Democrats have learned nothing.
Democrats have learned nothing.
M aybe the funniest media phenomenon right now is when news anchors and reporters refer to progressive it-girl Stormy Daniels as both a “former adult film star” and a “director.”
Yes, who can forget Daniels’s voluminous directorial oeuvre stocked with cinematic gems including Nymphos, Whack Job, and scores of other titles that one should not allow to sully the pages of this august publication. It isn’t exactly clear what a porn director even does. You don’t even have to yell “cut!,” as the end of the scene is typically more the byproduct of biology than cinematography.
Real Spielberg, that Stormy.
In any event, the media has recently struggled to identify the thing for which certain famous people are primarily known. National Public Radio recently earned some guffaws when it posted that “football great Orenthal James Simpson, known as O.J., has died.” The network quickly followed up by mentioning that oh, by the way, Simpson also probably murdered his ex-wife and her friend, leading to perhaps the most publicized and racially fraught trial of the 20th century.
The Washington Post earned plenty of ridicule when it mourned the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, terrorist leader of the Islamic State, by identifying him as an “austere religious scholar.” They later settled on “extremist leader,” which would have been like tagging Simpson as a “cutlery aficionado.” And CNN is still trying to pass Jeffrey Toobin off as a “legal analyst” instead of, as he is more commonly known, “the guy who inexplicably still has a job after strangling his ostrich on a Zoom call with his colleagues.”
And now, thanks to an ill-considered criminal lawsuit brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, another notorious American figure is about to get a complete image makeover just in the nick of time. (More on this in a bit.)
Such reputational whitewashing has gotten so commonplace, it now has its own meme. A few months back, former Saturday Night Live head writer Jim Downey appeared on Conan O’Brien’s podcast and did a riotous bit in which he pretended not to know anything about convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein other than the fact that he was a “New York financier.”
When done seriously, this strategy of character compartmentalization can be used to defend the indefensible. It supposes people are made of — just stay with me here — Lego bricks: Even if they primarily comprise bad bricks, you can point to one good one and make your defense on that basis. For instance, in 2022, Politico Europe ranked Russian president Vladimir Putin No. 1 on its “Green 28” list of European environmental heroes. It picked the green Lego and ignored the dozens of “poisons and defenestrates opponents” bricks in order to argue that “clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.”
Of course, this isn’t how humans view each other. No one will drink a glass of beer with a human eyeball in it, even if the contents of the glass are 90 percent beer. If you’ve got a racist or antisemitic brick in you, all your other more favorable ones don’t earn you any goodwill. Consider that nobody is saying, “I wish I knew Kim Jong-un’s skin-care routine,” or “Man, you have to try this baked ziti recipe I got from the Harvey Weinstein cookbook.”
But it is exactly this type of segmentation that has kept Donald Trump, someone composed almost entirely of poison Legos, politically afloat. Trump’s supporters, either willing or unwilling, cobble together just enough hand-picked bricks to make him seem palatable. If one slaps the “Trump nominated the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade” brick together with the “Trump cut taxes” brick together with the “Trump hates DEI” brick and squints hard enough, it is possible to see a normal Republican candidate.
(Of course, that ignores the dump truck full of “tried to overturn the results of a popular election,” “is a serial sexual predator,” and “doesn’t know what the Battle of Gettysburg was” bricks, all of which tarnish both Trump and his supporters who discount them.)
This (mercifully, I know) gets to why the current criminal trial against Trump is so politically fraught for Democrats.
The aforementioned Alvin Bragg is about to hand Donald Trump a golden brick that outshines all the others in Trump world. If Trump beats the 34 felony charges Bragg has levied against him for effectively covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment to legendary director Stormy Daniels, it transforms the former president from “Trump, overturner of elections and health hazard for vice presidents” to “Trump, vindicated defendant.” Many of Trump’s rotten Legos will fall away, leaving him strengthened by all the “I’m a victim of political persecution” bricks — which should hold up until the public has already voted in November.
And as has happened in the overwhelming majority of times in Trump’s life, he will probably beat these charges. Bragg has stretched the law thinner than a grasshopper on Ozempic, effectively charging Trump for failing to report the $130,000 paid to Daniels as a campaign contribution.
Nobody contests that paying a porn star money to keep an affair secret is a legal transaction. And even if one considers it a “campaign expense,” in most venues, this is an oversight that could be cleared up with a candidate filing an amended finance report. In Bragg’s jurisdiction, however, it could earn a defendant 136 years in prison. (As National Review’s Andy McCarthy has laid out, it appears that Bragg had to charge all the underlying “falsification of business records” violations as felonies rather than misdemeanors because if they were the latter, the statute of limitations would have run out.)
Nonetheless, Bragg and his Democratic allies on MSNBC and other networks spend their time staring into cameras trying to will a conviction into existence. As was the case with Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference, progressives believe they can make these accusations stick if they simply believe in them strongly enough. They are like Wile E. Coyotes believing the box of ACME TNT won’t once again blow up in their faces before they can trick the Road Runner.
Even if Trump is convicted on lesser charges, it could still be a win. If it appears he is being dragged into court for two months on what ultimately resembles a parking ticket, he can play “Trump the martyr” instead of “Trump the guy we all saw spend months trying to steal an election” all the way till November. He can play “golfin’ O.J.” instead of “double murderin’ O.J.”
Everyone is aware that Trump is a narcissistic imbecile perfectly capable of creating his own problems. The only way he gains traction is when the Left overcharges him for something he didn’t do, making a confirmed reprobate seem sympathetic.
And yet they can’t help themselves. And so it is that an acquittal is entirely possible, one that could give Trump and his supporters, like the cast of a Stormy Daniels–directed movie, a very happy ending.