By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Daily Kos Morning Roundup campaigns@dailykos.com
One thing was attempting to harsh my
mellow on a fine Wednesday morning. It is the knowledge that, if a
judge rules that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago must submit to electronic
monitoring, it will take his campaign about 11 seconds to produce fake
ankle-monitors with TRUMP 2024 emblazoned on them. In a more distant
future, I can imagine T-shirts reading, "My President Is In Prison." And
the members of the cult will gobble them up as fast as the merch people
can crank them out. That depresses me.
Otherwise, I think people should cool their jets on the whole
Momentous History Takes for a while. This is going to be a criminal
trial. There will be a judge and a jury. There will be a prosecution
team and a defense team. It is helpful, I think, to start thinking about
all of these things as merely complex criminal trials, and not as
turning points for our nation. It's not that I don't recognize the
enormity of the crimes of which the former president* is now accused.
It's just that too much pious hot air pumped into the case will cause it
to float away from the tawdry reality of how the former president* went
about those crimes. Also, too much of that pious hot-air will crowd out
the fundamental joy that any true friend of the American republic feels
in their hearts. I am no more "saddened" by the former president*'s
latest indictment than I was saddened when they finally busted Whitey
Bulger. In fact, I am positively gleeful. I am, for example, very taken
by the flying elbow thrown by Jack Smith, who comes off the top rope in
the very first sentence of the indictment.
The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of
the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The
Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.
Death by simple declarative sentence.
Reading the indictment carefully, you find yourself drawn inexorably
toward Count Four — the charge that the former president engaged in a
conspiracy against the rights of voters. This is the one that's based on
a provision of the Enforcement Act passed in 1870, a law aimed to
enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1868, aka The Ku Klux Klan Act. This is
the one that has set much of the MAGA set howling about the unfairness
of it all. But it also is the count that sums up the other three. All of
the various plots and schemes set out in the other three counts of the
indictment all come down to a massive conspiracy to deny the effective
franchise to voters in Georgia and Arizona, and Michigan and Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania. In a way, Smith has arraigned the entire
voter-suppression program that the conservative movement has put the
Republican party behind. Here, Count Four says, here is where all the
tricks and traps set out in state laws inevitably lead.
And then there are those who see right through Trump and always have.
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