Alan Zendell, February 17, 2024

One and a third billion dollars! That’s the total amount Donald Trump has been fined, to date, by two different New York courts. Think about the implications of that number. If you graduated from college at age twenty-one, your average annual earnings for the next forty-nine years were $150,000, and you retired at seventy, your total earnings during your working life would have been $7,350,000. That is about one half of one percent of the amount Trump must pay for defamation and decades of business fraud.

All this after decades in which Trump’s fraudulent business practices have placed him in constant conflict with our legal system and resulted in bankruptcies and being banned from receiving loans by every major American commercial bank. And this is before any of his criminal trials on more than ninety felony charges begins. He’s being prosecuted by one red state, one blue state, and the U. S. Department of Justice, all of which, Trump tells us is part of a vast conspiracy to keep him from becoming president again orchestrated by current president Joe Biden. Trump believes average Americans aren’t smart enough to know the difference between prosecution and persecution.

CNN journalist Stephen Collinson summed up what the judge’s findings in the New York business fraud case tell us about Trump perfectly:

• “Trump thinks rules are for other people. He will always break them in seeking more wealth, more attention, or more votes.
• If reality doesn’t get the ex-president what he wants, he conjures a new one.
• Trump is compelled always to fight — even when stepping back would be smarter.
• And when accountability finally arrives, he sees justice as an act of persecution by his enemies.”

This is the man who wants to be president again, and that is the role model he presents for the rest of us. If you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, or in Trump’s case when it’s been lodged deep in the jar during his entire life, just scream “witch hunt!” How much sympathy do you think you’d get if you embezzled money from your employer and screamed persecution when you were caught? How would your reputation fare if thirteen women independently accused you of sexual assault, and it was proved that some received payoffs to remain silent and one received a court ruling that you had, in fact, sexually assaulted and defamed her? What would your life expectancy be if the entire world had seen you lead an insurrection on live television?

Trump intends to ride the persecution pony straight into his campaign rallies. He stands before judges accused of major crimes, and calls them corrupt to their faces. He rails against a rigged legal system and rigged elections. The person he most sounds like is Alexey Navalny, who was persecuted for years by Trump’s hero, Vladimir Putin, who has harassed, deported, imprisoned, and after several failed attempts, finally poisoned him. It’s darkly ironic, that if Trump were a Russian who accused Putin of the things he accuses Biden of, he’d be lying dead in a cell today. But in America, with its principle of free speech, someone like Trump can threaten all of its institutions, divide its people based envy and lies, and still be a viable candidate for president.

How can this be? According to Collinson, it’s because of “Trump’s political super skill — his capacity to identify and harness the frustration of Americans who feel themselves rejected and condescended to by East Coast political, economic and media elites.” Trump acts like some kind of twisted Robin Hood character, except that Robin Hood stole from the rich to feed the poor, while Trump enriches the already powerful and obscenely wealthy (and himself) at the expense of everyone else.

Great nations that claim to live according to idealistic pronouncements are all eventually tested. Critics of America’s unique system of individual protections and freedoms warn repeatedly that they make us vulnerable to power-mad populists like Trump. Without an absolute authority to assert what is true and what is fiction, and without the internal security forces that keep dictators in place, our system allows its citizens to make their own judgments about who will lead them. Trump is proving how remarkably courageous our Founders were when they drafted our Constitution. They gambled on democracy, in effect placing all their confidence in the ability of Americans to see through fluff, lies, and demagoguery and make the right choices.

I think of Trump as a stress test for America’s heart. If it fails, the America we know dies. If we pass, we vindicate the revolution that created us.