Trial(s) of Trump

same song, different verse

"For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by all her children.”

—Luke 7:33-35

“After five months of exile in Sicily, Michael Corleone came finally to understand his father’s character and his destiny. He came to understand men like Luca Brasi, the ruthless caporegime Clemenza, his mother’s resignation and acceptance of her role. For in Sicily he saw what they would have been if they had chosen not to struggle against their fate. He understood why the Don always said, “A man has only one destiny.” He came to understand the contempt for authority and legal government, the hatred for any man who broke omerta, the law of silence.”

—Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Circumventing the Circus:

Trump is a symbol, and Trump’s trial is symbolic.

In the ancient past, amid an era of superstitions, heretics were burned at the stake; prominent enemy kings were burned in effigy; and even the dead bodies of condemned apostates were dug up and ritually desecrated by the officially-sanctioned church. Heresy was viewed as the precursor to violent political rebellion, and for that reason any public deviation from the official religion was punished systematically, swiftly, and brutally. 

Disobedience was crushed. 

In those days, power ruled openly through military force. 

Knights riding horses. 

In these days, every man is free™, and every man or woman or race is equal™, but some are more equal than others™, and the Global American Empire rules through debt and propaganda. 

Hard power has been forgotten, quietly abandoned in favor of fiat currency and an institutional religion laundered through televised media, public schools, university sinecures, global industrial conglomerates, tangled bureaucracy, and an opaque judicial process. 

The Full House, by Raw Egg Nationalist: 

“Yes, the regime wants to strike at the power players who made 2016 happen, but this isn’t just about making Trump and his close allies pay for what they did and preventing a second Trump term.

The regime is looking beyond Trump. The regime wants to make another Trump, once Trump is gone, impossible. They want to cut the legs off the populist movement before it ever gets the chance to start running. And that means going after the ordinary people who support Trump as well.

…

Our enemies have made their intentions clear. They’re rigging American politics so that 2016 can never be repeated. So that the interests of the American people can never win out again over the interests of the profiteers of American decline. To do that, they need to eliminate patriots at every level of society.”

—The Full House, by Raw Egg Nationalist: 

The Full House (infowars.com)

Casinos are designed so that the house always wins. 

When players win, the owners of the casino instantly suspect the players are cheating — because they know the slot machines are rigged… if the casino loses, something must have gone terribly wrong. 

Democracies are designed so that the uniparty always wins.

The professionalized, managerial elite stays in power regardless of cultural disturbances; the uniparty of bureaucrats, lobbyists, global conglomerates, academic sinecures, and political insiders will always get paid, will always be protected and bailed out, whether in prosperity, stagnation, or bleak recessions.

They are insulated from market pressures, or popular discontent.  

When an outside populist candidate wins a democratic election, the managerial elite instantly suspect the Presidential candidate is cheating — because they know the tangled systems of mass immigration, welfare codependency, choice architecture, and consensus manufacturing are rigged… if the uniparty loses, something must have gone terribly wrong. 

Democracy is designed to keep out celebrity billionaires… 

The process of democratic participation and formal, civic petition of an absent bureaucracy has been meticulously designed to corrupt, redirect, and safely diffuse the rebellious energy expressed by an Occupy Wall Street, by a Tea Party landslide, by a Bernie Sanders, by a Ron Paul… crowds rage in frenetic, manic outbursts and with brief, furious passions… this anger and anxiety manifests in the form of raw, inchoate dissatisfaction which can be procedurally stalled out: delayed and distracted and dampened until the hurricane fury of an electoral landslide has been blunted; diminished; dissipated. 

Democracy is designed to keep out celebrity billionaires… to make an iconic television star like Donald Trump a safely irrelevant and powerless symbol… for him to win a dishonest election in a rigged system (and the managerial elite know it’s rigged because they are the criminals who operate the fraudulent counts)... that must be RUSSIAN interference, there must be some kind of sinister trick, because everything in contemporary America is built to suffocate the voice of ordinary citizens and redirect their passions into performative signals, parasocial media, and evolutionary dead ends.

