Needless to say, I don't like the indictment of Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents. Oh, I get it. The very idea that the middle class should nominate for president a guy that actually proposes to rule in the interest of the middle class! The Horror!

But, really, the indictment of a candidate for president is not so much a misuse of political power but an admission of weakness. If you can't head off a populist nationalist candidate at the pass, dear liberal friends, and cruise to glorious victory with a fine moderate candidate that unites all good Americans on a platform to Make Things Better, then you have a problem.

Oh yeah. That's what you said Joe Biden represented: moderate Joe Biden against extremist Donald Trump. And then you folks pushed an extreme Left agenda down America's throat, from student debt giveaways to climate change hysteria and the straight-up racism of DEI and reparations.

And I don't like it.

But still, Get Trump is just politics as usual. Whether it's Get Trump Classified Docs, or Get Clinton with Monica, or Get Reagan with Iran-Contra, or Get Nixon with Watergate, or back in the day, Get the Turbulent Priest, it's all politics as usual. And everyone lines up on Their Side.

Moderate politics? A Joe Biden with real cojones would reform Social Security and Medicare, before they run out of money. There's a book out on Modernizing Medicare right now. Good luck with that. You think we seniors would vote for politicians that cut our free stuff? Look at the current Biden student loan forgiveness presently up before the U.S. Supreme Court: "Most College Students Would Feel Angry If SCOTUS Blocks Student Loan Forgiveness." If you would rather not reform Social Security and Medicare, dear liberals, you are nothing but political Bartlebys.

So Trump or not, there's no chance of doing anything serious, probably not even when the government is broke and inflation is 20 percent. Unless it is all done with smoke and mirrors. And I don't like it.

Talking about smoke and mirrors let's talk about Science. That's where the educated class holds all the cards. Because Science has been bought and paid for by the rulers ever since the Germans invented the research university.

Example: the recent smoke from Canadian wildfires that descended on east coast cities. According to AOC, an ordinary politician, the reason is climate change. AOC will easily find an expert to agree with her, and so if you like your gas stove and your gas-powered automobile you can go and pound sand. And I don't like it.

It's not just that our liberal friends just pull rank on us -- being more educated than deplorables. They also use state censorship to shut us up. That's what World War COVID taught us. The U.S. government had censorship agencies in place ready to censor scientists that didn't toe the official line. CISA, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, already had a page on Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation and their bureaucratic definitions, and the Twitter Files told us how our government got social media to censor dissenting scientists. Guess what: the Brits have their COVID Disinformation Unit that made "hourly contact" with social media tech firms.

Isn't it interesting that both the U.S. administrative state and the Brit administrative state use the same word "disinformation" as the basis of their censorship? Why, it's almost as if they had been planning all this for years.

Back in 1989 Francis Fukuyama announced in "The End of History" the "ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy". But how do we then explain the eruption of "populist nationalism" all across Europe and in the U.S. with Donald Trump? If you are John Lloyd of the Financial Times, the populist nationalists represent "The Threat of Decivilization." He writes about how French President Macron is now facing the possibility that

he will be succeeded by Marine Le Pen… [that he sees] as narrowly nationalistic, reactionary, racist, and dangerous.

French polls now show Le Pen more popular than Macron. He doesn't like it.

Maybe M. Macron, John Lloyd, and all the ships at sea should stop denigrating the deplorables and bitter clingers and, as recommended by Sun Tzu, try to "know" them. Maybe the ordinary middle class is realizing that a liberal democracy that privileges credentialed educated people and floods the zone with indictments is unjust to the middle class, and they are not going to take it anymore.

Maybe Trumpism is just the latest edition of Nixon's silent majority, the Reagan Democrats, and the Tea Party: no surprise at all to anyone with half a brain. Eric Hoffer was on to it 50 years ago in First Things, Last Things.

Might not the common people, so cowed and silent at this moment, eventually kick up their heels and trample would-be elitists in the dirt?

But that is inconceivable!

And I like it.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: United States District Court, Southern District of Florida