The penalty in Trump's civil fraud case: Perspective on what matters

 Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $355 million, and he has been blocked from serving in any capacity in the State of New York on the boards of businesses.  He will appeal, of course, and one can never be certain what will happen on appeal, yet let us step back and ask what we should make of these verdicts.  It is tempting to take a moment of schadenfreude.  Those with moral clarity have always recognized what Donald Trump is.  Of course, moral clarity has always been difficult and rare, and I think that there will be a post soon on the challenges of moral clarity throughout history, taking the long view.  Yet here, now, is a man who has always flouted every principle because, as is obvious, he is a sociopath.  One is tempted, then, to enjoy his loss.  Yet to do so is to lose that moral clarity.

There is some satisfaction in justice done.  Justice is not yet done, to be sure.  He has his appeals, and there are processes, but a right verdict is satisfying for its correctness.  Remember, also, the old wisdom that the guilty man is never truly free.  He may evade the law on any given day, but in his own mind, the law is always one step away, so in his own mind, he always feels the terror.  Even the sociopath, while incapable of feeling the guilt of having harmed another, can feel the fear, as Donald Trump always has.  His bluster is never more than a cover.  He was always captured in his own mind.  He can escape today, but he will always be on the run.  Well, on the slow mosey.  Even the king, the tyrant, lives forever in fear of the assassin's blade.  If punishment is what you want, Donald Trump does that to himself, every day, every second, and it isn't your business, nor your problem.

Of course, a sound society does depend on justice.  It is a problem that Donald Trump has evaded it so consistently, and in that sense, the verdict-- another verdict-- is good.  Not because a bad man suffers, as all bad men do, but because rules matter, and unenforced rules do not exist in any real way.

Yet let us take a bigger picture perspective.  What now?  Idiots are giving Donald Trump their money, and as the cult leader of the Republican Party, his renomination had already been secured years ago.  Biden's approval rating sits at 40.1% in the RCP average, which is not good.  It might go a little higher, but probably not by much.  2023 Q4 GDP rose by 3.3% annualized, which is pretty good.  What matters most will be Q2 2024, and we do not know that, but this looks rough for either Biden or Harris if Biden dies.  Trump has a real shot, and even if he loses, the GOP will do a better job trying to steal it for him this time.

Bigger picture, I care much more about the country than about Donald Trump's business dealings or bank account balance.  I care more about the world than Donald Trump's business dealings or bank account balance.  I do not actually care about Donald Trump much at all because he is one person.  One crazy, old man who will die in a few years anyway after stewing in anger and resentment and conspiracy theories and delusions.  Rich, poor, doesn't matter, he's a miserable sack of shit and that's all he is capable of being because as the saying goes, poverty is not having too little, but wanting more.  He does not matter, independently of the crazy people who worship him as a godhead.  Trump cultists concern me greatly, just as leftist psychopaths concern me, but Trump?  As a man, he is not even a man, much less a concern to me.

So what now?

I ask the pragmatic question from a national perspective.  Does this have any effect on the 2024 election?  It could go either way.  You have probably seen surveys asking respondents how they would respond, if some legal eventuality happened with Trump, such as a criminal conviction.  Scholarly surveys never use this structure, for two reasons.  First, people cannot predict their individual responses to events, and second, if they knew, they would not necessarily tell you the truth.  We can use three methods.  We can use case comparisons, such as Election A versus Election B, where voting patterns are compared.  Second, we can use the before-and-after method, to see if there are changes in preferences, although that requires a lot of data over a particular time period.  Finally, we can use cross-sectional comparisons to ask about voters' knowledge or beliefs about events, and see if that predicts voting behavior controlling for other factors at the end point.  That's a very quick overview, and it is more complicated, but we never ask questions like, will you be influenced by x, or will in change your mind if x happens?  That's what journalists ask because they never study survey methodology and they don't listen to those of us who do.

That said, if you have seen those kinds of badly done polls, you may be tempted to think that such a civil judgment will hurt Trump.  The problem is that the kind of people who will say that it will reduce their probability of voting for Trump are the kinds already disinclined to vote for Trump.