Malcom Kyeyune (Tinkzorg), America’s Dangerous Election Cycle:

“The barrage of indictments against Donald Trump is election interference. That much, even the former president’s most fervent opponents have to admit… this blatant politicization is probably the point: Trump is to be defeated in a campaign of judicial shock and awe. To be any subtler would dilute the harsh lesson the powers that be intend to impart to half of the American electorate.

But there is no sign that this lesson will be heeded. The Trump mugshot, far from humiliating the man, turned — predictably — into a rallying cry. And while Trump’s ability to campaign will be hampered by the concerted lawfare against him, the actual effect will likely be to make campaigning unnecessary in the first place. When only one candidate is being dragged through the mud by a political party that is busily dismantling what remains of American political norms, supporting that candidate becomes a far more fundamental matter than policy preferences.

…

Democracy only continues to function as long as an electoral system ensures basic compliance and buy-in, which means accepting the legitimacy of results.

…

The mugshot, the trial date, the unrelenting indictments: These are just the beginning of this crisis.”

—Malcom Kyeyune (Tinkzorg), America’s Dangerous Election Cycle

Trump is a symbol, and Trump’s trial is symbolic… because we live in a time of symbolic power.

Procedural force. 

As we witness the desecration and deconstruction of this individual man (Donald Trump) who plays the role of a political symbol (American President, an exiled king seeking to reclaim his throne), it’s worth considering the concrete function of such an abstract symbol — and the relationship of a global empire to its provincial subjects.

Origins of political legitimacy.  

The prosecution of Donald Trump is an injustice, but there has always been, and will always be injustice. More pertinently, the prosecution of Donald Trump is a ritual performance designed for the purpose of intimidation of a domestic audience, and that domestic audience is the tens of millions of frustrated American adults who voted for Donald Trump — tens of millions of Americans who have come to believe that the status quo does not protect them, that the imperial managerial bureaucracy is a parasitic caste which extracts maximal value from productive sectors of the economy while offloading maximal costs; risks; externalities; discomfort onto obedient, productive, patriotic American families.

In his book Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky writes, "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself”.

Prosecuting Donald Trump is a bluff — a signal of coercion. 

The unspoken promise is that anyone who dares to challenge the status quo will be dragged through years of legal harassment, their friends and family will be humiliated and targeted for any casual mistakes, their businesses will be boycotted and bankrupted as pressure is brought against the symbiotic networks of vendors, suppliers, distributors, and contractors who interface with any large, profitable company. 

For a tyrant, the problem of issuing this sort of threat is that a climate of fear only succeeds if you move from words to action, and engage in the expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous campaign of persecuting anyone who dares to openly disrespect your edicts. 

Otherwise, a posture of aggressive belligerence creates resentment, alienation, distrust among ordinary citizens — without cooperation.  

Threats and bluffs are a tremendous burden… a painful obligation… a sort of self-inflicted tax which a tyrannical government must suffer to retain control of a disobedient population. 

The American Regime is attempting to transition from soft power to hard power.

The American Regime is renegotiating the Social Contract upon which civilization rests, and intentionally subverting the traditional expectations of fairness which underpin widespread obedience to a costly system of laws, taxes, and penalties. 

What happens next?

Where are the soldiers, the battalions, the armies prepared to carry out these federal campaigns of persecution?

They don't exist. Neither do internal guerillas.

Ordinary American citizens are not going to transform into forest guerillas and begin a military insurgency. 

Direct resistance is unlikely. 

Instead, the political situation is regressing to the cliched plot of a Western — a sinister gunman has seized control of a small-town, established himself as the local warlord, and proclaimed that anyone who contests the authority of his gang of bandits will be forced out of town. 

What happens next will be the same thing that happens in every Western movie — for a while, the bandits terrorize their small-town: plundering meager treasures, bullying locals, abusing women, crippling individual men who attempt to resist. Briefly the town experiences a Reign of Terror. The bandits are shortsighted criminals who feel invincible, and expect their power to continue forever.

But the people cry out for a hero!

Something is coming.

A lone gunslinger rides into town, nameless and fearless. 

