When the ruling party starts conducting kangaroo court proceedings versus rival presidential candidates, the temptation is to extrapolate to full Stalinist show trials – the regime culling its enemies as a signifier of victory rather than as a mechanism to achieve it.
This isn’t exactly wrong. But paradoxically, despite losing his show trial, Trump is not headed towards the Lubyanka basement. NPR is gently preparing their audience for a sentencing hearing that results in zero jail time, but instead delivers a cinematic montage of what awaits his supporters if they lose – a mere four days before the Republican National Convention.
How did we get to this point? I have a few hypotheses.
No. 1: Affirmative action DAs botching a kangaroo court was good actually
In this telling, the scholarly honors student Alvin Bragg (Harvard class of ‘95, where he was literally described as “the anointed one” by a publication that still understood how to do a tiny bit of irony) jumped the gun and initiated an incredibly ham-handed railroading of the leading presidential candidate in a way that can only further Trump’s campaign pitches – that he is a threat to the system, that he and his supporters are persecuted by an unjust regime, that DEMOCRATS are rigging the election, again, and so on. Existing institutions are delegitimized, Trump is now forced to WIN or DIE, and upon ascension will begin the process of dismantling them out of sheer self preservation instinct.
Alvin Bragg doesn’t care about any of this, because he wants to be governor or attorney general or etc, and high profile screwjobs are canonically how a prosecutor gets there, regardless of who holds the presidency as a result. Trust the plan – Bragg arrested, Gitmo’d, executed by ‘26.
No. 2: They’re literally just gonna kill him
It is over. The trial was not a delaying or smearing tactic; the Democrat apparatchik put in charge of the railroading will complete the maneuver by imposing a sentence sufficient to preclude campaigning, or a bullshit “parole” or “home confinement” that allows him to summon Trump at will with the same effect. Trump is martyred in prison. Biden resigns for “health reasons”. Kamala Harris cackles into the Oval Office as our first Canadian president, with Gavin to follow, succeeded by an infinite string of party men in various shades of brown and grey.
No. 3: A hamhanded hamstringing a la Trump’s first term
The more “normal” the election is, the likelier a Trump victory. 2020 happened because libs essentially declared a global state of exception, where we couldn’t possibly follow antiquated principles like one man-one vote, or an “election day”, in the context of Basically The Plague plus Literally Hitler trying to win, racistly. Without the ability to pull these maneuvers, or to pretend that Biden is the “return to normalcy” candidate, Trump has an excellent shot.
So the goal is to cripple his administration, exactly as they did the first time, with various ongoing civil and criminal legal entanglements that everyone pretends to take super seriously. “Mr. President, did you check in with your parole officer before you flew to Geneva to mediate the Ukraine war?”
No. 4: The fix was in, and Trump is the fall guy
The inverse 5D Warhammer hypothesis. The objective material situation, globally, is not great. The supranational NATO “security” clique seems like they are trying to tiptoe into a hot war with Russia. The US economy has been in a state of dislocation since 2020 that is becoming increasingly unignorable – stagflation combined with a federal debt burden that cannot plausibly be increased at its current rate means that the dice are loaded for a classic debt crisis sometime in the next four years.
In this view, Trump will be the opportunity to lance the boil on all these problems at once, and lay the fallout at his feet. Regime change in Russia and the completion of the 90s looting project that was aborted when Putin came to power, a domestic cramdown of disastrous economic policies on an uppity middle class, and provocation of China into a hot war while it is still theoretically winnable.
This is compatible with No. 3, but with the variation that the prosecutions are designed to fail, by picking novel legal theories with the worst possible fact patterns, rather than whatever legitimate white collar crime could be dug up from a 40 year career in property development. I love property developers, some of my best friends etc, but I cannot think of a single one that doesn’t have colorable felonies under their belt given that the essence of the job is telling mutually supporting lies to counterparties to resolve coordination issues around funding vs opportunities vs permitting vs buyers and so on, butressed by an exoskeleton of bribes.
Doing this under Biden, or forcing Kamala to cackle through it, risks laying it at the feet of the Party, when the goal would ideally be to blame it on Full Socialism never having been tried.
But what is actually going on?
The left relies heavily on memes for distributed coordination. You don’t need to hand out marching orders when you have a ruling class that thinks more or less identically, modulo some minor tactical disagreements. The implication is that all of these can be true, for various distinct actors, and the Trump prosecution was a Murder on the Libtard Express. But what it really signifies is the completion of the liberal project – everything that can be “liberated” has been, and now we are observing the fallout start to accrue. It is an empirical question how this shakes out over the next couple years (this being the funniest timeline, my money is on Trump somehow riding the situation into ruling as dictator-for-life for another twenty), but we will not get, for instance, reciprocal prosecutions of libs by red state attorneys general – there is no metastable back-and-forth equilibrium to be had, it will collapse to one thing or another.
The only worthwhile political project right now is making sure that Trump in fact comes through this as the win-or-die candidate and subsequently pulls it off.
-By Hank Oslo
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