You hardly need me to tell you that Donald Trump has been found to be a felon by a New York jury. His crime seems to be a stitched together, out-of-date series of misdemeanors. But really, his crime is being Donald Trump and running for president. As one post put it, “If Trump is the first President to be convicted of a crime, it is not, remotely, because he is the first President to be guilty of a crime.”
You probably heard that the presiding judge is a Democrat donor, that his daughter stands to make money from this trial, that he allowed irrelevant salacious details to be presented to the jury and that he is a little sensitive to people eye rolling at his decisions. Jury instructions were quite puzzling, with jurors told they didn’t need to agree on what Trump was guilty of, just that he is. The prosecution used unreliable witnesses, including a man who admitted to stealing $30,000 from Donald Trump, but the court was not bothered by those facts.
Rather like a Hollywood-style lifetime achievement award for seasoned actors, those who cannot countenance the idea of Trump back in office, have piled up his unsavory deeds in the hope that something sticks. And it seems it has. Writing at The Atlantic, David Frum concluded: “Wrong case, right verdict.” Trump will not be held to account for “his violent attempt to overturn the previous election”, he lamented, “but he is now a convicted felon all the same.” And that seems to be enough for him.
It doesn’t take a lot of insight to see that this verdict, this case, is a catastrophe for America in so many ways, as Albert Mohler wrote. The crowd at the Commentary Magazine podcast laid out many of the issues, not only with the case but what it means for the future. What is to stop any politician from being prosecuted if he fails to disclose everything that could possibly be perceived as “election interference”? What if Trump wins in November anyway? Will the Left march? What happens if his conviction is eventually overturned? Will the Right march? (Is that why corporate media is trying so hard to discredit the Supreme Court by attacking Justice Thomas’ RV, Justice Alito’s flags and Justice Barrett’s husband?) So many ways to spin this case to reinforce everyone’s priors: Trump is a would-be dictator and Republicans are a danger to democracy. Or, institutions are corrupt, the justice system is illegitimate, the Constitution is useless.
A maxim from the world of cybernetics says the purpose of a system is what it does. The idea is that the machine is never broken, it does what it is designed to do. One liberal tech writer asks his readers to reflect on “the horrible truth” that systems around us might just be doing what they are supposed to do, engendering inequality and such. His solution is to take charge of systems, to build ones that will not produce the “wrong” results:
Ask yourself, how do you get the power to change the system so that it wants something else, so that it can only inevitably do the right thing? Is there a reasonable path to that power? Or does that system need to be dismantled, so that it can be replaced by a system whose purpose is to do the right thing?
Each side of the political divide wants this to be true. Just make the right system, and you’ll get the right result. Maybe that is the case in a mechanical production line, where each component does what it was designed to do, no more, no less. But human systems are not mechanical. Education, media, charity programs, government – faith in those systems is likely the problem. Humans invent these systems, humans are part of the system and humans are flawed. If a program, an institution, a system can be used for good, it likely can be used for ill. Yet, if you are only considering life “under the sun”, what else do you have to put your hope in?
Perhaps there are some for whom this news about Trump has revealed where their hopes really lie – there are folks who would have him for their savior. But we don’t have to labor under such illusions since Jesus is the one who “declares the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done.” The power is not in the right system, but in our God. We are not allowed to despair, as Pastor Wolfmueller often says. Our hearts long for days of peace, for justice and joy, so our hands and feet and minds must work for that end, knowing that it will not be long before Jesus Christ will return to right every wrong and give us rest.