ROGER KIMBALL: Trump Gets the Beria Treatment.

The Trump indictments—note the plural—are they not like the blind encountering an elephant for the first time?

One touches the beast’s trunk and says it’s shaped like a snake.

Another touches its tusks and says, no, it’s hard and bone-like.

A third, hands on the elephant’s capacious side, says it’s more like a wall of flesh.

That old story was meant to remind us of how limited our individual perspectives can be.

How easy it is to mistake the part for the whole, to seize on one thing we’re familiar with and elevate it to a general explanatory principle.

Noting the wild differences among people in their assessments of the latest—but not the last—of the Trump indictments, I at first thought the differences of opinion might be due to the differences in the vantage points from which individuals survey the news about the indictments.

But the more I learn about the issue, the more I think that’s too generous a conclusion.

It assumes a modicum of good faith among those issuing the judgments.

Alas, I don’t think the motives of every party to this spectacle are pure.

Exit quote: “Donald Trump is being given the treatment that Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, advocated when he said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’ At the end of the day, Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is.”