Belated, Brief Notes on the Trump Verdict

The Land of the Pragmatist and the Home of the Partisan Hack

In an increasingly Pragmatist (i.e., unprincipled) age, it has never been more important to at least try to adhere to principles above expediency, politics (partisan and otherwise), and knee-jerk emotional reactions.

Few dislike Donald Trump like I do, and for as long. I remember perusing an unauthorized biography of the cronyist heir in the 1990s that reported he tried to use Eminent Domain abuse to forcibly evict an elderly woman from her Atlantic City home so he could build one of his gaudy casinos. (He has more in common with his rivals and politically-motivated persecutors than either do with me.) I detested him ever since, through his ghost-written books with asinine titles and his unwatchable so-called “reality television” show, which I know many Democrats and other future detractors of his enjoyed. I remembered the Eminent Domain anecdote when he started running for President, posing as an opponent of that kind of entrenched, typical statism who would Make America Great Again. I didn’t vote for him. It would take much more than Donald Trump to get me back in a voting booth. I watched him continue to the unsustainable high government spending (even before 2020), watched him appoint a corrupt statist to the Supreme Court (who helped close an important investigation into the suspicious death of a high-ranking government official), and watched him allow Anthony Fauci and company completely and inexcusably mismanage the overreaction to the worst pandemic since 1970. I noted in my review of The Price of Panic for Capitalism Magazine that Woodrow Wilson, a vanguardist statist and grower of government who was derisively denounced as a “World Saver” by H.L. Mencken, did not mention the much more disastrous “Spanish Flu” pandemic in public while he was president. Trump, the putative laissez-faire outsider and “freedom fighter”, micromanaged a pandemic response, and this is a concrete example of how far American culture and politics have fallen.

I disapprove of the prosecution and verdict