The swamp needs draining, maybe more now than in 2016. That’s why Donald Trump still holds appeal for so many Americans. The Claremont Institute’s Matthew Boose explains:

If the last seven years of constant anti-Trump intrigue have shown anything, it’s that America’s liberal so-called elites want to govern a certain way and will not tolerate being told otherwise. Given Donald Trump’s recent [indictment], they could not make themselves any clearer apart from possibly having the man killed. If he goes to prison, he very well may die there. …

The recalcitrance of the elites has pushed the country into a political crisis. Their refusal to be restrained by popular opinion has left a large swath of the population with nothing to lose.

Boose writes of Joe Biden and that noxious “pride” banner hung from the White House. He tells of the “spiritual aspect” of much of the fighting in America today. He recounts the crime-ridden inner cities, and the lawlessness that terrorizes people like Daniel Penny. He laments the “venal, sleazy puppet” who occupies the White House. He then goes on to consider why Trump resonates.

A regime that treats good people like criminals and criminals like “public servants” exposes its own iniquity. But try explaining that to Jill Biden, who expressed “shock” that Trump still has supporters despite being arrested by her husband’s government for something no worse than something her husband did (and, unlike Trump, he did it without the power to declassify documents). Don’t Republicans realize, she told a room of wealthy donors in Manhattan’s Upper East Side last week, what a serious matter this is?

The Left isn’t trying to persuade anyone of Trump’s turpitude. Their own hands are far too dirty for that. They just want to crush him and demoralize those who find hope in his spirited war with the deep state that has worked endlessly toward his destruction and the ruin of liberty in America.

But until they actually lock him away, Trump will continue to dominate the scene. Strongmen thrive in times of decadence. When disorder becomes unbearable, and the government is neglectful, corrupt, and abusive in turn, people naturally look for protection elsewhere. This is as true today as in any period of political turbulence of the past.

Where others see a wrecking ball to a treacherous oligarchy, the oligarchs naturally see an emergency, a would-be tyrant who threatens the supposedly lawful system of “norms” they claim to uphold. They are willfully blind. In times like these, a charismatic populist like Trump will have appeal no matter how many times he is indicted, or what “crimes” the kangaroo courts can contrive.

To millions of Americans, nothing that Trump has done with any porn star or “classified” briefing measures up to the betrayal of having their country taken from them. Indeed, to earn the proscription of such “elites,” as we have, is its own honor.

Read the whole thing here.