Injustice creates discontent, discontent which demands vengeance and the arrival of a popular champion who will rise against the corrupt, decaying status quo. 

Hence the term, “demand creates its own supply”.

Or as Napoleon Bonaparte said, “I did not steal the crown. I found it lying in the gutter, and I picked it up with the sword. But it was the people who placed it on my head."

Cults of personality will emerge: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Prince, Nayib Bukele. The people desire a hero to liberate them from tyranny. A Caesar.

Perhaps Donald Trump is not “The Guy”. But it’s only a matter of time before there is “A Guy”. 

The Global American Empire is overextended and crumbling. 

Donald Trump is ultimately just a man, and he is the compromise candidate — the next generation of leaders is currently studying him, learning from his mistakes, researching his strengths, analyzing the flaws in the existing system of government. 

Trump has provided a stress-test of a brittle, unprepared system.

The managerial caste of the American Empire intended to prosecute Donald Trump and punish him for the crime of challenging their leadership, and for offering an alternative to slow, gentle decay. To silence anyone who dared to question American Entropy. In a superficial sense, their plans succeeded. What will happen to Trump remains a mystery. 

But the managerial caste of the American Empire ended up prosecuting themselves in the court of public opinion, and have planted seeds of doubt — why does anyone bother to obey this grotesque, derivative menagerie of mediocre, dysgenic conformists?

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones:

““I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think… he’ll be so angry when he gets back…” She shivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”

Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident. Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”

His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things she had always believed were suddenly called into question. “You… you swore him your sword…”

“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his servants?” His voice was bitter.

“He is still the true king. He is…”

Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now. Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”

Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good king, would he?”

“There have been worse… but not many.” The knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.

Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrow sea to free them.”

“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”

Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.

“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked him.

“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with longing.

“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing it.

Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then, Khaleesi.”

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King’s Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.

“My brother will never take back the Seven Kingdoms,” Dany said. She had known that for a long time, she realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words, even in a whisper, but now she said them for Jorah Mormont and all the world to hear.

Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think not.”

“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us home.”

“Wise child.” The knight smiled.

“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. Her heels pressed into the sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, the warm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, it was dusk.”

—George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones:

Ordinary people don’t want “to be free”.

Ordinary people don’t want “to know the truth”.

Ordinary people want to ignore corruption, look the other way, and enjoy their peaceful, productive lives with the families they love — small islands of civilization nestled amid an ocean of barbarism, tragedy, disease, poverty, carnage.

Private happiness amid public misery. That’s what average citizens are chasing. And they want the dignity to pretend otherwise, to pretend they are part of some holy moral crusade larger than themselves, some grandiose heroic project which they can support easily; cheaply; sheltered at a safe distance from the real conflict — hiding behind the sacrifices of heroes.   

There will always be evil, and despair. Heroes are admired because they’re rare. Courage is praised because it’s extraordinary. Normal people want no part of these intensified, geopolitical struggles. 

So it’s worth considering how the Trial(s) of Donald Trump resonate with ordinary people on an emotional, subconscious level.

Paulos MythPilot, The Great House Plan II:

“The intangible benefits here can also be very strong; those things that don’t cost money but people value very highly: community, status, high-quality dating pools, art, ritual. These are things that the market is bad at delivering.

…

Another way to answer the question about retention has to do with assumptions about the future, which I think is going be rough in a way we have not seen in the developed world for some time. Due to the upcoming challenges of the next several decades, I think that people will be clamoring to get themselves admitted into networks that can deliver community, resources, protection, and opportunities. A poorly functioning general society makes the idea of community not only relatively more attractive, but an absolute necessity.

…

Once upon a time, late 20th century America offered the epitome of public life. A boy from a small farm town could access high-quality public education and libraries, travel to the city on public roads, attend world-class universities open to anyone, study anything he wished, and go into a similarly open job market. Any career path he desired was open to him; companies during this period trusted in the education and training provided by formative institutions and were happy to hire complete strangers. He could move anywhere aided by cheap gasoline, and live almost anywhere with a high degree of safety. In the realm of commerce he could buy and sell goods and property from and to whoever he wished, to anyone in the world. If so desired, he could enter politics, or found a company with readily available capital. It was an open world.

