A Manhattan court and a Democrat prosecutor convicted President Donald Trump. Our elite celebrate justice while Trump regrets it -- or so goes the story. That confection is the latest episode in a histrionic soap opera the neoliberal elite have been producing since Trump won almost a decade ago: “Trump is childish, vicious, and dangerous. We must stop him as we are mature, benevolent, and benign.”

Now, the fake elite have drawn America into the method and madness of Stalin by throwing a bridle around the essential tool of the liberal state, the courts, making it their private political workhorse. Their latest episode is a moment of truth: either Trump is everything they say he is -- or they are. He is treated so exceptionally harshly either because he is exceptionally bad -- or his inquisitors are. Those are the options. There are only two.

So just how exceptional is Donald Trump? That’s the question to ask.

Most instead ask about legal details. The work of Trump’s prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, and his judge, Juan Merchan -- consistent with their middling legal pedigrees -- is shoddy. Trumping up a charge on a clean man like a legal MacGyver takes talent. These guys don’t have it.

Bragg and Merchan’s show trial is hobbled by many grave errors. Chief among them is that Merchan allowed jurors to disagree on exactly what unlawful conduct Trump supposedly intended to commit or cover up. Practically, that meant Trump had to put forth evidence that he had no unlawful intent once Bragg produced just enough evidence to convince some jurors of one intent and others of another.

But a prosecutor must bear to the trial’s end the burden of proving a defendant’s guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Merchan let Bragg get away with leaving some jurors with reasonable doubt on what other jurors may have thought Trump’s criminal intent was and vice versa so that ultimately all jurors could have reasonable doubt yet still convict. That’s an unconstitutional outrage.

Yet analyzing any more deeply Bragg and Merchan’s dumpster fire is like picking through trash to tag solids from mushes. It’s tedious. And, it just adds to the painting the angry elite try to forge: that Trump and legal trouble follow each other. That shows he’s exceptional, they say.

But in key ways, Trump actually is quite unexceptional. From the start, Trump -- like a normal politician -- just wanted to be liked by most Americans. He wanted to do deals, sign popular bills, and rack up accomplishments to brag about.

Our vindictive elite do not want to be liked by most Americans. They do not want to pass popular bills. They do not want to rack up accomplishments they can brag about to anyone but their rarefied peers. So after Trump got elected, they snapped his olive branches, one after another, until the olive tree stood naked.

Then they said that Joe Biden would be a return to normal.

Whose normal? What followed President Joe Biden taking office has been the exceptionally abnormal prosecution of the former president.

Two images sum up the changeover from Trump’s normal to Biden’s abnormal. For the first, a photographer sneaks a long shot through the Rose Garden into the Oval Office, where President Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democrat leader, embrace. Both smile, Trump warmly. Schumer puts his finger out between him and Trump as if to say “don’t get too close.” Trump grasps Schumer with both hands as if to say “I’ll make a friend of you yet!”

In the second image, Biden’s hands are in angry pounding fists. He stands behind soldiers floodlighted in Nazi red. This is Biden’s infamous Red Sermon, in which he screams, without a hint of irony, his midterm campaign theme: Trump and his supporters are threats.

On the night of Biden’s last State of the Union speech -- another strange shouting jeremiad -- Michael McFaul, one of former President Barack Obama’s ambassadors to Russia, took to X to ask “those criticizing Bidens [sic]... speech for being too divisive, can you post excerpts from Trump speeches that called for cooperation with Democrats[?] I don’t remember them. But I’m ready to be reminded.”

I reminded him of nineteen, all from Trump’s speeches to Congress. Among them: “The time for... fights is behind us.” “True love for our people requires us to find common ground.” “[L]et’s work together [and] compromise.”

Hardly mere words, these sentiments accorded exactly with Trump’s first term in office. Hillary Clinton, though under criminal investigation when Trump beat her in 2016, never got prosecuted. Trump, though not under criminal investigation when Biden won in 2020, somehow came under investigation and got charged and then convicted. What explains the difference? The elite say Trump. They’re half right. It’s their vain malevolence contrasted with Trump’s patriotic benevolence.

“[W]e must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution,” Trump told Congress and the nation in 2019. “Together, we can break decades of political stalemate,” he said in a mature, statesman’s tone. Like a normal benevolent president, he entreated America to “bridge old divisions [and] heal old wounds.”

That’s why Trump got charged but Hillary didn’t. It’s because Trump is normal but Biden and his elite are as malevolently abnormal as screaming, malignant cancer.

Four years ago, America got scammed by “return to normal” Joe. In this year’s election, it won’t. And when Trump wins again, the convoluted details of his screwy prosecution will make no difference to anybody.

Sean Ross Callaghan is an attorney, a tech entrepreneur, and a onetime federal law clerk.

Image: Gage Skidmore