https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/04/the-getting-of-donald-trump/
Forgive the foggy memory, for I can’t quite place the sign that announced in carefully painted white-on-black block letters just a single word, ‘BELIEVE’. Tennessee or Kentucky maybe, because the road it was beside wound through narrow valleys and hillsides waiting winter-naked for the first green sheen of the northern spring. And there it was, on the other side of a low fence fronting a roughly cleared plot, this handmade testament to … what exactly? This was in the South, albeit only just below the Mason-Dixon line, where churches large and small are regular as milestones along the way and almost as common. Around the next turn, no doubt, there would be another little billboard instructing the passerby where belief is best invested, with Jesus or the Bible seeming most likely. But there was nothing, no second sign to deliver the expected one-two punchline. Just ‘Believe’, and that was that.
Until an oncoming 18-wheeler switched the focus to evasive driving and self-preservation, it was a riddle to occupy for a mile or two the thoughts of a solitary motorist. What species of rustic obsessive would go to such trouble and for what purpose? Today, though, with some seven months to run before the 2024 election and a criminal trial like no other getting under way, belief for the sake of believing seems almost to make sense. To abandon the comfort of delusion would mean chewing over some deeply unpalatable truths, not least about the full machinery of the law being deployed in the selective and unprecedented prosecution of one man, a former president and current White House contender.
But believe what you want to believe. Everyone is doing it, and why not? Your ‘truth’ is as valid as that of the next they, zim or zey. If the facts disagree, if the evidence contradicts, well there’s the handy expedient of not really being required to care too much. You have your belief and that’s enough. An eager willingness to believe the unbelievable, it’s all that’s needed anywhere and everywhere. The more what is obvious and unhidden goes unremarked and unquestioned, the better for a troubled nation’s peace of mind, at least in the short term.
At the New York Times such belief demands what is unfolding in a southern Manhattan courtroom be painted as a triumph for American fair play, as laid out in a recent editorial built upon a believer’s ‘truth’ that, as usual, simply isn’t true: “Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office,” the editorial begins. No examples of Trump’s alleged perfidy, no names or cases are cited, and certainly there is no mention of the many harassing and vexatious lawsuits brought against Trump, for that might ruffle what the Times prefers to perceive and present as a moral crusade in which its editorial voice speaks for all the noble traditions of courtroom probity and decorum. Trump, the leader column assures the core readers its authors know are equally eager to believe, “is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”