…

The Failure of the Open Society

Now imagine you are middle class family in 2020 and public life has been closed by your government. There are barriers to crossing borders, you cannot gather in public, you cannot send your children to school, and unless you have a laptop job you cannot work. If you have a small business that relies on foot traffic, you are in danger of losing it. Furthermore, through some madness, government officials decline to enforce public safety. Downtown shopping centers which used to be areas of recreation are now open-air crime zones predated by roving mobs.

Aside from COVID-era suspensions of normal order, the open society has achieved such scale and penetration that you are entirely exposed to the market. Trade, education, and labor are international. To earn a place at a good university (the primary gate for advancement into the upper-middle class) you must compete with international students, legacy admits, and government-mandated preferred admissions. While productivity has risen for 50 years, wages have not risen commensurably; your wife is obliged to work, so you must outsource childcare to the market as well. Also, because of the twin pressures of international investment and immigration, the idea of buying a home is a distant dream, demand anywhere is demand everywhere; prices in your bracket are simply out of reach. If you are a young person, your exposure is even more extreme. Social life has been forced into digital networks that demand your performance and where you can be easily surveilled. They have the power to thrust you immediately into the global spotlight for consumption by outrage mobs. Everyone, left, right and in-between, lives in fear of being cancelled.

In effect, every structure of social protection between you and the state, or between you and the mob, has been removed. In the Roman republic there were situations where it was impossible for the state to prosecute individuals because they were shielded by the jurisdiction of the paterfamilias. Today, you are subject to overlapping jurisdictions of Federal, State, and municipal governments. Your institutions likewise have jurisdiction over you; as a young man you can be prosecuted in secret Title IX courts without ever being afforded the right to question your accuser. Your subjection does not end there: your job, your professional organizations, the technological systems you interact with; all these cooperate to wield disciplinary power over you. At all times they seek to implement their formative programs on their subjects and extract their consent.

The current hostility of governments and institutions towards their subjects is very strange. For most of human history, it was in the best interest of rulers that their subjects should flourish. More men, women, and children in your kingdom meant more soldiers and laborers. In a world defined by human power, more humans meant more power. Even continuing into the age of mass democracy and industrialization, larger populations could field larger armies. Therefore developed powers had an interest to grow their populations. However, with the advent of nuclear weapons and mass automation, large populations were no longer necessary. Bombs could protect borders, and goods and food could be made by machine. Population growth came to be viewed as a liability that could interfere with development.”

—Paulos MythPilot, The Great House Plan II:

Great House Plan II - by Paulos - Myth Pilot

The Trial(s) of Donald Trump threaten to spook the market, to shatter political legitimacy that prior generations took for granted.

The Libtards are Scaring the Hoes.

The promise of America has been the American Dream: Obey the laws, work hard, marry a wife and buy a house and raise a couple of kids in relative safety, privacy, prosperity, comfort. 

That dream and bargain is dead. 

The new America offered by the ruling managerial caste is a permanent, arbitrary Reign of Terror. 

Everyone is an automatic racist capitalist war criminal for the crime of purchasing groceries farmed in colonial overseas territories, and for enjoying shoes manufactured by child slave labor in a Chinese sweatshop. At any time, for any reason, laws which you don’t know about can be summoned forth to ruin your life. If you dare to exercise the legal rights promised to you by law, the government will unleash powers and resources you’ve never heard of — to crush you like an insect. Be quiet! Everything you love will be stripped from you. Property rights are meaningless. Your job will be automated, or intermediated, or legally abolished, or transferred overseas, or undercut by foreign migrants imported to replace you, or reduced to the transient serfdom of The Gig Economy, or hidden behind a nepotistic network of credentialed institutions which only hire subservient janissaries of the correct ideology… tribe… race… gender… sexuality… pronouns. 

Everyone is guilty… a legitimate target for the federal Leviathan to prey upon. 

Attacks originate from above and below.

From above, the legal and judicial system target opponents.

