Reversible error.

Former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Wednesday, June 5, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

When a New York City jury convicted a former president of the United States of multiple felonies – felonies that still cannot be succinctly explained to persons of nominal intelligence – the fact that such a verdict was widely anticipated did little to mitigate the shock of it actually happening.

Legal pundits – mostly on the right but many notably on the left – have opined at length on the long list of reasons that the jury’s verdict against Donald Trump will not survive on appeal. The reasons cited are what lawyers and legal scholars call “reversible errors.” In legal speak, a reversible error is something that the judge in the trial court got wrong that affected the outcome of the case. The list of things that judge Juan Merchan got wrong is too lengthy for this column. I recommend an article at AmericanMind.org by Kenin Spivak.

But the subject of reversible error has me thinking. The country is a mess. There is much gloomy writing on these being the end days of the American experiment.

Possibly. But not inevitably.

Just as Donald Trump’s farcical conviction can be set right by fixing the reversible errors of the trial judge, so too can America be set right by fixing the reversible errors of bad policy.

The mess at our southern border is a reversible error. We know this because the border was under solid operational control during the Trump administration. A return to Trump policy will stop the flood. Most Americans favor deportation of those who have come in illegally. That won’t be easy. But it must be done, and it can be done.

Americans noticed that the vilest of the antisemitic protests on college campuses this spring were on the campuses of our most elite universities. Continuing to hold schools like Columbia and Harvard in high esteem is a reversible error. Prospective students and prospective employers are, in significant numbers, rethinking the value of an elite university degree. That will inevitably chasten those institutions.

Regarding education, many of our country’s primary and secondary schools are teaching kids the wrong things about America. That’s a reversible error, too. School boards are accountable to their local communities. We fix our schools by paying much closer attention to local school board elections.

And then there are our political parties. For decades the paradigm has been that Republicans represented the aristocratic, corporate, Brahmin class, while Democrats represented the middle and the working class. That is in the process of being turned on its head.

For those same decades, Republicans largely wrote off black and Hispanic voters. That is an immediately reversible error. Today’s Republicans are much more aligned with the interests of a black voter aspiring to entry into the middle class than today’s Democrats. Republicans will profit mightily by reaching out to the minorities they once wrote off.

As to Republicans and the election, we’ll never know for certain to what extent cheating and malfeasance made the critical difference in the approximately 40,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that gave Joe Biden the win in 2020. But regardless of whether you believe that malfeasance made the critical difference, failing to be prepared for election night shenanigans was an error – one that must be reversed in those three critical states this time around. And one that can be.

It’s easy, given all that’s going wrong, to become downhearted. Don’t. Much of what’s going wrong can be reversed. And there is ample evidence that the reversal has begun.