Donald Trump’s Last Hurrah

No mug shot was taken at Donald Trump’s arraignment Thursday on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. So Mr. Trump produced his own and posted it on Truth Social. Beneath a black-and-white image of the former president were the words “Not Guilty”—and a big red button saying “contribute.”

It confirms something Bostonians already know: Donald Trump is the Republican James Michael Curley.

In the “The Last Hurrah”—the fictionalized 1958 film version of Curley’s life—Spencer Tracy plays a lovable rogue politico who fights for the Irish-Catholic working class. In real life, Curley’s campaigns against the Brahmins who’d dominated Boston civic life since the Mayflower foreshadowed Mr. Trump. Elite loathing only made Curley’s supporters love him more. They happily looked past the corruption and abuses, which somehow never made it into John Ford’s film.

Curley (1874-1958) served four nonconsecutive terms as Boston’s mayor and one as Massachusetts’ governor, along with stints as a city alderman, a state representative and a U.S. congressman. But the biographical fact most relevant to Mr. Trump today is that Curley was imprisoned in 1947 while Boston’s mayor.

It wasn’t his first time wearing prison stripes, either. In 1903, while a member of the state House of Representatives, Curley was convicted of taking the civil-service exam for a constituent who wanted a job as a letter carrier. In prison he brashly, and successfully, ran for Boston’s Board of Aldermen under the slogan: “He did it for a friend.”

Four decades later he ran for mayor and won while under federal indictment for mail fraud. He served part of his last term as mayor in the federal pokey in Danbury, Conn., before President Harry S. Truman pardoned him. He then returned to his job.

The constitutional implications for a convicted mayor and president are different. But both are examples of politicians who thrived amid scandals that would destroy ordinary men. In Mr. Trump’s case that includes an affair with a porn star, two impeachments and various indictments. Mr. Trump understands this well, regularly trolling his enemies by highlighting polls showing him beating his GOP rivals and even occasionally Joe Biden.

The reaction among Mr. Trump’s haters is to wonder why his supporters don’t hate him too. Mostly they tell themselves that his voters are stupid. Never does their own role in stoking Mr. Trump’s popularity occur to them.

Mr. Trump isn’t the first politician to turn his enemies to his advantage by playing up populist resentment. Huey Long did it with rural whites on small farms in Louisiana in the 1920s and ’30s. Leaders from Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to Marion Barry

Consider the worst things Mr. Trump has done. His failure to act during the Jan. 6 riots. His continued claims the 2020 election was stolen despite a lack of evidence. The pattern of hiring good people, who were then trashed when they fell out of favor.

His supporters see this. But they also see how a biased investigation into nonexistent Russian collusion, which featured the FBI lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, hung over his administration like a cloud. A House Jan. 6 Committee that made sure that its membership and process were stacked against him. Two partisan impeachments, one without any hearings.

Cut to this year. When Mr. Trump was indicted on a charge of keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his former attorney general William Barr

He’s right. But Mr. Barr also recognized that “there is a two-tiered system of justice”—and that he himself had tried to redress that as attorney general. Problem is, public faith in impartial justice and law enforcement will never be restored until voters see that it applies to people named Biden and Clinton too.

Instead, the Justice Department offers Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal that its own prosecutors admitted was unprecedented. Scarcely a week later, federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Trump using novel legal interpretations brought by a special counsel once rebuked 8-0 by the Supreme Court for stretching the law. The result is that 2024 may be decided by who is more unpopular: an indicted former president or a possibly impeached incumbent president.

As much as he’d love it, Mr. Trump isn’t looking to the courts to vindicate him. Like James Michael Curley, he is banking on voter nullification. If against all odds the 45th president becomes the 47th, he can thank the overreach and condescension of his enemies.

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