Because of the cog I occupy in our wheel, because I am running out of fingers to count the number of Trump legal cases, and because I am afraid that the Democrats plan to get him nominated then trounce him in the November 2024 election is working, I end up writing about former President Trump and his travails more often than I’d like.

Still, I am not a Trump obsessive. I am neither so repulsed that I have to turn away nor so smitten that I can’t take my eyes off the whole thing. If I am watching the news and he comes on or is covered, I don’t stop watching; but I don’t go out of my way to watch, or to tune in if he’s giving a speech. I don’t watch nighttime cable opinion shows. I’m weary of both Trump and his most zealous antagonists – the latter being a driver of the ruinous endurance of the former. I have long been resigned, however, to the reality that the only remedy is time – however long it takes for a critical mass of Republicans and conservatives to realize that the Trump/anti-Trump dynamic is killing us, and is the best thing that ever happened to progressive Democrats.

I’ve really hoped that this realization would take hold in time for another candidate to win the GOP nomination. If it doesn’t, Democrats are going to gain a two-to-four-year stranglehold on the White House and both congressional chambers, giving them the margins they need to pack the Supreme Court and destroy it as a judicial institution. If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be that kind of a rout, bank on it.

For now, alas, not nearly enough of the political right sees the way this chessboard plays out. It’s thus increasingly likely that Trump will win the nomination, at which point Democrats will pivot to phase-two of their strategy, throwing everything they’ve got in the way of trial evidence and Capitol-riot/stop-the-steal imagery at the electorate – not the GOP primary electorate whose Trump enthusiasm is immune from that stuff, but the much different general electorate that is already lopsidedly opposed to Trump, regardless of how little enthusiasm they have for Biden and Democrats. Between that and the millions of Republicans who won’t “come home” – many of whom won’t be Republicans anymore if it’s now irrevocably a Trump-populist rather than conservative party – November 2024 will be a disaster.

Those who read my columns or otherwise care what I think (I don’t delude myself into believing there are multitudes of you) will not be surprised by any of this because I’ve said it repeatedly. I was surprised last night, though, to hear from an old friend who vehemently opposes Trump that, at a GOP dinner in Alabama, the former president had named me as a supporter. Naturally, I didn’t even know Trump was giving a speech last night, much less watch it – at the time, as a glutton for punishment, I was watching the Mets and stumped on a crossword puzzle.

I found the speech on the web and the relevant part. In point of fact, Trump did not identify me as a supporter. He identified me as a skeptic about special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump on fraud, obstruction, and civil rights charges arising out of his schemes to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. In the same vein, he also cited our editorial and my Fox News colleague Jonathan Turley.

I am a naysayer on the indictment (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Again, that can’t be a surprise to anyone who cares what I think because I’d written repeatedly over the last two years that Trump should not be charged criminally over the post-2020 election misconduct unless there is evidence tying him actionably to the riot, which there is not. (Moral and political culpability is sufficient for impeachment but not for criminal liability.) I opined many times that fraud and obstruction charges would be infirm, and I argued against civil rights charges when it was reported, shortly before the indictment, that Smith might go in that direction. As the body of my work attests, I am not a Trump cultist mindlessly swatting down charges against him; rather, with respect to the 2020 election, I believe Smith has collided with our constitutional structure, which prefers that elections be decided by the public, not the FBI, and that presidential misconduct be addressed by Congress, not the Justice Department.

That said, in the same commentary Trump cited, I (and National Review editorially) contended that the criminal charges were a proxy for Congress’s failure to hold Trump accountable politically. I’ve said he should have been convicted and disqualified after being impeached – and that Democrats botched the impeachment by failing to investigate it competently and vote impeachment articles that were comprehensive and accurate. I’ve argued that Congress could have used the January 6 committee – if its manifest flaws were fixed – as an impeachment investigation, which would have been far preferable to a criminal prosecution.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also contended that Smith’s Mar-a-Lago documents indictment makes out a strong and serious case against Trump (see, e.g., here, here, and here). I harbor doubts about whether the case can be pushed to trial prior to the 2024 election because of complications attendant to classified-information prosecutions. Also to Trump’s advantage: The judge and jury pool are more favorable to him in south Florida than in Washington, D.C. (the venue for the election-interference case), and Manhattan (the venue for district attorney Alvin Bragg’s flimsy hush-money case). While I don’t think much of Trump’s Presidential Records Act claims, I do think he could get traction in the Florida venue when he argues that he’s being singled out for prosecution on illegal document-retention when Hillary Clinton got a pass and Joe Biden is getting a pass. Nevertheless, I’ve argued that the case against Trump is strong, and that the manner in which he mulishly, recklessly got himself into that mess is, like his other post-2020 election escapades, testament to his unfitness.

No doubt because of the way my parents raised me, there was a point in time when I’d have been thrilled to be mentioned by a president, a former president, or presidential candidate as support for some point he or she was trying to make. Now, given the years gone by and the current state of things, it’s a non-event for me (I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t been alerted to it) and I can’t imagine that anybody else much cares.

I can’t help it if the former president, or anyone else for that matter, cherry picks the things I write or say. I’m a fairly prolific author, and doing what we do here, the selective mining of some things and the outright distortion of others come with the territory. I also get things wrong from time to time, and having your errors thrown back at you is also part of the gig. I can control only two things: being honest about what I think and trying to marshal a convincing case for thinking it. But the work is an open book.

What time are the Mets on?