William Barr Returns To The Debate

Willaim Barr, a never-Trumper who was Trump's second attorney general, has become the most visible proponent of the eight-dimensional chess interpretation of the Alvin Bragg Trump indictment:

“Politically, it’s gonna be damaging, I think, to the Republican Party simply because I think it’s a no-lose situation for the Democrats,” Barr continued. “I think the impetus is really to help Trump get the nomination, focus the attention on him for two years, have this thing swirling around, plus whatever else comes, which I think will be damaging to whoever gets the nomination.”

In other words, whatever prospers Trump hurts the Republicans, and this is prospering Trump (darn it!). My overall view continues to be that at this stage in 2015, Jeb Bush was the consensus favorite for the Republican nomination, while Hillary was likely to win the general. But the whole story of 2015 was that the elite consensus never factored Donald Trump into the equation, and as best I can tell from current reports,

New post-indictment polling data from former President Donald Trump’s campaign shows that not only does he hold a commanding lead in the GOP primary and a lead over Democrat President Joe Biden in a likely general election matchup but that more voters in both the primary and the general election say they are now going to vote for Trump because of it.

The one thing to keep in mind is that, as we learned in 2015 and 2016, politics is never a sure thing. But we also learned in those years that it's also a major error to discount or underrate Donald Trump. Wlliam Barr, an Ivy League white-shoe lawyer who worked for the CIA out of college, is a multimillionaire member of the one-percent elite that, Republican or Democrat, has been instinctively opposed to the populist movement Trump represents. Barr, possibly because he's a member of C Wright Mills's power elite himself, seems to view Trump's opposition on the left as something like his own comfortable environment, run by a concursus bonorum omnium. But this isn't the current actual state of the leftist coalition.

As I pointed out on Friday, the New Deal coalition has been gradually fraying at the edges since the 1972 election, and as Joel Kotkin points out in a recent interview, the Silicon Valley one-percent have become the main funders of the Democrat party, when previously it had been labor unions.

[T]he old industrial companies in Silicon Valley, such as Hewlett-Packard, were very cognisant of the importance of their workforce. Business management author Tom Peters wrote about this quite a bit. Executives were dependent on the people on the factory floor. The grunts were important. But if you’re a social-media company, there are no grunts. You will hire grunts to do your catering, but that’s about it. You don’t have a bunch of high-school graduates who may be very good at doing one particular thing – you don’t need those people anymore. So they don’t even have any contact with the vast majority of the population. Early 20th-century business magnates like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford, bad as they were, at least had to think about the people on the line, because they made their products.

. . . At the same time, in their unbelievable arrogance, Silicon Valley elites decided to become the main funder of the Democratic Party and to identify with every ‘progressive’ cause.

This brings us back to the Starbucks dillemma, that the one-percent entrepreneurial elites and their allies in the broader gentry romanticize the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders who make up other key members of the current leftist coalition without recognizing that neither of those factions is reliable, and indeed, as Kotkin also points out, they've lost touch with labor, which had previously been a reliable member of the New Deal coalition. We need look no farther than another aspect of the Starbucks saga, the growing movement to unionize its workforce.

I think Mr Barr is assuming there's still some Averell Harriman type quietly arranging things at the top of the Democrat coalition, and District Attorney Bragg has just as quietly squared the whole strategy with his office. But Bragg is not a quiet sort of guy, and if that were the case, we wouldn't have people seriously advancing these opinions on the Trump indictment:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg thrust America into uncharted political and legal waters when he secured a grand jury indictment against Donald Trump. Soon his team will face withering scrutiny that will test three crucial elements of his case: the credibility of his witnesses, the clock known as the statute of limitations and the consistency of his application of fraud law.

. . . "It's the worst, weakest, most abusive case of prosecutorial indiscretion," Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, an unbashed liberal and self-described Joe Biden supporter, told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "In my 60 years of practicing law, I have never seen a weaker case."

If there were in fact some Averell Harriman, some Nelson Rockefeller, quietly guiding affairs via a Henry Kissinger or a George Shultz, there might be a sure thing behind something like a Trump indictment. The problem is that nobody has any sense that there's a sure thing here -- instead, it's uncharted territory, a crossing of a Rubicon, which an established elite simply does not envision. If an elite were running the show, everything would already be a done deal, Trump would be off to Lompoc or Lewisburg as we speak, having already entered his guilty plea a la, say, Martha Stewart, Michael Milkin, Ivan Boesky, Bernie Madoff, or Spiro Agnew.

That this hasn't happened is already an indication that there's no Averell Harriman type quietly guiding events, and Bragg is instead simply playing with fire. In this sort of uncertain atmosphere, the one mistake past experience suggests we shouldn't make is to underestimate Donald Trump, however events may ultimately play out.