Trump's Indictment Is a Blunder of Historic Proportions | Opinion

There is little doubt that news of former President Donald Trump's indictment and pending arraignment will be met with jubilation on the Left. The reality, however, is that the Left and the Right—the United States as a whole—will suffer the consequences of this blunder of historic proportions. New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg's decision to bring charges will be a moment that historians, and society more broadly, will look back upon as a societal turning point.

The immediate reaction to the first criminal indictment of a former U.S. president has largely focused on the legalities, with charges related to the hush money allegedly paid to former porn star Stormy Daniels. If this is true—and with the indictment still under seal, we don't yet know—it makes the situation worse not merely for Alvin Bragg, but for the entire country.

After all, Bragg is a DA best known for not seeking prison sentences for many crimes, while downgrading others. In Bragg's world, armed robbery, burglary, and drug dealing are, by the wave of a woke wand, misdemeanor offenses. Felony assault in New York is up 15%. Major crime in New York City jumped 22% in 2022. Last year, a convicted sex offender who put a man in a coma walked free. But for Bragg and the Gotham establishment that have made these absurdities possible, alleged improprieties concerning campaign finance are felonious to the point of being worth risking national discord to prosecute.

The media has largely framed this story with a trope about how Bragg's decision to prosecute shows that "no one is above the law." This framing is false. The son of the sitting president, who has filmed himself committing what appear to be serious crimes, has apparently illegally owned a gun, and has allegedly taken enormous sums from Chinese Communist Party-tied companies, is not merely a free man—he is celebrated, shielded, and further enriched. When the media says no one is above the law, the corollary left out is, "so long as you are on the right side of the political divide."

For nearly 10 years, the media, security state, intelligence community, and professional bureaucracy have bent every law, flouted every norm, and concocted conspiracies so ludicrous as to defy belief—all in an effort to prosecute Donald Trump. In their zeal, they have corrupted myriad institutions and destroyed Americans' trust in them. What Bragg's decision demonstrates is the astounding length to which these actors are willing to go to achieve their singular anti-Trump goal. They are the Captain Ahab of America's national ship, maniacally pursuing their white whale even if—indeed, especially if—it costs the rest of us everything.

I say this not as a Trump supporter, which I am not. (I have not voted for Trump, and I will not vote for him.) I say this as an American who, living abroad, sees from afar tragic events unfolding that can be avoided. But the present realities are too harsh to simply ignore.

Half the country is enraged by what they feel is a system now overtly tilted against them. They had their businesses shut down during the COVID-19 lockdowns by authorities who urged others to go out and protest en masse in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM). They watch as the media relentlessly ridicules them, their lifestyles, their beliefs, and their faith. They are told that racism is the worst form of evil by the very same people who, in the same breath, blame white people for all the world's ills. And now, they're seeing their livelihoods inflated away by people who assured them that inflation was "transitory," and that more government spending is the remedy.

America is in trouble. First, we suffered a biological disaster with the COVID-19 pandemic, which was mishandled in every possible way, including the calamity of shutting down the nation's economy. With people home, afraid, angry, and glued to an incendiary media, the biological disaster then spread to a social disaster, in the form of the BLM riots. The reckless federal spending of the COVID era has now caught up with us, as a supercharged economic disaster is unfolding right before our eyes.

In extreme moments, disaster tends to cluster, as Lionel Shriver—the great novelist who, in her 2016 novel The Mandibles, predicted the major economic instability we're now witnessing—noted in a recent podcast. This is how catastrophe erupts: Botched public and official responses to a disaster do the exact opposite of what is necessary, setting off a cascade of further disasters. When things are bad, bad people make them worse.

And now, with this fateful decision by a New York DA, the political disaster that could have been kept on the horizon has been brought to shore. This may well be the one that capsizes the country into utter catastrophe. The terrible irony is that, with the country sunk, those who ushered in these tragedies will still cling to their belief that it was all worth it.

Ashley Rindsberg is a media expert, investigative journalist, and author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times' Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.