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When Ted Cruz was running for the Republican presidential nomination against Donald Trump in 2016, what Wikipedia describes as a “right wing street artist” and who calls himself Sabo created a poster of Cruz as a tattoo-covered gangster ready to take on the establishment by hook or by crook. But it didn’t take long for Cruz to meekly roll over and offer up his belly. Part of the reason is that Cruz was a play-nice personality whose innate weakness was revealed under the blinding radioactive light of a blustering egomaniac named Donald Trump.

Although I’ve been critical of Trump, what has always impressed me is his astonishing ability to withstand everything the establishment has thrown at him and still emerge bloody, but unbowed.

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And now that he’s a convicted felon — a fact that his opponents seem to think will work against him rather than in his favor — he stands a chance of becoming America’s first gangster president. So his first name is more apt than ever: He has become a “don” in the mafioso sense. But maybe a gangster is what America needs, seeing as how all the milquetoast presidents have brought us to the brink of collapse.

As a convicted felon, Trump will join such other unsavory characters as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But he’ll be the only felon who’s running for president and just might win. And as a felon, he might snag a majority of the black vote.

The fact that a New York jury convicted him of 34 felonies — THIRTY-FOUR! — last Thursday sounds damning until you realize that it refers to 34 separate checks, invoices, and vouchers that were generated to reimburse his former lawyer Michael Cohen as hush money to former porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump is scheduled to face sentencing on July 11, only four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Most legal experts say that it’s unlikely he’ll be imprisoned before the election.

Trump still faces ten felony counts in Georgia for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election results, 40 counts in Florida for reportedly mishandling government documents, and four federal counts in DC on charges of attempting to block the transfer of power to his doddering nemesis Joe Biden.

So that’s 34 felonies down, 54 more to go.

Depending on your confirmation biases, this is either evidence that Trump is an incorrigible criminal or that the system is corrupt beyond repair.

And they’re still tossing other rotten tomatoes at him, such as the evergreen allegation that he is recorded on tape – somewhere — using the word “nigger” in his pre-politician days while filming The Apprentice.

He also survived the fact that in 2016, nearly the entire Republican Party was against him. He weathered the fact that nearly all of the major media has been allied against him from the start. He endured the idiotic Russian piss dossier.

Amazingly, he takes it all with a shrug and says that the system is rigged. It hasn’t dampened his bluster one bit. If anything, it’s emboldened him. To his supporters, and possibly even most of his enemies, he flexes the indomitable will of a mythological superhero.

Anyone who denies that Trump is the victim of malicious lawfare obviously has his head so far up his ass that it wriggles up through his alimentary canal and pops up through his neck again. There’s no need to print a litany of all the other crimes that presidents both past and present committed, some of them far more egregious than anything that’s been thrown at Trump. Yet, they were all miraculously able to evade prosecution.

Tucker Carlson had been critical of Trump in the past to the point of texting a colleague that he hated him “passionately.” But last year Carlson said he became a Trump supporter after witnessing the 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago and concluding that Trump was indeed the victim of endless witch hunts. After Trump’s criminal conviction on Thursday, Carlson wrote:

Import the Third World, become the Third World. That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.

Last Thursday, I viscerally reacted to Trump’s conviction. Although I’ve previously sworn off voting, this pissed me off to the degree that I felt impelled to piss on a Banana Republic-style system that allows such things to happen. I’m under no illusion that my vote will change anything in the long run; it’s merely a symbolic middle finger to a political-financial-industrial complex that has been fisting white Americans up the wazoo with no lube to the point that sitting back and enjoying it is no longer an option. I’m also now convinced that Trump could win 100% of the votes and the Powers That Be would still find a way to make him lose.

My vote will also be a gesture of admiration for the fact that Trump is the psychologically toughest person I’ve ever witnessed. All men would do well to emulate his unbreakable mettle.

Last week, before the convictions were read, I’d arranged to interview Jared Taylor about his article “What Is Our Goal?” as well as Greg Johnson’s response article, “Is America Doomed?” All three of us seem to agree that America is irretrievably broken, but that voting for Trump is necessary anyway.

