Once a scoffer, now a martyr

Donald Trump has always been a scoffer, always liked to get away with things.

We all know he raves about guys like him who can grab a woman by her private parts, cut taxes, or get away with shooting someone in the middle of Broadway.

A large part of his personality enjoyed being a scofflaw, somehow feeling that a certain percentage of Americans would love him all the more for it. And it turned out he was right. Many of his followers who found this glee attractive, and now find their resume actually enhanced by his murder conviction, are scoffers too.

When our own Arizona GOP, as reported in these pages a few months ago, picks for top positions in the national party lawmakers who of course tried to overturn the 2020 election, they are mockers.

Kari Lake was a laughingstock when, asked before the gubernatorial election if she would accept the election results, she replied, “Sure, if I win.” Like Trump, she was confident that many of her followers would love her all the more for that clever disregard for the legal electoral process.

Those who see those convicted of the crimes we’ve all seen on TV — destroying property, threatening our elected representatives, and setting up the transition of power while attacking police officers — as patriots are scofflaws.

If a large percentage of the electorate of this country are mockers, if we reach the president with mockery, we are in trouble. But in the last few months, it got a lot worse.

Derogatory “scofflaw” makes sense only in the context of a respected general rule of law.

When Trump, early in his political career, made a point of talking about what he could get away with, he didn’t say that laws against rape or murder or tax evasion were wrong, just that he thought it was who he was. . , could get away with them.

But now that he didn’t get away with the Stormy Daniels escapade and was convicted, (and may be convicted of much more serious crimes), he makes it clear that the laws are wrong, the entire judicial system “armed” against him. . The fact that many millions, most of them Democrats, are happy to see him somehow get his act together means he must be innocent.

He is no longer a scoffer, happy to get away with things, but a martyr. And a martyr, when you look at it, in what can only be seen as a revolutionary cause.

Trump sells himself as a victim of politics, a Navalny, not a jailbird in the usual sense, but a hero of the Russian opposition to the tyrant Putin. (Even if, as we know, Putin really identifies.) Although it would not be good politics to use that name, Trump calls himself Hitler, imprisoned after the Nazis’ failed attack on mainstream democracy, a political martyr. prisoner, a key move in his rise to Fuhrer.

To insult, disrespect or otherwise undermine the legal system is actually a revolutionary act, a radical overturning of the existing order of things. To see the judicial system, the entire institutionalized democracy, as being “armed” against you as the enemy, not just as someone who has been caught breaking a law, is to declare yourself the enemy of that system and those institutions And I know of no clearer definition of revolutionary .

Trump’s followers are often characterized as a not particularly caring bunch who applaud whatever comes out of their beloved leader’s mouth. But they might want to think about their man’s self-promotion from gleeful mockery to victim and enemy of the state, and his plans to weaponize the presidency, should he end up holding it, against a democratic government he fantasizes as armed against l.

Are his supporters really on board with the revolution this former scofflaw has in store for us?