Felonious Don: Long a Con Man, Now a Convict

If there's a human being more dishonest than Donald Trump, I'm all ears. He is crooked to his core, and his is no mere propensity to deceive but rather pure pathology. Long a certifiable con man, Trump has now descended to an even lower plane. Found guilty of 34 separate felonies by a 12-person jury that took only a few hours of actual deliberations to reach a unanimous verdict that he was a bona fide criminal, Trump is now officially not only a con man but a convict.

Now let's face it: The only jury pool more favorably disposed to the Manhattan district attorney's criminal prosecution of Trump than the one Trump had to contend with may be found at lunchtime in the Democratic National Committee's cafeteria. And the application of the law that formed the basis for District Attorney Alvin Bragg's prosecution was somewhere between unusual and novel.

But let's also dispense with the outrage about Trump's criminal convictions. They were based on indisputable evidence of Trump's indisputable dishonesty: falsifying business records to create the fictitious appearance that checks written by Trump to Michael Cohen were for legal services rather than reimbursements for hush money payments to a porn star with whom Trump had an adulterous affair, in order to conceal what Trump had done. There are no tears to shed for Donald Trump.

There are as many reasons that returning Trump to the White House would be disastrous as there are grains of sand on the proverbial seashore, and his through-and-through amorality isn't even at the top of the list. That half the country is prepared to go ahead and do it is a national stain.

But there's a whole lot of crazy out there. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio illustrated this immediately after Trump's convictions, which, kissing The Big Guy's ring, Rubio blamed on Joe Biden. "Our current President," Rubio posted, "is a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power." This, of course, is unadulterated garbage, but it at least served to call to mind literary critic Mary McCarthy's famous declaration about playwright Lillian Hellman. "Every word she writes is a lie," McCarthy once said, "including 'and' and 'the.'"

Joe Biden is not only an extraordinarily decent man, but he has been a hugely successful president, even historically successful, the more impressive given the awful socio-political hand he was dealt when inaugurated in January 2021. Rubio is simply auditioning for a vice-presidential nod, so he talks crazy because crazy is what he hopes will get him there. He knows that the truth is what his colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham told an interviewer in 2015, back before crazy was king. Joe Biden, Graham said then, is "as good a man as God ever created."

This shouldn't be a close election, but it will be. It isn't only because the years-long disinformation campaign waged by the right has paid off. It's also because of Democrats' hubris and their failure to confront the revulsion that far-left groups that America's heartland associates with the Democratic Party has triggered in states Biden needs to carry to win reelection. Mobs of pseudo-revolutionaries storming buildings, vandalizing property, blocking roads and forcing people to navigate gauntlets while they chant in favor of a genocidal, misogynistic, homophobic and jihadist terror organization disgust the vast majority of Americans, though not the majority of Columbia University's faculty. The pro-Hamas crowd, chanting slogans they don't even understand, proclaiming "Death to America" and calling the police "pigs," is cool at Democratic Socialists of America HQ. Not so much to most of us.

A fear that chaos and lunacy on the left is what Democrats stand for isn't just an albatross around Joe Biden's neck as November draws near. It's an anvil.

Biden doesn't deserve this. And America can't afford it. But if the mobs and what they represent aren't confronted and defeated, the country is in danger of paying a dreadful price.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.