On the other hand, Trump's entire political persona is build upon his personal grievance complex, and the more aggrieved he can claim to be, the more his cultists project their own grievances onto him, work themselves up into a lather, give what little money they have to him, and get exercised, or what little exercise they get, fat slobs that they are, no, not apologizin', maybe they should get together with the left and their body positivity death cult.

Point being, if these kinds of verdicts sway some independents-- who are rarer than you are told, but not non-existent-- they can also increase turnout among Republicans.  Net effect?  I do not know.

And the angrier the left gets, the stronger the left gets!  Actually, no, it isn't like the Hulk.  The angrier they get, the crazier they get.  I wrote a post a while back about what I called "mutual derangement syndrome."  To the degree that we are concerned with the country, and the world, it matters not one whit that Trump loses his business or anything of the sort.  Yet even if these verdicts tilt 2024 towards Biden, that is only good to the degree that Biden really stays better than Trump, which is supposed to be the lowest bar imaginable.

The problem is that Biden is being pulled in the crazy direction by a group every bit as morally reprehensible as Donald Trump.  The Squad.  Yes, I said it.  The Squad is as reprehensible.

In fact, right now if I had  choice between Donald Trump and Ilhan Omar, I would probably vote for Trump.  Consider everything I have ever written about Donald Trump.  I stand by every word of it.

Ilhan Omar is worse.

And Biden is old, and weak, and spineless.

And with each passing day, he gets more Squad-ified.

Let's put this in mathematical, political science terms.  There is the basic, spatial model, which began with Hotelling's 1929 paper, and then was adapted by Anthony Downs in 1957, and then took over a lot of the discipline, and I cannot complain with any credibility as it got me publications and tenure and all that horrible stuff which should be abolished, but I ain't givin' it up, in tenure veritas!

Anyway, it works like this.  There is a dimension-- a line-- from left to right, which we call the liberal-conservative dimension in American politics, and those outside the US use the word, "liberal," differently, and sanctimoniously ignorant scholars within the US pretend not to know what the word, "liberal," means because it makes them look like me, not knowing the rules of football, or so they think.

They're just jackasses.

(So am I, except that I really don't know the rules of football, and nobody expects me to, but if you are a professor, studying anything even vaguely political, and you don't know that the word, "liberal" has a different meaning here, you should be stripped of your degree.)

Anyway, everyone has an ideal location, and single-peaked, symmetric preferences, such that distance to the left is as much of a cost as distance to the right.  Hence, one votes for whomever is closest to one's ideal point.

Question:  Is the policy space bounded, or unbounded?  We'll come back to that.

In contrast, consider the "directional" model, proposed by Rabinowitz & McDonald.  This is a controversial model, and I go back and forth on it.  Which is not intended to be a joke.  The idea is that instead of having preferences on locations, voters have preferences on the direction in which they want policy to move.  If so, they can actually prefer candidates who are more distant in locational terms, as long as that means moving policy in their preferred directions.  Interesting.

Anyway, though, let's return to the question of the boundedness of the policy space.  If the policy space is bounded, then the closer you are to one boundary, the more of a challenge it is for you to vote for anyone on the other side of the midpoint of the policy space.  Let's say the policy space is -1 to +1.  If you are sufficiently far to the left, there is basically nothing that can happen to get you to prefer anyone on the right to anyone on the left.

Now take away the boundaries.  Let's say you are at -.95.  You're a loony lefty, by any standard.  But, is it possible for you to flip, if you are rational?  Yes.  Let's say, the GOP goes hard right, and moves to 3.  Serious wingnut territory.  Then, though, the Dems out-crazy the crazy, and move to -5.  Your distance to the Dem is 4.05, with a distance to the Republican of 3.95.  By a bare margin, you prefer the totally wing-nutty Republican to the insane moonbat Dem.  With a bounded policy space, that cannot happen, but if there are no bounds on the policy space, then as everyone gets crazier and crazier, you can have someone who was far, far, far left suddenly prefer a psychopathic, right-wing nutjob because the Dems have gone full terrorist.

