One Historian's View

 Biden’s handlers thought it was a sly Machiavellian move to coordinate local, state, and federal prosecutors to wear down Trump, bankrupt him, destroy him mentally and physically, and brand him as a criminal felon—through a long winter, spring, summer, and fall of lawfare of the sort never witnessed in America before. But the latest Michael Cohen iteration—Liar, Crook, Spy, Grifter, and now Thief—along with Judge Merchan’s one-sided, adolescent pouts, have blown up Alvin Bragg’s circus—even if the biased judge warps the proceedings and a slanted jury were to nullify the evidence and convict Trump. The judges—Lewis Kaplan (Carroll case), Arthur Engoron (James), and now, the most touchy, and prejudicial of the three, Juan Merchan (Bragg)— have proved so imprisoned by their Trump animus, so ideologically transparent, so intent on ignoring even the pretense of applying the law equally to all parties, that they have lost the American people. Ditto Fani Willis. The nation is daily becoming more embarrassed—and angry over— how the world’s once finest example of jurisprudence has been reduced to the status of the Soviet show trials. And for what? To ensure that the supposedly Satanic Trump not be voted into office by the voters through the machinations of lawyers? The prosecutors, the judges—and the White House—do not realize what they have unleashed, a growing repugnance for the Left, spreading now across class, race and gender lines. Sometimes it is manifested in polls showing overwhelming support for Israel, and disdain for the pro-Hamas protests; sometimes in clear disapproval of the show trials; sometimes in Biden’s plummeting approval ratings  (36% in the latest poll); sometimes in the paranoia and panic that Biden may do to his party what McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1980 accomplished. When these ritual trials are over, the country won’t revert to square one. But instead, Americans will be permanently distrustful of their courts. In cynical fashion, they will never again quite believe the once American hallowed idea of blind justice and equality under the law. And we will forever remember who did all this to the country. Biden’s Morehouse speech was one of the most bizarre graduation embarrassments in memory. It was more than just hateful and divisive, given it was anti-American to the core. In Biden’s demagoguery, 2024 black America must try “ten times harder” to excel than a hateful white America—now in the sixth decade eighth decade of affirmative action and the second decade of woke reparatory hiring and admissions. Biden, heretofore infamous for compiling the most extensive corpus of racist drivel of any modern politician, screamed to a hard-working cohort of graduates that their country was racist, hopelessly flawed, and deserving of the smears he so insidiously leveled. Why even try after all that? His graduation address was reminiscent of his prior creepy, red-twilight Phantom-of-the Opera “semi-fascist/Ultra-Maga” rant, and the SOTU shout-fest. In these diatribes and others, a hyped Biden screamed, slurred his words, grimaced, growled, and grumbled his way through smear after slur—presenting a challenge even for the Orwellian transcribers who sought to recreate what Biden should have said rather than what he actually said. When Old Yeller shouted to the NAACP audience, he proved beyond comprehension requiring the transcribers to change at least nine incomprehensible shouts. (Note that the White House clerks edit the transcriptions to erase the blabbering—but not the lies, given there is assumed value in Biden repeating ad nauseam that he inherited 9 percent inflation.) Meanwhile, Biden is reigning over a general, self-induced societal collapse. Anti-Semitism has been exposed as a campus religion, more so the more expensive, private, and supposedly elite the university. The DEI commissariat is transparently racist, anti-white, anti-Semitic, and keen to destroy meritocracy. The Left blew up the notion of a magnanimous America welcoming in the best and brightest foreign students from across the globe, eager to receive unmatched education and exposure to a civilization guided by the Bill of Rights. Instead it has created campus enclaves of hatred, magnets for tens of thousands of guest students who are unabashedly pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, anti-Jewish— interpreting the hospitality of their hosts as Western decadence to be mocked on the assurance that in our decline we have no values, no honor worth defending. The radical foreign student presence on our campus is merely the elite bookend to a nonexistent southern border, through which 10 million unknowns have swarmed across, without audit, but with the correct assurance that Biden and the Left welcome them as useful constituents. Biden inherited a calm world, and in less than four years it is on the brink of an existential end in Ukraine, a new war in the Middle East in which the Israeli homeland is now the target of Iranian missiles. Biden apparently believes Iranian autocracy is more attuned to his values than democratic Israel, given he is doing far more to destroy the elected Israeli government than the dictatorship in Iran. China rightly feels that it can send with impunity a spy ballon across the continental U.S., send thousands of its young male citizens illegally across an American open border, and send poison fentanyl to cartels to partner in killing 100,000 Americans a year. The only mystery? Was all this historic chaos a dividend of a debilitated, calcified president or due to some destructive cunning and desire to end the country as we once knew it?

 

Victor Davis Hanson, Historian