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Trump May Be Found Guilty, but Don’t Expect His Followers to Care
As with all of politics, it’s about power
There might be a verdict in the Trump election interference trial today. It’s not a “hush money trial” as misreported in much of the corporate media, but a trial about an alleged criminal conspiracy to alter an election result. A jury may find Trump guilty or not guilty. It’s anyone’s guess at this point.
But there’s a bigger and broader point that must be made. As with everything about politics, there is a power dynamic at the core of how people will respond to a verdict. Like most of politics, many people will respond to the trial verdict like it was a sports match — someone won, someone lost. For too many people, politics is about pettiness, not principles.
Results Matter but not to Everyone
If the jury finds Trump guilty, there will be legal consequences. And though people who oppose Trump will no doubt celebrate it as a “win,” Trump’s supporters won’t see it that way, and that’s understandable, but they won’t see it as a loss. We can’t predict the verdict, but we can predict how many supporters of Trump will react to a guilty verdict. They won’t care.
Support for Trump is not about principles such as character, morals, patriotism, or a desire to make America “great” (whatever that means). It’s about power. In this case, a desire to concentrate power into a particular segment of society. I need not belabor the details of which segment.
I wrote a book about the larger issue of the core dynamics of this desire for power concentration. Last August, I wrote a shorter article on the specific anti-law-and-order desire that motivates Trump and his followers.
Supporters of Trump won’t care about a felony conviction of Trump because it conflicts with their desire. When politics is motivated by petty hatreds and desires for manufactured recognition, other things are ignored, like election results, the law, and…
