Will There Ever Be a Reckoning for What trump Did?

As donald trump gets marched into yet another courthouse today to get arraigned for criminal charges, that question remains at the fore. While trump is getting charged, and is facing his day in front of a judge and jury, will trump face any consequence for the sins he's committed?

There remains the actual matter of how the trials will end. trump is unlikely to plead to anything - his own narcissism and belief of being "above the law, they let you do it" will stop him from ever accepting guilt on even a misdemeanor deal - so it's going to determine if a jury finds him innocent or guilty on any of these matters.

Criminal cases are different from the civil cases trump has faced - and recently lost - before. The burden of proof on the state is higher, and the jury needs to be unanimous on all guilty verdicts. Meaning trump can pray for at least one die-hard conservative who survived voir dire process to nullify everything into a mistrial, which trump would crow as vindication and delay matters until after the November 2024 elections.

On the other hand, prosecutors have to have a strong case going into these matters in the first place, meaning Special Counsel Jack Smith has enough evidence to sway even a MAGA jury into realizing how badly the laws were broken. Considering the track record the Justice Department's had against the January 6th rioters so far - few acquittals and plenty of plea deals - they know how to present this kind of case to a jury to secure a conviction on at least ONE of the charges. trump's never faced anything this serious before, and is going up against prosecutors who know how trump is going to try to defend himself and will be prepped to outflank him.

What's also at stake here is the nation as a whole. We're entering literally uncharted waters now. We've never had a former President - the highest office in the land - face criminal charges of any kind post-admin. At most we've dealt with corrupt congresscritters going to jail for bribery and other unethical acts, we had to deal with the Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis for their insurrection of Civil War (which led to the 14th Amendment provision blocking their like from any further office). This is new, and uncomfortably close for a lot of pundits towards crossing a line into partisanship.

In previous matters where a corrupt official found themselves cast adrift by their political party when caught in the act (Hi, Richard Nixon!), for trump almost the entire Republican Party has rallied to his defense. The nature of partisanship has gotten so severe that the modern GOP cannot cut themselves free of trump, and are tying his fate to theirs.

That also has a lot of the punditry worried, especially at the Atlantic (paywalled, by the by) that I still quote from often (blame TNC). Let's start with Ronald Brownstein:

The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.

With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests...

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”

The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”

And Adam Serwer notes the GOP voting base - and thus the GOP officials pandering to that base - is still with trump:

If you’re wondering how Trump has survived as a candidate for office, you can look squarely at the conservative elites in politics and media—including many people who would prefer to be rid of him—who have staked out the position that trying to overthrow the government is not illegal if a Republican does it. Those defending Trump after his indictment over his attempted autogolpe are not opposing the politicization of justice; they are demanding it...

The hard-core authoritarian right that has risen in Trump’s shadow, the one contemplating political purges, noncompetitive elections, and iron-fisted state repression of its political opposition, has no commitment to democracy as an ideal, and its continued support is no mystery. The group is small in number, even if a committed political vanguard can have influence beyond its numbers, especially given its growing acceptance in mainstream-Republican circles.

The majority of conservative elites, however, retains some philosophical commitment to democracy and self-governance. They have nevertheless repeatedly failed the most basic test of democratic citizenship posed to them, defending the right of their public to choose their leaders. Right-wing media knowingly encouraged the delusions of the conservative base that the election was stolen out of fear that their audiences would flee. Republican lawmakers, now including Trump’s own primary opponents, have validated the idea that Trump is a victim of political persecution rather than someone who engaged in a conspiracy to keep himself in power, because they fear the electoral cost of opposing him. Immobilized by their own cowardice, both groups remain indefinitely in his thrall.

It is that blind devotion to an obviously corrupt figure like trump that is sounding five-alarm bells. Quoting from Tom Nichols about the danger trump represents now:

Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society...  The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.

The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion... I have long described Trump’s candidacies as moral choices and tests of civic character, but I have also cautioned that Americans, for the sake of social comity, should resist too many arguments about politics among themselves. I can no longer defend this advice...

This is painful advice to give and to follow. No one, including me, wants to lose friends or chill valued relationships over so small a man as Trump. But our democracy is about to go into legal and electoral battle for its own survival. If we don’t speak up—to one another, as well as to the media and to our elected officials—and Trump defeats us all by regaining power and making a mockery of American democracy, then we’ll all have lost a lot more than a few friendships. We face in Trump a dedicated enemy of our Constitution, and if he returns to office, his next “administration” will be a gang of felons, goons, and resentful mediocrities, all of whom will gladly serve Trump’s sociopathic needs while greedily dividing the spoils of power.

This is the real danger we're facing: The likelihood of donald trump getting criminally convicted by a jury and still eke-ing out a win - thanks to a still-broken Electoral College system and likely Republican voter suppression - for the Presidency in 2024 that would negate any prison time for himself (and then mass pardons for all of his lackeys to join him in the White House to commit more crimes).

Remember, there's only these restrictions - must be 35 years or older, must be a natural-born citizen, must have lived in the United States for 14 years - on running for President. There's no law blocking a convicted criminal running for that office, only the moral and ethical limits of any party willing to back him. Eugene Debs, after all, ran for President from his jail cell in 1920 and garnered about 1 million votes. Thing was, Debs was a fringe candidate for a fringe party and that was 3 percent of the total. This time it's different: trump will be representing one of the two major parties able to rally at least 62 million and at most 74 million to trump's banner. Even with trump sitting in a jail cell come November 2024, Republicans will vote for a convicted trump.

This is the fear: That trump and his Republican followers will never face a true reckoning for the damage they've done to our nation, and threaten to inflict even more.

This is where the ones who can stop that - the 81 million voters who sided with Joe Biden in 2020, the Democratic voters, the No-Party independents - need to stand up, now and in 2024. We need to keep fighting for our right to vote even as the Republican-controlled states try to purge the rolls and rig the results. We need to show up - even more than 81 million strong - to ensure there is no chance the likes of a corrupt trump and a corrupt GOP seizing the Presidency.

Because they're - not just trump - openly promising to make sure they never lose that power again.

For the LOVE OF GOD, America, stop voting for a corrupt Republican Party and their crooked banner carrier donald trump.