Felonious Trump: Whose Crooked Now? What is Justice?

 

Occasionally, I have imagined arriving in Heaven and being welcomed at a sort of cocktail party for new arrivals in an event which looked a little like some of the parties thrown by New York publishers I got invited to, decades ago. Scattered about those Manhattan event rooms were people I recognized all brought together in one place:  George Plimpton, Nelson DeMille, Kurt Vonnegut--people you'd expect to see hanging about at a party of literati, but also Carly Simon, the singer, who wound up there because she had written a children's book and was a grand daughter of the Simon of Simon and Shuster, but also the occasional mayor, or ballet dancer. 

But in my imagined welcome party at Heaven, I saw Adolph Hitler, standing there with his Swastika armband, among the other guests, and I thought, "Oh, my, perhaps I did not qualify for Heaven after all, but am in the other place."

The Model Victim

Wannabe

But no, I was assured, I was in Heaven, but so was Adolph. He was just standing there chatting, among the other celebs, all having a pleasant time.

And how would I reconcile those two things?

But then I remembered that passage from that wonderful book I read, as a freshman in college, "The Stranger" in which Meursault, the narrator, who has told you the story of how he, inexplicably,  shot to death an Arab youth on a beach, and who now tells you, immaculately detached, about his trial and the witnesses who come forth to describe how utterly unfeeling he seemed at the funeral of his mother, and Meursault says, likely accurately, that he got the impression he was being judged not for having fatally shot the Arab youth, but for not having cried at the funeral of his mother.  

Listening to Accusations

He was being judge for being alienated from human affection.

And he marvels at the parade of witness who describe him from different parts of his humdrum life, each from his own perspective, relating a scene with Meursault they remember in some detail, as the prosecution systematically builds its case against him as an inhuman, remorseless killer, and Meursault observes the experience engenders even more detachment, as the person they are describing is completely unrecognizable to him, as the picture which emerges is not of him, but a picture of someone he does not know at all, who is on trial, not for a murder on a beach but for being a monster.

Of course, we know Meursault as readers, and we know the scenes described are accurate in one sense, but we know Meursault is not so much unfeeling, as scrupulously honest; he simply refuses to profess feelings he does not really embrace. He would never say, as most of us do, "Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss," when, in fact, we are not really saddened, but we know we have to act out our parts as the sympathetic human beings we are not.

In Meursault's case, his mother has died at an inconvenient time.  The fact is, she had lived apart from him in a nursing home and it is likely she had never much missed him nor him her. They had "grown apart" we might say in polite society. And now she had died and his employer had to give him the Friday off so he could get to the funeral some distance away, and the employer felt he had to say yes, although clearly he was unsympathetic, but in the end he had to say, "Well, there is no one like a mother." He had to play the role of sympathy society demands, but which Meursault sees as phony.

When Donald Trump went on trial, I have not one iota of doubt he heard testimony against him and he did not think any of it fairly described him. He sees himself as a good man, a champion in fact. He had no idea who that man was who was being described by Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.

Rauter on Trial

So did Hans Albin Rauter, the SS commandant of the Netherlands, who ruthlessly executed anyone who resisted the German control of that nation, who oversaw the round up and execution of Dutch Jews--the Netherlands, by percentage, purged more Jews than any other European nation falling under Nazi control. (Of 150,000 Dutch Jews only 40,000 survived.)  When Rauter survived an assassination attempt, 500 Dutch were summarily executed in reprisal under his direction. This was standard Third Reich method: Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia and whole villages with villagers int them were burned alive.

 And in both cases the SS men felt wholly justified.

Heydrich

Listening to Rauter testify in his trial for war crimes after the war, you learn he considered himself an innocent victim, who was only concerned with maintaining order in the new, exalted society the Reich was creating.

Obadiah Youngblood

In "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," Judith Rossner provides the confession of the man who murdered a woman he had picked up in a bar, who had taken him home to her apartment, had sex with him but then tried to get him to leave her apartment when he had nowhere else to go, being homeless, and so her stabbed her to death, which, as Rossner observes, seems to him a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in fact anyone in the same position would have done the same, because, after all, he was the victim.

And so it is with that 40% of the American public who loves Trump. Trump is a completely innocent man. He can never be guilty. His trial was a witch hunt and a travesty of justice, a political charade. 

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand was "crooked." But Trump is a straight arrow who says what he thinks whether it is politically correct or not, like Meursault. He is fundamentally, an honest man who says the truth, offensive as it may be, like, for instance, our country is being poisoned by illegal immigrant rapists, insane asylum escapees, who are dark skinned, and who don't speak English.

You never see yourself as guilty.