SHUT UP AND WAIT

Trump has been indicted.

None of us know specifically what is in that indictment.

We will presumably discover what is in it this coming Tuesday, when the former president will reportedly surrender to the authorities in New York City and be arraigned.  At that time, the indictment will become public

In the meantime, what should all of us do and how should all of us react?

Here's my answer in three words.

Shut up and wait.

No one, however, is following that advice.  

As far as I can tell, no one is even giving it.  

Instead, on the right, the left and in the center, everyone is sallying forth with their respective opinions on what is merely the latest piece of unique news to be attached to an American president who literally has raised the notion of uniqueness to an art form.  In truth, he has been so unique so outrageously and so often that we have lost count. He has exhausted our ability to attend to his acts, to notice them, to calmly evaluate them.

He has even exhausted our ability . . .

To wait.

Why is this?

Is it all about him?

Or is it about us?

For as long as I can remember, I have been confronted -- attacked really -- by the notion that perception is reality. 

I don't know whether it took root in my collegiate studies of philosophy, or in a now fifty-plus-years devotion to American politics, or in the complexities of interpersonal relationships that have both failed and succeeded.  

But it has always been thus.  

Efforts to embrace or argue from reality were subject to the rejoinder that people simply did not see it that way.  

The critics were astounded by my supposed naivete.

Perception is reality, they would say.

Reality is reality too, I'd retort.

Not in the real world, they'd reply.

This is the sort of conversation college kids (or at least the ones I hung with) have over late-night drinks in dark bars.  It is also the kind of conversations therapists have with patients.  The problem, I think, is that absent analytic rigor, accepting perception as reality or awarding it too much credence is very dangerous.  Perceptions can be wrong. They can also be manipulated. At worst, they can be lies.

For the past eight years, that sort of contest has been played out in the world of all things Trump. He creates his own reality and by doing so makes the perceptions he creates in others their reality.  People then act on those perceptions, often in ways that are unexpected and dangerous.  

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the worst example of this. 

Having created the false perception among millions that he had won an election he clearly lost, thousands who lived in that perceptual vacuum stormed the Capitol, stopped an electoral count, assaulted the police and threatened to kill the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Trump's election in 2016 was another one.  

The economically depressed rural and ex-urban voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who made Trump president in 2016, like the ones who made JD Vance Ohio's Senator last year, embraced the notion that they were the victims of woke elites and illegal immigrants while ignoring the reality of tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation, right to work anti-unionism and outsourced manufacturing, all of which are the real reasons they are struggling. 

Fast forward to today.

Trump and his acolytes are at it again.

Weeks before the indictment was even announced, the former president warned of "potential death and destruction" were he charged.  And once it was announced, right wing commentators and virtually every elected official from the Republican Party immediately condemned it as an un-American assault on the rule of law. Mark Levin called the indictment an act of "tyranny", a "grotesque, Stalinist, Maoist-type action".  Mike Pence called it "outrageous".  Kevin McCarthy said it was an "injustice" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". Governor DeSantis said he'd refuse to obey the law if he was asked to extradite Trump to New York, and Tucker Carlson suggested it might not be a good time for anyone to get rid of their AR-15s.

None of them have seen the indictment.

But all of them have condemned it.

The now announced case of People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is going to be a long slog.  After the indictment is made public on Tuesday, it will take at least a year and a half for the case to conclude.  The former president is represented by competent counsel (full disclosure: one of his attorneys is my friend).  There will be motions to test the sufficiency of the indictment, a period of discovery in which the DA will be required to disclose all of his evidence (both the good and the bad for his case), jury selection, a trial at which Trump and his lawyers will get to cross examine the state's witnesses, jury deliberation, a verdict and possible appeals.  Between the beginning and the end, the case may change.  In fact, some or all of it may end long before any trial.  

Far from evidencing an assault on the rule of law, the whole process will be testimony to its continued existence.

The rest of us should stifle any advice to react on cue and let that happen.

In other words . . .

Shut up and wait.