus Christ, or at least that he has Jesus’s ear, like the supporter on the Gab social media platform who responded to Trump’s arrest this Easter with the observation ‘Seems there was someone else who was tortured and crucified.’

As another supporter on Telegram put it that same month: ‘Good vs. Evil. Biblical times. Divine timing.’

The least that can be said about such comments is that they lack empirical rigour. But so do the QAnoners who believe that Trump is fighting a cosmic battle to save children from being raped and eaten by Hilary Clinton and Celine Dion in order to drain adrenochrome from their brains. And the Twitter trolls who posted pictures of Jack Smith as the ‘face of evil’ over the last week. Or the politicians like Sarah Palin and Marjorie Taylor Greene who believe that the Democrats are ‘communists.’

You’re not going to get much sense or honesty from these quarters, let alone regret or repentance. Politically and morally speaking, this is the twilight zone, where a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Republicans believe law enforcement officials are engaged in ‘politically motivated investigations’ against the former president, and another poll in March found that 58 percent of Republican voters still believe the 2020 election was ‘rigged’.

In effect, the entire Republican Party is infected with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome'), and this is why the likes of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - a man who would pimp his own mother for political advantage - are working themselves up into a lather of fake-indignation, echoing Trump lawyer talking points that the former president was merely exercising his right to ‘free speech’ by challenging the 2020 election results.

In fact, the indictment goes to some lengths to point out that this was not the case, and that Trump is not being charged for expressing his opinion, but for actively colluding and conspiring to undermine the election, thereby denying American voters their democratic rights.

McCarthy et al are too co-opted, too craven or too self-interested to care less. As long as the base sticks with Trump, they will stick with the base. And DeSantis is no better, simultaneously trying to distance himself from the ‘rigged’ 2020 election narrative while also describing the indictments as politically-motivated.

Some more hopeful polls this week suggest that 52 percent of Republicans wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was in prison on election day, and that nearly half of Republicans wouldn’t vote for him if he was convicted. This is hardly the stuff of political happy endings.

‘If’ is the key word here. Should Trump’s lawyers succeed in delaying his trials, he could win the election and then pardon himself. And even if he is convicted and ends up in jail before the election, it’s entirely possible that some Trump-surrogate like DeSantis could run on a ‘pardon Trump’ ticket and do just that.

From Trump’s point of view, he has to become president to stand a chance of staying out of jail, and if he achieves these aims, he has made it clear that he intends to inflict ‘retribution’ on those responsible, in messages like this deranged post on his Truth Social platform:

A Trump spokesperson has since issued a statement defending the former president’s post, as ‘ the definition of political speech, and was in response to the Rino [Republicans in Name Only], China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and Super Pac’s.’

Few people are likely to be fooled, except those who want to be. And in order to understand what Trump might do in order to win, and what he might do if he does win, let’s take a closer look at the way he has depicted his enemies.

The Deep State

Long ago, back in the late sixties and early seventies, the concept of the ‘deep state’ was used by the left to refer to the ‘strategy of tension’ pursued by obscure elements within the Italian state, who appeared to be colluding with both left and right wing terrorism in order to push Italy towards an authoritarian democracy.

Today, this imagery of puppet-masters working in the shadows has become a recurring theme in the right’s neo-gnostic view of the world, to describe not only any opposition to anything the right wants to do, whether legal or political, but also any attempts to indict or discredit Donald Trump. In July 2018, Kevin McCarthy - of course - described an anonymous op-ed critical of Trump published in the New York Times as evidence of a ‘permanent political class in Washington that believes that it has a divine right to rule the American people. You could even call it a Deep State.’

You could, though if you had even a smidgeon of honesty and integrity, you probably wouldn’t. No surprise then to find Lindsey Graham in November 2019, responded to revelations that Trump extorted the Ukrainian government for political gain with the observation ‘When you find out who is the whistleblower is, I’m confident, you’re gonna find out it’s somebody from the deep state.’

Allegations like this will not be unfamiliar in the UK. In February 2018, a number of Brexiters accused the Treasury of having ‘fiddled the figures’ to make post-Brexit economic assessments seem worse, such as the the ex-Brexit Minister David Jones, who warned that ‘ the last of the Remain tendency are deep within the bowels of the Treasury.’ The Treasury’s negative assessments also moved Jacob Rees-Mogg to wonder ‘if there isn’t a pattern in that, whether there is some orchestration of the stars.’

If the Deep State can orchestrate the stars, it can also bring down prime ministers, according to the indefatigable truth-teller, Dan Wootton at GB News, who described the Privileges Committee investigation into Boris Johnson’s rule breaking as an ‘anti-democratic campaign…that threatens to undermine British democracy itself…The deep state stitch up of Boris Johnson could have ramifications for our political system…the stakes could not be higher.

Blessed is the nation that has such democrats to defend it. In the UK the sinister references to the Blob’ and the ‘Deep State’ have been used to justify attacks on the civil service, and Trump has a surprisingly similar agenda. One of his last acts before the 2020 election was an executive order moving federal workers in ‘confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating’ civil service jobs into a new job classification, which would make it possible for the government to remove and appoint government employees at will.

As Trump described it in a rally that year, these were ‘ critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,’ in order to ensure - wait for it, that ‘The deep state must and will be brought to heel.’

This order was rescinded by Biden, but Trump has never abandoned these aspirations. In March this year he told a rally that if re-elected he would remove parts of the federal government in order to ‘totally obliterate the deep state.’ This, he insisted, was ‘the final battle…Either they win or we win.’

It’s clear why Trump must win this ‘battle’. But many of his supporters are so afflicted with TDS that they see the world in exactly the same terms as he does. They believe that Trump is the victim of a ‘deep state’ plot, and even if they don’t believe it, they will pretend to, as Ron DeSantis did this week, when he promised to transform the federal bureaucracy through mass firings, in which he would ‘start slitting throats on Day One.’

DeSantis has been widely condemned for using violent language. But violence is a very real possibility, whether Trump wins or loses. And if he wins, and attempts to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own appointees, this will not be an attack on the Deep State or a ‘critical reform’ of government.

It will be an act of vengeance, and an authoritarian power grab by a criminal and would-be tyrant that would spell the end of American democracy, and send a dark message across the world.

And the great problem that America - and the world - now has, is that millions of people know this, and don’t care.