If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, there wouldn’t have ever been any Christians. Had Mr. Trump eschewed politics and just remained a flamboyant, media-genic real estate developer, jack-booted thugs would have never ransacked his home… which just happened to make him a modern-day folk hero.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is obviously the real villain in all of this…and Mitch McConnell, in spite of everything else, deserves praise for keeping this swampy political hack off the Supreme Court.  Garland’s lack of circumspection has revealed the omnipresent Deep State to be pathetically fallible.  “What was he thinking?” keeps being asked.  Raiding the home of a former president cannot escape serious scrutiny, especially when combined with the many other harmful malfeasances being imposed upon the innocent population, such as the combination of price inflation and a contracting GDP.

Now, Trump is emerging as a giant among Lilliputians.  But he really is  a straightforward, reasonably competent problem-solver, uncompromised by political group-think.  He had at least two really good ideas that were left behind when he left office: Indexing to inflation the tax on capital gains and requiring hospitals to have published price lists.  There’re probably more where these came from, and they will most likely be made public once Trump or an ally of his becomes the next president.

What is also particularly frightening to the swamp rats is that other than his extraordinary personality, Trump isn’t all that unique.  America has always had a lot of self-sufficient problem-solvers in its midst.  But, until now, most have avoided politics.  The continuing persecution of Mr. Trump may well be at least partially intended to scare those folks into staying on the sidelines.  Now, however, it has become rather plain that the Trump model needs to be followed at all levels of government.  His recent ascendency into stardom can only encourage many more to try.

Where Trump has been unique is that he became president without ever previously holding office or being a famous general.  Had Wendell Willkie defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, then Trump wouldn’t have been the first…but he is.  You may notice that senators are always running for president, since their six-year term allows them a free shot without putting their cushy job in jeopardy, but only three have ever made it:  Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.

There’s now also a lot of loose talk about a new civil war.  Problem being that, unlike the Civil War that was, the current division of opinion cannot be described geographically.  I tend to describe the division to be akin to the “town and gown” nature of semi-rural college communities—as was typified in the movie Breaking Away, which took place in Bloomington, Indiana.  The townsfolk in the movie were called “Cutters” because many of them labored in the local limestone quarries cutting stone.  Today’s members of the effete Deep State look down their noses at, what they describe as, smelly Walmart shoppers, who also tend to like Trump. 

The eleven states of the Confederacy were all contiguous.  Separating today’s dystopic urban cores from the semi-rural heartland of America would create a crazy quilt of “ins” and “outs.”  I suspect that the only civil war in our near future would be fought by lawyers.

Meanwhile, politics has become more and more a blood sport.  Why?  Because way too much power is constantly being put up for grabs.  William Manchester wrote in his Narrative History of the United States that, up until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration, Washington, D.C. was very much like many other sleepy southern towns.  Then large-scale construction began as a plethora of new “alphabet soup” agencies needed large volumes of office space.  And the process did not end with FDR.  This may be considered to be Socialism American style. Or maybe rather paternalism with elections to keep the masses from rioting and a modicum of allowable private wealth so it can be increasingly taxed.

And, back to Mr. Trump.  The Jan6 Committee and the media often use the word “insurrection” to describe the event they are supposed to be studying.  They are obviously trying to find a way to use the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 to disqualify Trump from ever again being eligible as a presidential candidate.  Now, he’s certainly no spring chicken, but he’s still way too young to have ever fought for the Confederacy.  Though I’m not so sure about Biden.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 3.0 license