Trump & Our Late Roman MomentHe might well be guilty of hoarding documents. But consider the corruption of the Ruling Class attacking him
By Rod Dreher
August 10, 2022
Hello from Limassol, a city on the south coast of Cyprus. I came here to do some research for my next book. I boarded the plane for Cyprus in Vienna as the Trump raid news was breaking. The monastery where I stayed the past day and a half did not have wi-fi, which was actually a blessing, because it compelled me to wait until more information emerged before commenting. You're welcome.
On the journey up to the mountain monastery, my jovial Cypriot driver gave me an earful about America. He's a conservative, and admires Trump. He explained that Trump was a president who understood how badly the United States screwed up in the Arab world with its wars, and was eager to draw back America's warmaking. The driver also talked about how scandalized and angry he is that his young daughter's school is introducing gender ideology to the kids. He blamed the EU for this, saying that Brussels forces this stuff onto Cypriots by threatening to take away their money for roads if they don't accept pro-LGBT liberalism. He talked further about American culture as the driver of all this, saying, "we think you are all like Rome before the fall."
He said a couple of times that he hopes he wasn't offending me, but he felt that he needed to be honest about how conservative Christians like him have turned against America. "What happened to you?" he asked. He is somewhat pro-Russian, not (he says) because he admires Vladimir Putin, but because he likes to see somebody stand up to what he regards as an arrogant America.
It was hard to argue with most of what he had to say. I asked him if he had heard about the Boston Children's Hospital, which brags about performing hysterectomies on little girls with gender dysphoria. I told him about this happy-clappy promotional video from the prominent children's hospital:
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He had not. "Oh my God," he said. "It's sickening."
It is. But this is what America stands for now to a lot of people around the world -- and to many of our own people. I bring this up because it conditions the way I see the Trump raid. I will explain later.
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Well, at this point, it appears that they really were just looking for documents Trump was supposed to have turned over, but allegedly did not. I thought this couldn't be real. I mean, look, if Trump really does have these documents, it's outrageous that he hasn't turned them over. But surely the FBI wouldn't conduct a raid on a former president's house unless something truly spectacular was at stake -- and especially not the house of Donald Trump, not in this political environment. Right? I was secretly glad that I would have a day and a half at the monastery without wi-fi, so things could clear up.
Well, it seems that the feds did just that: raided Trump's house looking for documents that they believed Trump had on premises illegally.
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Because you cannot understand the Trump raid out of context of the past few years. There was Russiagate, which turned out to be nothing, but consumed a massive amount of time and resources, and damaged the Trump administration. There was the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the entire Regime insisted was Russian disinformation designed to hurt Joe Biden's election chances ... but which they now admit was real. As Ross Douthat tweeted the other day in response to the Mar-a-Lago raid:
https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1557040488514994176* * *
I hadn't thought of it that way, but she's right. To the extent that Donald Trump or Viktor Orban is corrupt, it's Mayor Daley's Chicago corruption, or Huey Long's Louisiana corruption. To the extent that the Ruling Class is corrupt, it's Fall of Rome stuff, or Weimar Germany level rot. I would prefer that the champion against the Regime would be a man (or woman) of unimpeachable character. I don't see him or her; I'll take what we have, reminding myself that the faultless man lauded by his contemporaries as "The Incorruptible" was Maximilien Robespierre, a social justice warrior who turned into one of modernity's great political monsters.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-our-late-roman-moment/
