It remains to be seen to what extent New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron put a stake in the heart of the once-great, now-beleaguered, city of New York, but he certainly didn’t help when he issued his draconian judgment against Donald J. Trump, ruling that the former president and his family must pay a staggering $350 million-plus in penalties and forbidding them from doing business in the state for several years.
Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush, was the first I heard to acknowledge the disastrous protentional economic repercussions on cable news, but I imagine that businessmen across the city and state had anticipated this and have been making plans to exit New York for some time.
That state already has the biggest population outflow, outnumbering even California’s.
The mind-blowing size of Justice Engoron’s decision was just rancid icing on an already unpalatable cake.
But it was enough to inspire the ire of truckers across the United States who, like their peers in Canada and farmers in Europe, had had enough nonsense from the Engorons of the world.
We can only wish them well because they are the allies of freedom.
Meanwhile, what businessperson—high or low—wants to incorporate in a state where a wanton judge can suddenly decree his or her estimates of their real estate valuations to obtain a loan to be inflated, impose ridiculous fines, and then shut them down—possibly forever?
In President Trump’s case, as those same businesspersons surely noted, not a soul had been damaged by the former president’s estimates, inflated or not. All the loans had been repaid and the banks involved, of course, made money. There were no victims.
As the late Los Angeles Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn would say, “No harm. No foul.”
Except to the likes of Justice Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James, for whom Trump Derangement Syndrome is an illness more irreversible than pancreatic cancer.
Whether President Trump succeeds in overturning the absurd decision is in some senses irrelevant because the damage is already done.
Welcome to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and so forth, Mr. and Mrs. New York.
I would prefer such people go away because I love New York, the city I grew up in, and they are destroying it in the most reactionary manner, although they think of themselves as “progressives.” Go figure.
The onslaught on the business community means fewer jobs for the working class, including minorities, all classes actually, not that that has ever deterred the new Democratic Party that seems to care little for working men and women.
Although many remain oblivious, this has tremendous ramifications for what is nauseatingly termed “elitist” liberal and progressive Democrats who love, as I do, the magnificent cultural benefits that New York has always offered.
But with the economic base fleeing, with manufacturing nearly a thing of the past, who will pay for all the monumental museums, the Lincoln Center, the theater on and off Broadway, the many parks, the Bronx Zoo, and so forth, not to mention the plethora of world-class restaurants in any cuisine imaginable that depend on a well-to-do clientele?
The state?
As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it so succinctly years ago, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Not that that would mean much to Justice Engoron or Ms. James, so lost in their lust to destroy Donald Trump that the fate of any of the classes in the city of New York, even the outside world itself, is of little consequence to them.
This is par for the course for much of the Democratic Party these days, with the exception of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose intelligence and good sense they can no longer countenance.
They have switched roles with the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, composed of actual everyday, hardworking Americans, whom they disdain.
In a sense, the two parties are in the midst of what could be termed a political sex change operation. They are having a form of gender reassignment surgery.
This particular episode led me to consider, not for the first time, of course, why people such as Justice Engoron think the way they do.
That they have replaced religious faith with unquestioning leftist politics has become a cliché, but like many clichés, there’s some, in this case considerable, truth to it.
But other things are at work.
I have been rereading Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” It’s all about race, greed, and the justice system in New York in those days.
One thing that struck me is how pathetic the justice system was, as portrayed by Wolfe, and how its denizens were rife with jealousy of characters such as the book’s principal protagonist, Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy, even though McCoy gets his comeuppance in the story.
This made me think of the way that Justice Engoron must regard President Trump. Justice Engoron, though he is a Manhattan Supreme Court justice, is basically a lowly civil servant and inhabits what was in essence the lower ranks of the Manhattan hierarchy, especially as compared to real estate magnates, hedge fund managers, CEOs, media giants, successful entertainers, and even doctors and lawyers.
No wonder he despises President Trump, who is a genuine “Master of the Universe,” as Wolfe characterized it, albeit a truly successful one, unlike Wolfe’s protagonist.
As we all know, older—way older than the Democratic or Republican parties—is that document, chiseled in stone from on high, known as the Ten Commandments.
Number 10 is, of course, “Thou shalt not covet.” More completely: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house: you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17).
How much coveting has been going on in our culture, do you think, lately—not just in obvious places such as Justice Engoron’s courtroom? I would say an incomprehensible amount.
On top of all that, Justice Engoron as well as Ms. James are both tried-and-true members of the judicial division within the government.
If Mr. Trump succeeds in November’s election, it’s their jobs—not those of the working class and the populace in general—that will be in jeopardy.
One of the benefits of believing in leftist politics, despite its notoriously failed efficacy and historical danger to human life in several continents, is that, by atheistically replacing religious faith with political ideology, you are free to covet anything you want and destroy anybody in the process.
I think, however, to President Trump, Justice Engoron’s covetous decision, in the end, will be no more than a glancing blow.
To the city of New York, however, one of the monuments of Western civilization, it could prove yet one more step, and perhaps a fatal one, in a rapid decline that we have been witnessing for several years now—or, thanks to the truckers and other freedom lovers, an actual, long-awaited wake-up call.