From below, social media coordinates urban criminals and Antifa paramilitaries who receive indirect funding and legal sanction from a friendly bureaucratic labyrinth of diffused accountability and plausible deniability.

A Reign of Terror has begun. 

But let’s be honest — this particular Reign of Terror is not that scary. These are not the gulags of Stalin, the Red Guards of Mao Zedong, the killing fields of the Khymer Rogue. Obese barren women nagging about patriarchal capitalism and neocolonial heteronormative unconscious racism are very annoying… and that’s as far as it goes, without a trillion-dollar bureaucracy enforcing their temper tantrums. 

Normal citizens are bored by politics, and apathetic towards metaphysical questions.

Anarchotyranny is increasingly obvious. 

The phrase “The Purpose of a System is what it Does” has become popular, much like Watergate was summed up with the expression, “The coverup is the crime”. Translated to regular English, what this means from the perspective of an ordinary person is “All of this is boring, let’s punish someone, then watch football.”

Libtards are obnoxious, and they have refined bureaucratic irritation and petty harassment into an art form. 

These eunuch parasites cannot build aeronautics, or drill for petroleum, or pioneer robotics. Scientific innovation is beyond them. But if there is anything that global, hegemonic Leftist ascendancy has proven beyond dispute, it’s this: Ordinary people will accept, tolerate, and eat a comedic level of shit as long as you tell them a moral authority told them to do so, and there is a safe, comfortable middle-class life of unremarkable obscurity on the other side of a bland lifetime of periodic ritual humiliations. 

The Trial(s) of Donald Trump risks everything that Leftists have accomplished over the past century of Gay Race Communism, by slapping apathetic ordinary citizens in the face and forcing normal people to confront how much they are being robbed and disrespected.

It turns out that average men are cowards who will submit to permanent defeat as long as you allow them some illusory semblance of dignity and subsistence. But push a few inches farther, and a careless, petty tyrant will force the crowd to realize its own strength.

Clownworld was created on the battlefields of 1945.

Masculinity was beaten out of men through the sickening industrial warfare of World War One and World War Two, when millions of brave warriors were genetically culled through constant applications of trenches, tanks, and artillery. 

Industrial warfare stressed individual soldiers in ways that no man was born to endure. 

In 480 B.C., The Battle of Thermopylae lasted three days.

In 331 B.C., The Battle of Gaugamela lasted one day. 

In 1066 A.D., The Battle of Hastings lasted one day.

In 1453 A.D., The Fall of Constantinople lasted fifty-three days. 

In 1815 A.D., the Battle of Waterloo lasted one day.

In 1836 A.D., The Battle of the Alamo lasted thirteen days. 

In 1863 A.D., The Battle of Gettysburg lasted three days. 

Compare those heroic, famous actions against the more brutal, dehumanizing World Wars. 

In 1916 A.D., The Battle of the Somme lasted four months, and shredded close to a million men. 

In 1943 A.D., The Battle of Stalingrad lasted six months, and killed more than one million men. 

Nobody wants to live through another war of that duration, scale, intensity, tragedy, and brutality — ever. Leftists have exploited this entirely justifiable, rational concern in order to push an absurd, humiliating, and dehumanizing ideological program at every layer of community, industry, and government. It’s too much. Mental illness has been permitted too long; the de facto application of the legal code is a parody of the de jure written, official standards of acceptable conduct.

When millions of illegal migrants stream across the Mexico-American border, any pretense of fair government is obliterated. 

Supposedly the Trial(s) of Donald Trump involve 34 felonies, but nobody can explain what he did wrong — some kind of obscure white-collar financial crime where one of his accountants accidentally overpaid in taxes, and this is a VERY-SERIOUS-OUTRAGE which classifies as fraud despite an absence of victims.

The purpose of a system is what it does…  

The symbolism is what matters.

Legal persecutions are a tactical mistake for the managerial Regime, because the main result is to erode the soft power and political legitimacy which protects them from a potential challenger emerging from some counterelite faction. 

Finally, the “rules-based neoliberal postwar order” is coming to an end.

And in a strange way, the Trial(s) of Trump will transition us to a new era.