JIM GOAD: What is your take on the felonies against Donald Trump? Will this accelerate the breaking apart? Or my sense is there’s going to be quite a summer, and especially quite a November. I think chaos is ahead.

JARED TAYLOR: The felonies. Well, so many ideas swirling around my head about this. Well, yes, if we had a crevasse dividing America, now that crevasse is the Grand Canyon. I think as you probably know, in the 24 hours after the verdict, the Trump campaign became richer by something like $54 or $55 million. The reaction of many people, including a number of people I know, was to write a check. They said, “This is crazy. This guy needs to win, and I’m gonna do my best to help him win.” So the fact that we can estimate at least 70 million people are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, win or lose — what does that say? What does that say about the United States? Here’s a guy who is certainly subject to the most intense vilification campaign in American history. They went after this guy far worse than they ever did Benedict Arnold, for example. And —

JIM GOAD: — I’m sorry, far worse than they did whom?

JARED TAYLOR: Benedict Arnold.

JIM GOAD: Benedict Arnold. Or Nixon, I remember how they treated Nixon, but much worse.

JARED TAYLOR: Yes, this is infinitely worse. It’s gone on and on. Nobody has faced this kind of just slamming right and left. But the fact that what the head table says in the form of all these journalists and pundits and academics doesn’t matter to 70 million Americans, to 70 million American voters — that’s a very significant thing. The fact that practically no newspaper in the United States endorsed Donald Trump back in 2016, and he won anyway.

JIM GOAD: It was the Las Vegas Review-Journal, I think that was it.

JARED TAYLOR: Was that it? Was that it?

JIM GOAD: One, yeah, I think. [Note: There were actually two. The Florida Times-Union was the other.]

JARED TAYLOR: One, yes, practically none. Everybody, everybody endorsed his opponents. And white people, across the board — well, not across the board, but millions and millions; as I say, 70 million of ’em cocked a snook, to use a British term. I think to cock a snook is to go [thumbs his nose and wiggles his fingers] — that’s cocking a snook. They cocked a snook at the head table. This is very unusual. Most people are, I would say, politically inert or they simply drift with the tide, but for this large number of people to turn their backs on respectable or so-called respectable opinion and go absolutely the other way is an extremely significant sign of just how ferociously and irremediably divided the United States is.

So in that sense, I see it as yet another force that is leading to at least psychological separation. I believe, as I said in that piece that Greg Johnson quoted, we already psychologically live in a different nation from so many other Americans, including a certain number of white people. We live in different worlds. Let’s just make it formal. Let’s just make it physical. Let’s just recognize that if this were a marriage, we would call it irreconcilable differences and we as amicably as possible go our own way. And so anything in the United States that is driving such a powerful wedge between different parts of the United States, I end up welcoming. And this is one of those extremely powerful wedges.

Now, whether or not this will affect the way people vote, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to. Donald Trump is a really extraordinary personality in the intense loyalty that he is able to arouse in his followers. At the same time, I certainly don’t feel that intense loyalty. I think that Donald Trump is in many respects a lout and a cad, a liar and a braggart. It reminds me of H. L. Mencken’s obituary of William Jennings Bryan. It’s, I think, just a masterpiece of slashing obloquy.  But he says of William Jennings Bryan, “Imagine a gentleman. Now, imagine the very opposite. Behold, William Jennings Bryan.” I would say the same thing about Donald Trump. Although I understand personally he can be extremely charming and gentlemanly, but as a political figure, no. I mean, good grief, I admire people like Robert E. Lee or George Washington. Donald Trump — ugh.

In any case, I will vote for him. I will vote for him because what Joe Biden stands for is just so politically repugnant to every instinct in my body. And so, again, Donald Trump has been able to weather one catastrophe after another that would have sunk any other politician.

JIM GOAD: Or any human being under any circumstances.

JARED TAYLOR: Yes.

JIM GOAD: He’s made of granite.

JARED TAYLOR: Yes, I don’t think I’d get a wink of sleep if I had hanging over me everything that Donald Trump has hanging over him. I mean, it just seems to roll right off of him.