It's time to ignore Trump's trials: Criminal accountability is now a distraction

In the world of Trumpian politics and the 2024 presidential contest, constitutional democracy is ensnared by a modern-day Benedict Arnold. 

Donald Trump is a man who has managed to all but exorcize himself from four separate felony trials involving matters ranging from falsifying business records to illegally retaining classified documents to attempting to overturn a free and fair presidential election.

Whether Republican, Democrat, independent or “not committed,” most of us are more or less expended by a former president and “outlaw” candidate running a third time. If elected, the man is promising to release or pardon his political supporters who have been convicted and sentenced to prison for their criminal behaviors on Jan. 6,  2021. If he loses to Joe Biden for a second time, he is warning of a “bloodbath” for America. He is also “speaking truth to power.”  “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”

The wannabe dictator smells like a blackmailer to me. Please wake up sleeping America. Those who could not take any more of Trump and tuned him out, especially those who have been disconnected from politics. Together, you all probably make up about one-third of the potential electorate and could make the critical difference in whether the U.S. remains democratic or takes its first step into an autocratic or illiberal democracy.

The dangerousness of Trump to the world at large and at home cannot be underestimated or undervalued. It is both very real and getting more dangerous all the time. Trump really threatens our democratic ideals and is a living-breathing existential crisis that every American should take seriously.   

Wake up mainstream media. Stop normalizing Trump, his lawlessness, the GOP and their insurrectionary behavior. In case you have not noticed, the 2024 election is anything but another political horserace between the party of donkeys and the party of elephants. In case you have not noticed, your very own 4^th estate is on the chopping block should the former president recapture the White House.

Quit wasting your platforms and the public’s time by asking the voters what are the issues that they most care about in the upcoming election. And start informing them that there is only one issue on the 2024 ballot that matters:the future of American democracy versus the birth of fascist America. After all, the outcome of this issue will determine the future of the other issues.   

Until now I never thought that I would write that we should ignore the four criminal indictments unless they are dismissed or become actual trials. With U.S. democracy, at risk these pending indictments do not seem to mean “jack sh-t” except to illuminate or shine a light on some of the fallacies of our political and legal institutions. 

Not to mention what needs to be done to change these institutions for a new and improved democracy of a majority rather than a minority. First, we must save the democratic hemorrhaging from Trumpian wrath and prevent Trump’s “bloodbath” from happening when he loses the election by turning out the anti-Trumpers to vote for Biden. 

So from now until November 5^, the “only” thing that really matters is defeating Donald Trump first in the court of public opinion and then at the polls.      

Inquiring minds want to know how did the United States come to this Machiavellian moment? To rearticulate “it takes a village to raise a child,” allow me to submit that “it takes a MAGA base and a Republican Party to raze a democracy.” And quoting #46, “Folks, this ain’t no hyperbole. I am not joking. I’m serious.” 

But don’t take President Biden’s word on Trump’s dangerousness. Listen to a growing list of ex-Trump officials who refuse to endorse him in 2024. These include such persons as former  Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, former White House Chiefs of Staff Mick Mulvaney and John Kelly, former Secretaries of State Mike Pompeo and Rex Tillerson, former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. 

To ponder how such a revolting revolution came about is complicated. However, I will try to briefly explain by locating Trump’s rise to political power in the demise of the old Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and the rise of the new Republican party of Barry Goldwater.      

When Trump announced his first bid to become president back in 2015, neither he nor anybody else thought that the New York real estate “billionaire” would ever defeat Hillary Clinton. From the moment Melania and Donald descended the escalator at Trump Tower, the publicizing scheme to enhance the Trump brand actually declined, as from the get-go he was trashing migrants as rapists or criminals and various migrant groups as less than human. 

However, Trump’s grievance politics and his politics of scapegoating,along with Steve Bannon’s mission to “deconstruct the state” controlled by a global elite, did indeed resonate with a lot of alienated, uninformed, and detached white people. 

Right from the beginning, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny were central to his messaging and campaign. Nobody channeled grievances and anti-woke as successfully as Trump did. Similarly, his politically “incorrect” agenda and policymaking with nationalistic and selective isolationism caught on as it clashed with American foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War.   

After the first Biden defeat, a lot of election denial, and a failed coup d’état, Trump did not disappear from the political scene as most Democrats and Republicans were hoping for. I mean “objectively” speaking can anyone think of a better or baddest worst candidacy than Trump?  

Less than two years later and one week after the less than stellar performance of the GOP in the 2022 midterm elections, the former president announced his bid for the 2024 presidency. This was earlier than any other candidate for the highest office in the land had ever announced before for no reason other than as a presidential candidate Trump hoped to prevent his criminal indictments from materializing.   

At the same time, the lack of criminal prosecutions have turned out to be Trump’s very costly “get out of jail” cards paid for by his political constituents to the tune of more than one hundred million dollars and counting.  

Trump is pledging in his third bid for the Republican nomination to make America great again for a second time. There are two obvious problems with this scenario or view of things.

First, there never was the reality of an original MAGA. For example, scientific research reveals that 40% of US COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided if it were not for doctor Trump’s advice and mishandling of the pandemic crisis. Or take Trump’s record setting $7.8 trillion contribution to the national debt that according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will amount to about “$23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.”  

Second, despite Trump’s “doom and gloom” mantra the Biden economy is humming along well beyond any of the expectations of what most economists were predicting. Guess what, folks? Bidenomics is working as the US has the strongest economy in the world. Inflation is down, unemployment is down; infrastructure investments, climate expenditures, and the stock markets are up. Last but not least, “the GDP expanded by 3.1 percent in 2023.”   

