This piece will be appearing as an op/ed in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.
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How Did Trump Escape Accountability?
We’ve just witnessed something that would have been impossible in America in earlier times: In the intense battle we’ve seen in recent years between Donald Trump and the Rule of Law, Trump has emerged victorious in an extraordinary way.
Not only has Trump not been held accountable for his most serious crimes, but he’s become the President, the man supposedly responsible to see that the laws be “faithfully executed.
Looking forward, future historians will probably see that this extraordinary development had a huge impact on the future course of America. But something important is also visible if – looking back – we ask “How did this happen?”
For Trump’s victory over the Rule of Law exposes a systemic deterioration of the many “organs” of the American body politic (on both sides of the political divide).
We can start with what is revealed by Trump’s acquittal in two impeachment trials, despite Trump’s guilt and the necessity of removing him from office could hardly have been clearer. Trump escaped the tools the Constitution gives us for dealing with a lawless President because – twice -- the Republicans in the Senate voted to acquit Trump in violation of the oath they took in becoming jurors in those trials.
This exposed how this once-respectable party had largely devolved into an organization of opportunists ready to sacrifice moral integrity to maintain their place of power and status in the system,
That devolution made it possible for the most impeachable President by far this nation had ever had to go on to become the first loser of a Presidential election to refuse to concede his defeat, to openly launch an Insurrection to seize power against the will of the people, and to continue dominate a major American Party that had devolved into moral bankruptcy.
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Meanwhile, the failures of Liberal America and the Democratic Party made possible this profound deterioration of America’s conservative party. Over the course of the decades the GOP was being taken over by what might be described as a sociopathic force, Liberal America failed to perceive what was happening, and its political arm – the Democratic Party – continually shrank from the battle that needed to be fought to protect our basic democratic values.
The Liberal failure to understand, and failure to fight, was epitomized by how Attorney General Merrick Garland facilitated Trump’s victory over the Rule of Law.
Trump recognized he had virtually no chance to succeed at trial for his crimes – neither those regarding his attempt to overturn the election he’d lost nor those involving his theft of highly sensitive documents – for facts matter in a trial, and his continual lies would not help him.
Trump one legal strategy, therefore, was delay—hoping he could run out the clock and never face the force of the Rule of Law in a trial.
AG Garland, out of the weakness into which the Liberal world had deteriorated over decades, shrank from the confrontation with Trump that Garland’s oath required him to seek in the face of the most serious crimes in American history (mostly committed right in front of the American people). Rather, out of fear of being accused of acting politically, Garland acted politically: he went after the foot-soldiers in the Insurrection, but refused for two years – until congressional hearings forced his hand -- to go after Trump, who’d summoned and incited the insurrectionist mob.
Had it not been for that indefensible two-year delay, the trials would have happened-- and the Rule of Law would have yet defeated Trump. But Garland’s weakness – shrinking as the Liberals so often did from the battle -- enabled Trump to hold the Rule of Law at bay by running out the shortened clock.
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But Garland’s delay would likely not have saved Trump had there not been the blatantly corrupt role that the Supreme Court chose to play. Even before it handed down itshistorically terrible, “presidential immunity” decision – dealing a blow to the basic constitutional principle that “No one is above the law” -- the Court sided with the criminal against the Rule of Law by indefensibly giving Trump an additional six months of delay (contrary to the huge public interest in having a trial before people would be called upon to vote for President).
The Court’s conduct revealed nakedly that the institution charged with assuring the Rule of Law had devolved into a purely partisan force.
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But it’s not only at the top of the power structure that America’s “immune” system failed to defeat the invading force of lawlessness that Trump represents.
The Liberal side of the American people – as I’ve written about at length elsewhere – shared Garland’s inability to understand the nature of the battle that needed to be fought, and shared also Garland’s mistaken belief that refusing to fight was the way to achieve peace.
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Meanwhile, it is the people of Conservative America that have boosted Trump’s power at every stage, and that has now provided the electoral force to empower this lawless man to kill all the remaining cases against him (cases that would have gone forward had he lost). This embrace of a man who committed crimes, and then waged war on the American system of Justice, represents a stunning devolution of the base of the Party of Law and Order.
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All of which raises the question: how is it that so many parts of America would have deteriorated — in their various ways -- over recent decades?
How did the “immune system” of American civilization, that was supposed to protect the nation from the virus of a lawless, corrupt, fascistic leader like Donald Trump, become so weakened that the pathogen could take over the nation?