A Historical Precedent for Trump

Captain Alfred Dreyfus served as an artillery officer in the French army at a time when France and Germany were at daggers drawn. A French officer delivered war plans to the Germans. Dreyfus was charged with treason. He was an outsider. He was a Jew. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America in the year 1894. He was innocent. 

These events utterly divided French society at all levels for years. The debate pitted the left vs. the right, elites vs. elites, elites vs. the common man. Newspapers, bishops, generals, novelists, and the man on the street fought viciously for years over the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. The heart of the matter was that elites in the army lied about Dreyfus from the very beginning. While the fight was about Dreyfus, to be sure, his guilt or innocence, it also became about the very identity of the French nation. 

The division in French society over Alfred Dreyfus and the events that led to his conviction bear an eerie similarity to what is happening to American society over the crimes charged against Donald Trump. The charges against Trump have been trumped-up by elites in the government, mostly centered in the Department of Justice and the national security state, parroted by the gutter press. But, like the Dreyfus case, the Trump case has also become about who we are as a people and a nation. And the fight is no less vicious. 

The backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair was the changing tides, sometime violent, of the type of government the French would have. Would they be monarchist as they had been for hundreds of years, or would they be Republican, the violent establishment of which included the beheading of French nobles, including the king and queen only a few years before. 

One eerie similarity between the cases was the use of a secret document, a dossier in the case of Dreyfus that supposedly proved his guilt. His enemies had no proof of his perfidy, so they produced this phony document. If this sounds familiar, it should, because Trump’s enemies also cooked up the phony “Steele Dossier” that was filled with lies culled from Russian sources about Trump and treason. 

Dreyfus was tried in secret. Even so, the judges were not initially convinced, not until prosecutors produced the secret file, a document they did not share with the defense. We now know, thanks to the reporting of Julie Kelly, that the Department of Justice prosecutors, led by the perfidious Jack Smith, have withheld documents in the Trump state secrets trial. 

Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island off the coast of South America, a rock two miles long and 500 feet wide, where he lived alone in a stone hut presumably forever. And thus, the battle was joined and nearly tore France apart for the next few years. 

Calls for reinvestigation began almost immediately. For years, battles were waged in the newspapers and in the streets. Formal inquiries began. Each query was matched by yet new false information provided by the elites. 

It was whispered that the German kaiser himself had sent a private letter to Dreyfus. This was dutifully reported in the gutter press, though the letter was never produced. Rumors moved the case forward and back. As historian Barbara Tuchman writes, “What was truth and what people persuaded themselves was truth became hopelessly blurred.” Doesn’t this sound remarkably like our own time?

And so, this is where we are in the Affair of Trump. Trump is no less an outsider than Dreyfus, and he is a far graver danger to elites than Dreyfus ever was. He was not part of the club. He was never supposed to win. Even the thought was a joke. 

Obama sent federal-government spies into Trump’s campaign. And this set the tone for all that followed: government agents working full-time to overthrow the duly-elected President of the United States. 

On the evening that she lost the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton cooked up a lie that Trump had won through treasonous collaboration with the Russian government. A phony dossier convicting Trump was concocted using a foreign agent who was in touch with shady Russian actors. 

This overall charge is one of the defining issues of our time and has engulfed every aspect of American society. Even after Trump was “acquitted” by a special prosecutor, elites in the national security state still say he is a “Russian asset.” 

And then came the avalanche of charges cooked up by government officials: that Trump tried to bribe a foreign leader to go after his political rival; petty charges that he cooked books to hide an adulterous affair; that he overvalued his house in Florida in order to borrow money from banks; that he conspired to find votes in the Georgia election; that he stole, kept, and passed along state secrets to foreign enemies. 

Like Dreyfus, Trump is guilty of being an outsider. No one thought he could win. No one. His election was a shock to the system, most especially to the three political dynasties—Bush, Clinton, and Cheney—that Trump utterly destroyed.  Trump is guilty of being an outsider. No one thought he could win. No one. His election was a shock to the system, most especially to the three political dynasties—Bush, Clinton, and Cheney—that Trump utterly destroyed. Tweet This

In these final days of what will be his last campaign, the cries of elites have become ever shriller. Quite without self-knowledge, they claim he is a fascist dictator who will use all the power of the federal government to punish his enemies. It has been, in fact, Obama and Biden who have done this. 

If he wins, they say democracy will end, that we will never vote again! This is on par with the gutter press during the Dreyfus Affair. As I have written here before, these people are putting Trump and his followers in grave danger. After all, people fantasize they would have killed Hitler had they lived in those times. Well, they say Trump is Hitler and that we are Nazis. Do the math. 

This is a dark time in American society. The debate is not just about Trump. It is about who we are as a people. Do we live under the rule of law? Do our Constitutional protections have any meaning? Can we allow government elites to use the levers of power to persecute political enemies? Do we have a Republic any longer? 

So, what happened to Dreyfus? A court agreed to review his case. Civil war loomed. “It seemed like the eve of either a new Commune or of a coup by a dictator.” The court demanded a copy of the secret file. The army refused. Top officials resigned. Thirty thousand people rallied in Marseille. Forty-six judges handed down their decision that the case would be reopened. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island. 

Dreyfus arrived in the court a broken man, hardly able to stand. He knew nothing of the campaign for and against him in the preceding four years. The whole world held its breath, and the verdict was handed down: still guilty by a vote of 5-2 but with “extenuating circumstances.” Even the Queen of England complained about this verdict. 

With time served, Dreyfus would be a free man. In the coming years, Dreyfus was restored to the army ranks he would have achieved had the wicked events not transpired. He fought in World War I. He appeared never to give up on his country even though he was relentlessly persecuted by its elites. 

It turns out the traitor all along was a Catholic by the name of Esterhazy. 

What will happen to Trump? We shall see. But we should be deeply worried about the coming days, weeks, months, and even years. Thanks to government elites and the gutter press, the divide over Trump is broad and deep and vast. Violent left-wing thugs march through our streets even now. If he wins again, there will be widespread violence perpetrated by the Left. They will burn our cities. And you can be sure it will be blamed on Trump. This is where we are, a truly frightening time in the life of our country.