All it takes to bring Trump/GOP to justice is the willingness to do it. He ain't special.

As usual, our legacy/corporate media generally got it wrong when it came to analyzing the Trump trial, and how it was such an awful thing to have a former president face criminal charges. And that's called out in an excellent column in Defector by Tom Scocca, (PS - you need to be reading Defector, for both sports and takes on everyday life) where he says the "savvy" Acela corridor insiders really don't want to admit how simple it is to hold a powerful person accountable.

"For the past eight years, a lot of essentially simple truths were treated as matters of paralyzing complexity." https://t.co/My5ey4b3Hs

— Defector (@DefectorMedia) May 31, 2024

For the past eight years, a lot of essentially simple truths were treated as matters of paralyzing complexity. A man who ran his entire business empire on fraud, systematically cheated on his taxes, committed sexual assault, and conspired with his henchmen to obstruct justice had made himself into a presidential candidate, and then a president, and then an ex-president, and that second set of facts was somehow supposed to change the original, underlying facts. Presidents didn't do those sorts of things. Or, if a president did do those things, it certainly couldn't count—that would mean the president of the United States was a criminal, and that would mean ... well, it just couldn't.

And the correct answer was - "Why couldn't he be a criminal?" He's just a person elected by other people. He's not an immortal king. That's one of the founding principles of this country, from what I remember in my classes and my readings.

Scocca goes on to show that all it takes is for prosecutors and police to be willing to do their jobs, and ignore the outside noise about "tradition" and "institutions" and other Coastal BS. And that's why a case about what may seem like a small detail (covering up payments about an affair to keep it from getting out in the media) has turned Donald Trump into a convicted felon before the 2024 election.

While the opinion-havers were indulging themselves in mythology or fantasy—Trump as the embodiment of the will of the people, whose wrathful political power would only grow if challenged by law, or Trump as the highest of criminals, who must be punished by the highest of authorities—Bragg was putting together the documents and witnesses that would sustain 34 felony counts in a Manhattan courtroom. While the prosecutors with weightier, more historic-sounding charges were getting bogged down in their timelines and stymied by Trump's judiciary, the squalid little hush-money case kept moving.

And while the obstructionists in the federal side of the GOP have abused the DC crowd's vaunted INSTITUTIONS to insulate Trump from the consequences of his presidential-era corruption and lawlessness, Scocca points out that it's ground-level local and state lawsuits that are actually making Trump pay a legal price.

Donald Trump's political career has been one long demonstration that the legal structures that were supposed to be the bedrock of the rule of law are worthless. Impeachment was no match for a cynically disciplined political party. The Emoluments Clause and the Insurrection Clause are words on paper that the Supreme Court chose not to read. Even a well-tested prosecution machine like the Espionage Act is nothing that a determined judge can't rig her way around.

What caught up with Donald Trump was not the majesty of the republic but a civil suit for sexually assaulting someone in a department-store changing room and lying about it, and another civil suit for cooking the books on his property assessments, and now the criminal charges for covering up his hush-money payments. He is, as a matter of legal record, a rapist, a fraud, and a felon, on the edge of financial ruin and at risk of imprisonment. He might yet return to the White House, but he'll go there as a convicted crook.

This has to be a central message from Dems for the next 5 months. Some of it is about Trump himself, but suck in the rest of that rotten party with him. "Why is the entire GOP supporting this pathetic, amoral con artist whose only skill is shamelessness? What kind of weak losers would get behind this guy? And what do they think they're going to get out of it?"

All of them are the absolute dregs. No decent, self-respecting person should be associating with these grifters and BubbleWorld BSers. I am definitely staying here in Madison next month while those lowlifes are having their absurdities go on in Milwaukee.

And I sure would like to see Dems in both Wisconsin (THAT MEANS YOU, JOSH KAUL) and in DC to get a clue from what was done in these criminal and civil cases that Trump lost in New York. All you have to do is to file charges, speak the truths with force and constancy, and blast through all of the complaints by the protectors of privilege who claim it's somehow "different" when the people performing lawlessness, manipulations and thuggery are in positions of power.

This isn't a difficult concept to grasp. You just have to do it. And if Dem leaders aren't willing to take the steps to take out the trash that is making our political system fail, and stop giving impunity to people who break the law and who threaten everyday Americans for doing what their civic duty asks them to do, then GET ONES THAT WILL.