Yeah, yeah, I know.Â
I know the case brought by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg that resulted in a criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records last Thursday wasn’t The Most Important One. Neither in terms of punitive potential nor as far as protecting our national security and continuing democracy goes. Not compared to the others, the ones still pending trial. The federal cases brought by Jack Smith in South Florida and Washington D.C., and Fani Willis’s relentlessly fucked with yet undaunted RICO prosecution in Fulton County. The one where he’s accused of stealing classified documents and sticking them in his ferociously tacky country club’s outdated Palm Beach bathroom. The one where we all heard him attempt to steal the last election over the phone with state officials in Georgia, part of a conspiracy so far-reaching in scope that eighteen other people were indicted, too. And, of course, the one where he provided the psychological permission slip needed for a mob of Reddit-addicted Q-consumed anti-vax lockdown survivors to descend upon our nation’s Capitol. To erect a gallows intended for the Vice President. To hunt the Speaker of the House. To terrorize hundreds of elected members of Congress alongside everyone else who was working there that day, the defense against which resulted in strokes, brain injuries, heart attacks, and the subsequent suicides of multiple police officers.Â
Covering up $130,000 in hush money, inflating assets, and making a deal with the National Enquirer to catch and kill ‘unfavorable stories’ is Hungry Hungry Hippos compared to all that, and yes, I just retired Tiddlywinks as a reference in case anyone younger than the age of 75 is reading this.
The point is, I know.Â
Please join me for a moment, regardless. Allow yourself a deep, inward breath and a long exhale. The whole thing is moving at a speed so warped I’m not sure it can be measured anymore. The tech mercenaries who control our time and attention have jerry-rigged us to scroll instead of feel. Swiping away what seems like too much is a legitimate means of survival when the daily multi-pronged mass trauma assault is laying digital siege to our nervous systems. But something crucial is being lost. The capacity to linger in the good news when it comes. We need to metabolize those nutrients. To stay with their subtle shifts. The actual feelings. Of broken pieces being put back in place. Which is why Thursday’s decision by twelve anonymous New Yorkers matters.
It matters to a lot of us.
To the portion of the population, nearly 66 million of whom would go on to cast their ballots for her, who were forced to listen in the Fall of 2016 to a bloated ex-game show host who appeared to have been dipped in a vat of imitation cheese bragging that he could grab any woman he wanted to by the pussy, to those of us who would then watch as enough people in enough states decided they not only didn’t care he’d said that (along with every other racist, bigoted, thuggish, anti-democratic utterance over the previous year) but, they actually preferred a person who said that to the lady with fifty years of legal, diplomatic, and public service experience combined, including two highly accomplished terms as the senator from N.Y. and one as the nation’s Secretary of State:
It matters.
Because remember? How enough people couldn’t bring themselves to cast a ballot in her name? Remember why they wouldn’t? Her shrillness. Her outfits. All those blazers and pants. The throat clearing. Her marriage. And, of course, lest anyone forget, her motherfucking emails.
Thanks mainly to Mark Burnett and other self-appointed reality manufacturers over at NBC, who had direct knowledge of exactly how awful they knew Donald Trump to be, enough people in enough states were convinced to buy a long con perfected over decades. They were marks in a game with a distraction so elaborate that it required the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin to be effectively sustained. Enough smoke, mirrors, scripted lines, and re-edited takes constructed under hot white lights, funded by the darkest money, turned a tabloid clown into a charismatic billionaire boss, an amusing rogue. From that fiction, they built a hologram of an iconoclast who vowed to fight for the common struggles of a nation’s forgotten man. Enough people in enough states believed this in no small part because their very neural networks had been hijacked and then conditioned over time. They simply picked the card on which their gaze was trained. A huckster, an unhinged bigot, a serial sexual assaulter. None of it mattered.
Because they didn’t like her.
And why was that again?
Because she was, well, you know
her.
To those of us trying to go about our lives in the cold, abbreviated days following that election eight years ago, stumbling around the streets of our towns and cities in nothing less than a grief-struck fugue, those of us, perhaps especially in the city of my birth where any local who lived through the 80s clocked Donald Trump as, at best, a bootleg Barnum, primarily known for owning a gaudy triplex overlooking Central Park in which a golden toilet was installed, and who regularly called the N.Y. Post to place items about his own sexual prowess while cheating on any number of his various humiliated wives, the case Alvin Bragg finally brought and then won, matters.
It matters that our fundamentally problematic justice system managed to get this one right. It matters that 12 people were presented over several weeks with extensive documents and a host of testimonies, that the witnesses were questioned directly and then cross-examined, that the jury was carefully instructed on the letter of the law, that they deliberated over the course of two days for more than nine hours, and that those people unanimously decided to criminally convict the former President of these United States. They decided he was guilty of every count, thirty-four times over, and they agreed that even though the woman at the center of this case was a porn star, he deserved to be held accountable.
Whatever bravado and quick wit Stormy Daniels deployed in that hotel room, that she has been deploying ever since, didn’t truly protect her; it didn’t prevent her from having to wear a bulletproof vest to court. And it didn’t prevent her from feeling trapped, manipulated, ashamed, and alone in that Lake Tahoe bungalow in 2006. Every woman you’ve ever known has some version of this experience locked inside her psychic vault, where we shut our eyes and conduct a Houdini-like escape. His smell, his taste, his weight. We disappear. Or float above, separate from ourselves.
And, yes. I know: this case was not actually about the sex. It was about a conspiracy to cover up the payment to the woman with whom he had the sex. It was about the campaign. Still, it matters. That they listened to her. That they believed her. And, for better or worse, the decision by cable news to air wall-to-wall coverage mattered, too. Because it meant an entire nation’s gaze was directed back where it originally belonged. Back to his words and his behavior. To his shame.
Just as it mattered when the jury deliberated over the evidence presented in his civil defamation trial and awarded E. Jean Carroll $7.3 million in emotional damages, $11 million in reputation-related damages, and $65 million in punitive damages. It mattered that they found him liable. For defamation. For sexual abuse and forcible touching. And when the presiding judge said despite the N.Y. penal code’s narrow definition of rape, in any common parlance, the prosecution proved that was what he did.
Late Thursday afternoon, as a sweet May breeze blew through the lush green trees of Lower Manhattan, a small piece in our collective puzzle fell into its proper place. However long it took, the case was finally made.
I was there.
People hoisted phones and pumped their fists, joyful shouts erupting toward the sky. Birds circled overhead. Strangers embraced. The wordless looks between women after that dread-filled night eight years ago were exchanged again, only this time in relief.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Guilty.
In that dreary, ice-cold room. A whole life spent trying to avoid it. He reportedly closed his eyes and shook his head while the jury’s verdict was being read.
Alone. Trapped. Powerless.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I keep thinking about all those times he appeared to fall asleep throughout the trial. About the exquisite adaptive resources of our highly advanced brains, yes, even his. How an entire body will shut down in the face of what would otherwise overwhelm it. A brain, on behalf of a nervous system, can, at least for a while, prevent an unmanageable reality from breaking in. Dorsal collapse at times of high stress. Eyes close. Energy goes. Something essential vacates. Flies away from here. In moments of severe panic? Blood will leave appendages and numb whole limbs. Hands might shake, just like Stormy said afterward, as she tried to leave; hers did.
Enough fear? Enough shame? Enough real consequences?
The biggest star might burn completely, then.
Superb summary. Even reading it was cathartic.
This is awesome.