As radio personality Jesse Kelly remarks on Twitter, there are two ways to view what is happening with Donald Trump right now:

Either you see what's happening to Trump as being about Trump or you see it being about a weaponized government planning to make any opposition a crime.  

Only one of those views is correct. You don't have to be a Trump fan to see it's the latter.

For most Americans who've paid the slightest bit of attention these past years, that's an obvious statement.  But as George Orwell said of his own time, we've "sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." 

That particular phrase derives from a 1939 review of the book Power: A Social Analysis (1938), by Bertrand Russell.  What makes his observations interesting, and why it serves as another example of Orwell's prescience, is how precisely his commentary reflects what we are witnessing at this moment.

While he offers praise to Russell as among the most "readable of living writers," and notes that his not being in jail signifies "that the world is still sane in parts," he does critique his "pious hope" that the madness of the world in 1938 could not endure, much less descend into a deeper madness.  "He is inclined to point to the past," Orwell writes, and to say that "all tyrannies have collapsed sooner or later," and "there is no reason to suppose [Hitler] more permanent than his predecessors."

Americans today, like Russell, cling to the fading hope that common sense will prevail and that the weaponization of our institutions and our obvious march toward an authoritarian state cannot continue.   And Orwell wouldn't have been surprised, given the extent to which he feared the potential for tyranny represented by "radio," at the algorithmic propaganda dissemination that we've seen tech companies employing in collusion with the federal government, coupled with the unchecked government control of the education system.  Add to this the potential for tyranny in deepfake technology and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, and it becomes clear that all signs, as Orwell recognized in 1939, point to things getting significantly worse before they get better.

Our once-free citizenry no longer has any means of holding our representatives accountable.  Americans have never had less faith in the integrity of the electoral system, but even if we could trust election results, the truth is that we live under the rule of faceless, unelected politburos that are immune from any efforts toward accountability via the ballot box.  These institutions exact punishment upon anyone who dares to oppose the growing power of the government.

It has been that way for some time.  Consider the now largely forgotten revelations that the Obama administration, in the years leading up to the 2012 election, weaponized the IRS to go after his political opponents.  Forty years earlier, an allegation that Nixon "attempted to misuse" the IRS for political purpose constituted the second of three articles of impeachment brought against him.  Where Nixon failed, Obama had "very effectively screwed Obama/Biden's political opponents," writes attorney Cleta Mitchell, who investigated this criminal conduct of the IRS.   

We know there was subversive and damaging criminal conduct, but Obama escaped accountability for two reasons.  The first is that the media had no interest in pursuing anything that would damage their anointed leader, and in fact, they supported his weaponizing our institutions against their mutual enemies in the Tea Party, whom both the Obama administration and the media viewed as "domestic terrorists."

The second reason is that the media running cover for the administration allowed for an unconvincing, but very effective, defense mechanism.  Obama rushed to claim ignorance as to what had happened within his own agency.  If the American people demanded accountability, they'd have to look to those directly overseeing IRS.  Obama then set his Department of Justice, headed by his self-described "wingman" Eric Holder, to investigate the head of his IRS, Lois Lerner.  After 12 months of searching for evidence, wouldn't you know it?  It was announced that 28 months of her emails had been lost.  Whoopsie-doodles! 

Cleta Mitchell "regarded the politicization of the IRS as the most dangerous change in her lifetime and perhaps in the history of the U.S. because Obama/Biden did liberals' bidding and the press was willing to endure a wide variety of their non-democratic, dangerous practices."  She's not wrong, most importantly because it set a precedent that has only gotten worse.

When Hillary Clinton was accused of using a private email server to conduct business during her time as secretary of state, her emails were subpoenaed by the State Department.  These emails were of particular interest due not only to their sensitive nature, but also to allegations of bribery and influencing-peddling involving the Clinton Foundation, a name that  had all but become synonymous with corruption by that time.  Rather than surrendering them, though, she and her lawyers destroyed 30,000 emails, citing without evidence that they were of a "personal nature."  They used a "digital shredding" mechanism called BleachBit to do the deed, so that "even God couldn't read them," as Trey Gowdy said.  This is the purposeful destruction of evidence, and once again, the Justice Department shrugged its shoulders at obstruction of justice that would have carried a long prison sentence for anyone not under its political protection.

Donald J. Trump's election in 2016 was the American people's defiant scream in opposition to the corruption of the Obama years.  The media and Obama-era institutions' efforts to destroy him and anoint Hillary Clinton as a continuation of the Obama era had proven futile. 

The left would have you believe that Trump was a radical tyrant bent on destroying norms, but in reality, he made efforts to return to the pre-Obama norms.  For all his bluster in 2016, he did not aggressively seek to prosecute Hillary Clinton, though she and the media set to work in convincing the American people that the Trump presidency was illegitimate.  They refused to make the same mistake in 2020 and set in place an elaborate conspiracy to elect Joe Biden as president.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, mind you, because the conspirators are so brazen and unfearful of any reprisal that they openly proclaim the methods involved in the conspiracy.  "A well-funded cabal of powerful people," wrote Molly Ball at TIME, worked "behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information" in order to prevent Trump from winning in 2020.

Joe Biden's election* allowed for a return to Obama-era corruption and guaranteed a continuation of the rot in our institutions that had taken hold during the Obama administration.  As such, his Justice Department has now indicted Donald J. Trump, Biden's chief political rival for the presidency in 2024, for mishandling of classified documents.

Meanwhile, ample evidence has arisen that Joe Biden had taken part in a complex bribery and money-laundering scheme involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma and his son, Hunter.  There appear to have been seventeen audio recordings of conversations between Hunter and a "foreign national" who kept the recordings as an insurance policy.  Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) alleges that not only did the FBI hide Document 1023, which details the corruption, from Congress, but when it was submitted, it was "filled with redactions," including a redacted reference to the "foreign national who allegedly bribed" the Biden family.

In other words, the Justice Department is actively covering up evidence of a bribery scandal involving the sitting president, while aggressively trying to imprison the former president (and the administration's top political opponent) for allegedly committing the same crime that the Justice Department was uninterested in investigating when Hillary Clinton was accused of it, though she purposefully destroyed the evidence "in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recover," according to then–FBI director James Comey. 

We all know what this means, but we watch helplessly as our beloved country descends deeper into tyranny.  If we Americans saw any foreign nation whose dictator did what Obama did to throttle conservatives in 2012, we'd have accused it of being a banana republic.  We now live in something beyond a banana republic — a tyranny in which the government exists only to serve its own ends and to punish enemies of the state.  And while most Americans maintain a "pious hope" that the world will cure itself of its current madness, and that this doesn't mean eventual gulags for the parents who don't submit to the government's claim that their little boy is actually a little girl (i.e., that "two and two make five"), the fact that Donald Trump is facing the very real prospect of dying in a jail cell while Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton will likely never have to answer for their crimes should crush that hope for even the most optimistic of our countrymen.

Image via Pxfuel.