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General News    H3'ed 6/13/24

Thomas B. Edsall on the Convicted Felon Trump (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 13, 2024: Former President Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. The jury in his trial in New York City found him guilty on all 34 felony charges brought against him. But what impact, if any, will his felony convictions have on the vote in the November presidential election?

The op-ed columnist Thomas B. Edsall explores this situation in his latest op-ed column titled "Trump Would Be Long Gone if Only We Could . . . " (dated June 12, 2024) in the New York Times:

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As you may know, Edsall's weekly op-ed column is usually somewhat lengthy. He typically explores a variety of positions that are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

In Edsall's latest column, he explores a variety of views about former President Donald Trump's appeal to voters. At a certain juncture, Edsall discusses the views of John Ganz, the author of the soon-to-be-released 2024 book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and of the recent online essay "The Shadow of the Mob: Trump's Gangster Gemeinschaft."

Ganz's new 2024 book When the Clock Broke is reviewed by Jennifer Szalai in her piece titled "The 1990s Were Weider Than You Think. We're Feeling the Effects. In 'When the Clock Broke,' John Ganz shows how a decade remembered as one of placid consensus was roiled by resentment, unrest and the rise of the radical right" (dated June 12, 2024) in the New York Times:

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In her review of Ganz's new 2024 book, Szalai says, "Toward the end of the book, Ganz discusses an analysis by [the far-right intellectual Sam] Francis of 'The Godfather,' in which he connects the film to the sociological concepts of Gemeinschaft and Geselleschaft - a traditional community based on kinship ties [Gemeinschaft] doing battle with modern legalistic forces [Gesselschaft]."

According to Edsall, Ganz wrote, in his recent online essay, that Trump, who is now a convicted felon, "'talks and acts like a Mafioso. He's not trying to hide it. He has compared himself to Al Capone frequently. The New York Times reported last week, 'Trump Leans Into an Outlaw Image as His Criminal Trial Concludes' [by Maggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich; dated May 28, 2024],"

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In their article Haberman and Bromwich say the following: "Prosecutors recently asked the judge overseeing the documents case [against Trump] to change Mr. Trump's conditions of release by barring him from making any further remarks that could endanger federal agents working on the case. In response, the Trump team accused them of 'unsupported histrionics' and demanded sanctions against them.

"'He either does not know the truth, which is reckless, or he knows the truth and lied about it, which is abhorrent,' Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and F.B.I. official, said of the standard procedures that Mr. Trump has misrepresented.

"'He cares very much about wielding power, but not in service of some greater good,' Mr. Rosenberg said. 'Rather, he wants power - including over the Justice Department - to benefit himself and his friends, and to harm others. He sees that power as only appropriate in his hands. That is a wretched corruption of what the rule of law means - and ought to mean - in this country, and it is deeply dangerous.'"

Now, Grace Elizabeth Hale of the University of Virginia published her book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (Oxford University Press) in 2011. It strikes me that Trump has appealed to white non-college-educated American voters precisely by tapping into that postwar American attitude regarding rebellion.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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