Nevertheless, on the campaign trail in Dayton, Ohio this past Saturday, it was no surprise to hear Trump doubling down on his doomsday vision of the United States if he is not elected president this coming November to “save” us all from the vibrant economy. What was also not surprising was the opening video appearance of the J6 Prison Choir which has become routinized theater of the absurd as the opening act on the Trump campaign trail. There was a bit of an “add-on” at the Dayton rally as it began with a tribute to the rebellious “patriots” as an announcer’s voice directed the packed MAGA crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan.6 hostages.” Then Trump and the choir led everyone present in the singing of the Star Spangled Banner.

Now for some important foreshadowing and historical context

Worldwide, fearmongering or scaremongering in relation to religious, sexual, and ethnic identities has always been a vital component of scapegoat politics and grievances. Mongering of this kind has been primarily about marginalized others but it has also included societal elites and political parties.  

With respect to elites or parties and Trump, for example, there are his repeated antisemitic remarks and tropes.  From his defense of Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 where he claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” to his recent comments on Jews who vote for Democrats in defending Prime Minister Benjamín Netanyahu from the growing Democratic criticisms including those by the highest ranking Jewish politician, majority leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York:

In the U.S. fearmongering has often been joined by targeted or discriminatory violence. These patterned types of social interactions are as American as cheery pie or Fourth of July parades. 

Whether locally or nationally, to varying degrees the combination of verbal and physical intimidation is being propagated and weaponized especially around the criminal indictments of the 45^th president. This has been operationalized by Trump’s minions, the GOP, MAGA politicians, and their supporters. 

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Looking backward there was fear-inducing grievances and fearmongering about freed Black people and white abolitionists before the Civil War and during the era of Reconstruction. At the beginning of the fighting, fearmongering subsided.It picked up some momentum after the Emancipation Proclamation was announced by Abraham Lincoln on New Year’s Day, 1863. After the war ended, it resumed and became ever stronger in the Confederate portion of the body politic. 

There was the passage of the Black codes in nearly all the Southern states. These were designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and to ensure cheap labor by broadly drawn vagrancy statutes that facilitated local authorities arresting freed people and subjecting them to involuntary labor. 

Throughout the Progressive Era (1900-1920), several states, including Idaho, California, Kansas, and Ohio enacted criminal syndicalism laws. These laws prohibited advocating crime, sabotage, violence or other unlawful means for accomplishing industrial and political reform.

Succeeding the Russian Revolution of 1917 and nearing the end of World War I, and again after WWII, there was widespread fearmongering concerning the threats of communists, anarchists, and socialists. 

During the first Red Scare (1917-1920), Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the anti-anarchist Sedition Act of 1918. Both of these were signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). These laws have seldom been used by the authorities in the United Sates. 

The seditionist act criminalized language that was deemed to be disloyal to the U.S. government. Notably, Eugene Debs the socialist candidate for president was convicted twice and sentenced to 10 years in prison the second time. 

After receiving 914,191 votes or 3.4 percent of the electorate in the 1920 presidential race, which was substantially less than the 6 percent he received back in 1912. That was when Debs was. running against the former Republican President from 1901-1909, Teddy Roosevelt, who was now running on the newly formed Progressive Party ticket that split the vote giving the victory to Wilson, a Democrat. 

The second Red Scare (1950-1957) broke out during the early period of the Cold War when there were unfounded concerns about communist infiltrations. This Red Scare was better known as the McCarthy Era or simply McCarthyism. 

Named after its leading advocate Senator Joseph McCarthy,R-Wis, and his chief counsel Roy Cohn who Trump retained on behalf of his father and himself to defend them from their 1973 federal charges of discriminatory housing and rental practices. Cohn would become Trump’s first “fixer” with connections to President Ronald Reagan which helped Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald’s older sister, secure an appellate federal judgeship in New Jersey. 

McCarthyism is remembered for its Hollywood Blacklists, investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and televised hearings of suspected communists, Soviet spies, and leftist sympathizers for allegedly infiltrating the federal government, the film industry, and prestige universities. 

One of the legacies of McCarthyism during the Trump era has been the weaponizing of law, politics, and culture by the former president and his associates. Accomplished mostly but not exclusively by the manufacturing of false, unfounded, and sensationalistic assertions blasted out by hundreds of thousands if not millions of tweets and pixels of disinformation.

The acceleration of the conflation of law and order and the politics of crime by the Republican party has become a tradition of its own that predates Trump by half of a century. It all began following Republican Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964. Goldwater carried only six states all from the Deep South and 38% of the popular vote as compared with Johnson’s 61 percent and 44 states. 

The election marked a turning point in American politics where the Deep South had always been thought of as Democratic territory. It would take almost three decades of employing the first Southern strategy to increase the political support among white voters to flip the South into the Republican column.

Beginning with the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and then again during the days of President Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) these two men supercharged the modern-day Republicans and their tough on crime party of “law and order.” 

With the exceptions of the Bush presidencies the Republican Party has mostly engaged in grievance politics, fearmongering, and criminalizing the identities of nonwhite and poor people while consistently ignoring the crimes of the rich and powerful such as those of their “outlaw” presidential candidate for 2024.   

In a nutshell, it does not matter whether street crime has been high and rising as in the 1960s, 1980s and early 1990s, or has been low and declining as in 2000, 2016, and again in 2024. For the Republican playbook has mostly been to falsely accuse the Democratic Party of being soft on criminals and lenient on punishment.

Finally, after the failed insurrection of January 6 and until recently I had been asking myself where is the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918 when they are actually needed? Last month the Supreme Court answered: These two laws must have gone into hiding with section three of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

This is not as absurd as one might think because in the United States and elsewhere ordinary crimes and political crimes may flip-flop from time to time in the administration of justice.