I was teaching another legal ethics course today and had occasion to muse about what a foolish ethical system consequentialism is, as I have periodically discussed on EA. The short version is that deciding whether an action was right or wrong, ethical or unethical depending on what the eventual results flowing from it are is both foolish and illogical: an action can only be judged based on what is known at the time the action is taken. What occurs as a result of the action is vulnerable to chaos: once those metaphorical billions of billiard balls start rolling around on the theoretical infinite pool table, anything can happen and frequently does. People habitually say that a decision was “a mistake” or “wrong” when it was neither, just because the results of the decision were the opposite of what was intended.

Think of “The Simpsons'” master of mockery Nelson Muntz above as the spokesperson of the cosmos, and as Donald Trump as his unwitting agent. The previous, pre-Musk proprietors of Twitter, full allies that they were in the coordinated (and unethical) effort by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to bring Donald Trump to ruin for all time, kicked him off the ubiquitous social media platform for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, a plausible but unprovable thesis. (I quit Twitter in protest, as the move was totalitarian, reflecting the totalitarian drift of the entire political left—which has continued.) The Trump Haters and Trump Deranged cheered. Trump, given no outlet for his annoying but often effective outbursts, juvenile jibes, rants and trolling orgies, responded by setting up his own pseudo-Twitter platform, Truth Social. It was and is cheesy, but it did its main job, which was to provide the ex-President with a web platform from which he could not be censored or silenced.

Last week, Truth Social became part of a publicly traded company, and suddenly Trump was, on paper at least, richer than ever, as his fortune was boosted by around $4 billion by the increased value of his scorned web megaphone. This occurred, moreover, as an appeals court reduced New York’s unconstitutional bond demand in Letitia James’ partisan anti-Trump lawfare, designed to take Trump out of the 2024 Presidential race, from an impossible $454 million to a manageable $175 million. In the end, then, Twitter’s despicable move to silence Trump ended up saving him, and in some respects made him more formidable than ever. No one could have possibly seen that result, yet that was the result of his Twitter exile nonetheless.

To which I must add, “GOOD!” The arrogant and Machiavellian Trump-Deranged richly deserved such an ironic boomerang right in their smug, fascist pusses. This chaos theory demonstration also constituted what George Will calls “condign justice,” and it couldn’t happen to a more appropriate group of villains.

I offer now some ethics advice to Donald Trump himself, which, is, I know, futile, since the man has no ethics. It is this: Stop talking about revenge, or what you will do to your myriad foes once you regain the Presidency, if indeed you do despite the constant handicap of your big mouth and your terrible impulse control. The best revenge for you is the act of winning itself. That will be your revenge, and it will be both an ethical and a devastating measure of it.