Sadly, I voted for Trump for President. I panicked over the idea of the Dems packing the Supreme Court, which Biden pointedly wouldn’t deny they’d do.

But after January 6th, I rescinded my vote. Which of course is impossible. But I did it “in software.”

Sometime later, I followed up by changing my voter registration from “Republican” to “Independent.”

Now, after the anti-Roe v. Wade decision, I don’t even want the Republicans to win the Senate. And it looks like the Republicans have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by this Supreme Court decision. It will definitely lessen, and maybe eliminate, their gains in the mid-term election.

(I know, the Supreme Court is not an organ of the Republican Party; the Justices have to rule as they think right. But Trump nominated judges who were expected to deny a woman’s right to her life.)

Trump is a traitor, and a very cheap one at that. In order to fan a ridiculous hope of staying in power, despite the election, he announced on election eve, that he knew, using his super-powers, that there had been fraud—enough fraud to make him the actual winner. God gave him a mystical vision of what really happened in all the key election headquarters in five states. He didn’t have to wait for any court determinations: he knew then and there what had happened.

He knew because he felt it.

He felt really strongly, in the deepest chambers of his heart, that the majority of American voters wanted him.  They loved him. They were wearing his MAGA hat. They didn’t care what he did or said, they loved him for himself. James Taggart could only envy Trump’s effusion “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-fifth-avenue-comment/]

Therefore, when the vote tallies didn’t bear that out, it was proof, PROOF, that the tallies were rigged. A simple syllogism.

With an equally ardent mysticism, he announced repeatedly that despite the vote, he would be the President come inauguration day. And that’s why Jan. 6 happened. And that’s why he’s responsible for the assault on the Capitol by creatures from the age of Vandals and Visigoths.

Had he said that he accepts the people’s vote, that he follows the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power, then there would have been no barbarian storming of the gates. Several people who died would still be alive. The Republican Party might have been a supportable party of opposition.

But Trump continued his ongoing war against reality, and now we are at the point that Ayn Rand warned us about when the protagonist was not a demented thug but that gentlemanly, soft-talking, avuncular figure, Ronald Reagan:

The kind of Halloween-like creatures who are trying to take over today’s intellectual arena were not created by the Reagan Administration; they exist in any period, in the dark, unventilated corners of history. But in the periods of philosophical default, they come crawling out into the full, open moonlight. Today they are organized under many pretentious names and slogans. The most presumptuous of the names is the “Moral Majority,” and the falsest of the slogans is the claim that they are “pro-life.” What all these people have in common is that they are militant mystics who have learned to be arrogant by encountering no opposition. Their common ideal, the unacknowledged embodiment of their political goals, is the man who has succeeded in uniting religion with politics and establishing a religious dictatorship; he is known as Ayatollah Khomeini.

No, the Reagan administration did not create those militant creeps—but it sponsors and supports them to an embarrassing extent. Mr. Reagan has been declaring that he agrees with some of their ugliest demands, such as the anti-abortion issue and the “creationism” issue. It is embarrassing to hear a president of the United States endorse the plain, crude, illiterate superstitions of the populace of the Middle Ages. [“The Age of Mediocrity,” Ford Hall Forum, April 26, 1981; reprinted in The Objectivist Forum, June 1981.]

The concrete occasion for writing this post is the FBI raid on Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Fox and Friends were outraged. Trump supporters assume that this is an attempt by a politicized FBI to keep Trump at bay, and prevent him from running in 2024.

Yet that theory is as nonsensical as its leftist counterpart. Remember when the Left was screaming that Bush knew all along that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? “He lied! He lied!”

But if he had known, why would he have launched a mission that would find nothing? Why would he set up a massive military effort that would show him to have been colossally wrong?

I asked a Leftist that, and he literally screamed at me, “Because he’s a MORON!”

Now, the Right is saying that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago knowing that there was nothing of importance there to get in the raid—or at least without a solid reason to think they would find “documents of mass insurrection” or whatever.

But—entirely predictably—this has drastically improved Trump’s position. Why would the Left want to energize Trump’s base and undertake another failed attempt to discredit him (like the Christopher Steele fiasco)? I know . . . Because they’re MORONS!

No, you don’t do something as dramatic and theatrical and unprecedented to a man almost half the country already regards as a victim of governmental misconduct unless you either have to or you know what you are going to find.

(By the way, the denizens of Fox and Friends made the argument that “He was already cooperating with them,” because “He had already turned over many documents.” Yes, all the documents that are neither important nor incriminating. If he were holding back materials, that would have made the raid necessary. At least that’s the claim I’ve heard from the other side, and it’s the obvious claim that would have to be rebutted if you’re are going to say, “He was cooperating.”)

Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com