5/31/24

VERDICT:
DON’T GIVE UP ON HOPE

HERE’S WHAT I got wrong about the Manhattan trial that has now marked Donald John Trump as a felon.
     It wasn’t the guilty verdict itself; or the jury’s speed in reaching it; or even the clean sweep decision – guilty on all 34 counts.
     Almost everyone got some or all of those guesses wrong.
     The pundits, the legal eagles, analysts, inside-the-courtroom, outside-the-courthouse reporters – collectively, The Experts – didn’t forecast what happened late on a May 30 afternoon.
    It’s a lesson that as much as we lean on and even respect The Experts, who arguably do their best, they are mortals and rarely have all the answers.
     What I got wrong was forgetting that the most important factor of the 2024 election is hope.
     I should know better.
     Hope is the real X-factor of any crisis, no more so than an election that’s the most consequential of my lifetime .
     None of us knows what’s going to happen on Nov. 5. At best, some are “worried;” and, at worst, others are "resigned" to an outcome in which America delivers itself to a dystopian dictatorship.
     The odds often seem unsettling.
     Bad enough that Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, and other Republican notables, dressed up like Trump, showed up at the courthouse to support the defendant, then, after the verdict, attacked the justice system.
     The most depressing factor in this campaign was, and is, that millions and millions of Americans say they’ll vote for a failed president, a serial liar, an insurrectionist, a racist and an anti-environmentalist.
     All of which takes a toll on hope.
    
SO IT WAS with the New York trial.
     My prediction was that there would be a hung jury – that one or more jurors would disagree with her or his fellows, resulting in a mistrial, which Trump would claim as an acquittal.
     The case sounded too complicated. The jury needed to believe that Trump – long, long ago in 2016 - purchased the silence of porn celebrity Stormy Daniels about an even earlier encounter with her, then faked business records to pay the bill, all with the purpose of cheating on election laws.
     Frankly, a fair-minded anti-Trumper could reasonably agree to disagree with the prosecution. We also could suspect that a member of the Trump cult had lied during jury selection to become the stealth hold-out.
     There was also Trump’s most inscrutable, mysterious characteristic that has served him throughout his P.T. Barnum career in business and politics – his ability to fool so many, then to get away with it.
     He’d managed to stall the other three pending indictments, about the far more serious charges of attempted election subversion and possession of secret records possession, so that those trials won’t occur until after the election – if ever.

HOPE WAS AT A LOW EBB when I returned from an errand late in afternoon and my wife reported that the jury had reached a verdict.
     She been listening to the radio (we are old enough so that’s how we still get a lot of our news).
     My reaction was that it was too soon, just two days of deliberations, rather than the two months I’d expected, and so this had to mean acquittal.
     Rather than have my heart broken with the next “Breaking News” report, I went outside to adjust the pressure of the tires on our car. Better to do something positive.
     When I returned, my wife had more news.
     “Guilty!” my wife  announced. “On all counts. Thirty-four counts.”

STUNNED. AND ASHAMED.
     Shame on me: I had gotten it wrong. No mistrial, as I’d predicted. Nobody likes to be wrong, although I knew that somehow, I’d get over that.
     But the real shame was that I’d forgotten the most important factor of the crusade to protect American democracy: hope.
     I’d let Trump mess with my brain, nearly extinguishing hope. There were no excuses for that. After all, I live in a state whose motto is “Hope.” “Hope” is on the state flag. Hope is on the Rhode Island state seal.
     It’s possible that the conviction, in the end, will work in Trump’s favor and inspire even more voters to come to his rescue.
     And while it’s unlikely he’ll end up in prison,  even that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of Trump. Many giants of history have spent time in the slammer, heroes like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and in Trump’s case, Adolf Hitler.
     Appellate courts surely could overturn the jury’s verdict – The Experts tell us there’s plenty of legal wriggle room.
     But the Manhattan jury did more than declare Donald John Trump a felon 34 times. It reminded me, and I think lots of others, of the power of hope.
     As individuals, we can’t do much to influence the outcome of an election. We can cast our one vote; donate money; write letters; argue with neighbors; maybe go to the Six States That Count to ring doorbells.
     But hope – that’s something we can control.
     Hope is scary, uncomfortable, energizing and essential.
     In the end, hope is not an option for a democracy.   The future of our country and the planet depends on it.