Donald Trump arrest: Trump and Alvin Bragg are what we deserve
Timothy P. Carney
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The indictment of former President Donald Trump and accompanying statements by New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg tell two stories of America’s decline.
The first story could be called “The Death of Conservative Outrage.”
DONALD TRUMP ARREST: READ THE FULL INDICTMENT IN THE HISTORIC CASE AGAINST THE FORMER PRESIDENT
In the 1990s, conservatives said it was a travesty and morally harmful that the president of the United States carried on an affair in the White House with an intern half his age. The news media and the Democrats dismissed this as religious Right moralizing.
But we conservatives were correct back then. Former President Bill Clinton’s lying and philandering and Hillary Clinton’s constant scheming harmed our nation. They made us worse people.
By 2016, conservatives didn’t care about the moral health of our nation anymore — or at least no longer believed that our leaders’ character affected our national character.
It’s one thing to believe that Trump, despite his total lack of humility, self-control, concern for others, fidelity, honesty, civic-mindedness, or virtue of any sort, is nevertheless a better president than Hillary Clinton or President Joe Biden. Given Hillary’s marrow-deep corruption and Biden’s complete devotion to the Left’s radical agenda, that’s a debatable position.
But the Trump era has seen conservatives shutting their mouths about Trump’s serial infidelities, use of his position to enrich himself, and utter lack of concern for speaking the truth.
The underlying story of Trump’s indictment is the catch-and-kill payment and hush money payments made to silence Trump’s alleged affairs. Maybe the affairs didn’t happen, but there’s no reason to believe they didn’t when considering how he bragged about his infidelities in the 1980s and 1990s.
America would be in much better shape if we did not have a president whose candidacy precipitated hush money or catch-and-kill payments. That’s the story of the death of conservative outrage.
The other story is the Left’s embrace of the overzealous prosecutor. Inspector Javert, the antagonist in Les Miserables, is now the protagonist in the Left’s story of America. Conservatives used to criticize the Left for being relativists, but now they are absolutists. The American Left used to be better than the Right at showing the virtue of mercy, but mercy and forgiveness are now outre.
Bragg does not have a good case against Trump. Yes, he has the Trump Organization doing shady accounting to cover up hush money to cover up an affair. All of that speaks to Trump’s unfitness for office. It doesn’t make the case that Trump is a felon.
Right now, it seems that Bragg’s case rests on the premise that Trump’s hush money payments are, by definition, campaign related. That’s absurd. If every expenditure that helps a presidential candidate has to come out of campaign coffers, then many newspapers and corporations would be in a lot of trouble.
If the National Inquirer’s expenditures to elect Trump should count as Trump campaign expenditures, then Bragg’s partisan indictment should count as both a reelection expenditure for Bragg and a campaign contribution to the Democratic National Committee. Sadly, it should probably also count as a contribution to Trump’s primary campaign.
It’s tempting to say America deserves better presidential candidates and better prosecutors than we have. But there’s no evidence we actually do deserve better.