The Next Four Months Will Be A Political War Without Limits

The Next Four Months Will Be A Political War Without Limits

 David Samuels

One of the chief targets of the Democratic Party’s society-wide enforcement machine has been Trump himself. Since Trump left office in 2020, he has been relentlessly targeted by a series of cases that have been aggressively prosecuted by both local and federal prosecutors despite a glaring paucity of evidence to support the idea that his actions were, in fact, crimes. Actually, the legal basis for these cases was dismissed as such by authorities as various as former Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democrat-appointed judges on the US Supreme Court. The recent federal case against Trump, alleging that he had committed a crime by retaining classified government documents, which resulted in a full-scale raid by armed FBI agents on his home in Florida, was thrown out yesterday by the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, on the grounds that the appointment and funding of a special prosecutor in the case was itself “unlawful”. But the legality of the cases against Trump was never the point — which was to use the proceedings to prevent Trump from campaigning for months, while suggesting to voters that he was a criminal.

In turn, the legal onslaught against Trump and his supporters, which began even before he took office in January 2017, was only one part of a larger, incredibly well-funded, whole-of-society campaign that the Democrats launched against a man they have ceaselessly depicted not merely as the blustering, attention-seeking buffoon that he clearly sometimes is, but as a dark Hitlerian threat to democracy. In the wake of the attempted assassination, it is the other two major components of the elite anti-Trump campaign that appear most threatening to the American future.

Every conspiracy theory was wilder than the last, and was treated like the scoop of the century for a day or a week before disappearing without a trace. Nor was there any form of correction or consequences for the reporters and editors involved. Instead, they rewarded themselves with Pulitzer prizes. The result has been the wholesale and tragic destruction of the entire credibility of the mainstream American press. 

Unsurprisingly, the decline in Americans being able to trust what they read, and the rise in apocalyptic political rhetoric, was matched by a corresponding rise in political violence. Trump himself was hardly innocent of involvement with political violence, even if he never exactly called the white supremacist rioters at Charlottesville “good people” — a charge that has been extensively debunked. Still, clashes between the Proud Boys (a Canadian-led Right-wing group) and other so-called patriot groups and Left-wing Antifa protesters were common in the first two years of Trump’s Presidency, lending credence to the idea that both parties were cultivating bully-boy militias. Yet, as Trump’s interest in the violent Right lessened after the first year or so of his Presidency, the Left’s reliance on violence as a political tool only increased.

Trump’s election was greeted by large-scale riots in every major American city, some of which went on for weeks. In June 2017, Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader in the House, was nearly killed in a mass shooting by a Bernie Sanders supporter in what the Virginia State Attorney General concluded was “an act of terrorism… fuelled by rage against Republican legislators”. A year later, in June 2018, recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a California man named Nicholas Roske, who arrived at Kavanaugh’s house with a rifle before giving himself up to police, and was then indicted for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. Roske told investigators that he was upset over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as well as the potential for Kavanaugh to help loosen gun laws in the country.

The steady drum-beat of calls to public disorder from the Left during Trump’s Presidency reached its apogee in the run-up to the 2020 election, where rioters acting under various banners, from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, trashed the shopping districts of over 20 major American cities. In cities such as Portland, nightly battles between the police and Molotov-cocktail-wielding demonstrators went on for months, becoming a form of nightly street theatre in which young masked attackers threw bombs at police and federal buildings while teams of Democratic Party-aligned NGO lawyers stood ready to get offenders out of jail. As the damage mounted, and local panic increased, violent protesters in Democrat-led municipalities, most of whom turned out to be from upper middle-class Democratic families, seldom faced any consequences for their actions, with celebrities and others offering to bail them out. 

With the attempted assassination of Trump, the political and social stakes have once again been raised, in a system that seems ill-equipped to meet such a significant challenge. Any attempt at return to a procedural normalcy that was already badly weakened before Trump took office seems entirely beyond the capacity of America’s callow and insulated elites, which have lost themselves for nearly a decade in the fantasy cosplay of anti-Trump.

What we will witness over the next four months will be an election campaign pitting the hero figure of a bloodied but unbowed Trump, a man despised by nearly half the country, against the anti-democratic manoeuvrings of the country’s institutional elite, as exemplified by whichever hand-picked candidate Democratic Party insiders choose to field against him. The resulting campaign will be a game without limits, in which the level of violence seems likely to escalate — which will further diminish the interest or ability on either side to acknowledge a victory by the other. Americans are about to find out what it feels like to live in a country at war with itself — no matter who wins the presidency in November.