And in case you have not noticed, the Democrats have gone full terrorist.  They are supporting Hamas.  Even Biden is now telling Israel not to go into Rafah, where Yahya Sinwar and other leaders of Hamas are hiding, and instead, leave Rafah alone, let Hamas live, reward Hamas by giving them whatever they want, and no support for Israel unless they pay off Hamas, which committed the most brutal, anti-Jewish genocidal attack since WWII.

Cease fire!  Directed only at Israel, Hamas can keep shooting, raping, burning and killing however they choose, because leftists, including Biden, will respond by telling Israel not to respond, except to give Hamas whatever they want, including handing over more terrorists to do more Jew-raping.

Biden's domestic policies are... a mixed bag at best, having been pulled so far to the insane left that yes, he really did cause a lot of inflation, and only Jerome Powell has maybe pulled his ass out of the fire, on that front, and Biden just keeps digging on others.  If he cannot even confront genocidal terrorism, I have little use for him.

The civil fraud verdict may have no effect on the 2024 election.  I am no longer certain I care, which is a horrifying thought.

We, political scientists (and journalists) have been writing about polarization for decades.  The parties have been moving further apart, steadily and distressingly.  Represented mathematically, polarization is an abstract puzzle to be solved, comforting in its mysteries.  Yet polarization is an abstract representation of a real phenomenon.  Real people are adopting positions that are moving further away from each other and outside what had been an Overton window, and to the degree that the Overton window had been a sane Overton window, that's bad.

A plurality rule electoral system produces a two-party system, as Maurice Duverger observed so long ago, giving us "Duverger's law."  Hence, the proper functioning of an electoral system under plurality rule requires not even just one, but two sane parties.  We have zero.

That is the problem.  That is what matters.

Donald Trump, himself, is irrelevant, and a verdict against him is similarly irrelevant.  If I thought that a verdict against him would hurt his prospects in 2024, I would rejoice if I thought that were truly good, but that would depend on believing that the course of the country is significantly helped, relatively speaking, by Biden winning reelection.  Yet, Biden is moving in such a troubling direction, along with a party that has lost all touch with sense or reality, that long term, I am not convinced that it matters.

Biden claimed that his reason for running for president was Charlottesville, during which conveniently white people who looked the part chanted things like "Jews will not replace us."  Sick and deranged, but those aren't the people actually, literally raping Jews to death, or even making such threats to Jews on college campuses that they have to be kept locked in libraries, like at Cooper Union.  If you only care when they look the part, and then side with them when they look a different part, then you are the enemy.

The Charlottesville Rednecks are ineffectual enemies.  I am concerned with the ones who get the job done.

Imagine the Charlottesville tiki-torchers wearing those cultural appropriation scarves.  Suddenly they don't look so bad anymore, do they, you lefties?  Isn't that really what your heroes are saying anyway?  Jews will not replace us?  Why do you claim to hate one and give the other permission to murder us?  They sound the same to me.

And yes, I call cultural appropriation on those kids in their silly scarves.  (The difference is, they pretend to care about such things.)

There is something distressing about watching people break something you love.  The country.  The world, even those very people engaged in destruction.  The good things about capitalism and relatively limited government are that those of us who take responsibility for ourselves can still prosper.  Either way, I'll be fine.  To take responsibility for yourself is to insulate yourself from the misdeeds of others, yet that does not mean one does not weep for how others destroy themselves.

Natural disasters happen, but most of the damage is self-inflicted, by some combination of stupidity and malice.  All avoidable.  You cannot make stupid people smart.  You cannot make vicious people virtuous.  They harm themselves, and you cannot protect them from that harm.  You can insulate yourself, and truly, the value of capitalism and limited government is that they create the possibility of insulating yourself from stupidity and vice.

Yet one weeps for the destruction of that which was great.  And what was built can be rebuilt.

Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, "All That Matters," live.