COMMENTS
More and more Americans believe Trump must be punished. But will it ever happen?
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
Published
Friday, June 24, 2022 – 22:07
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After five episodes of it live thriller about the coup in the United States, there are so many smoking guns in the room that the smoke alarm howls. There is not even talk of “smoking guns”, but tangible evidence from countless witnesses who have seen and heard the gun being fired. Donald Trump tried to reverse a legal election and prevent a peaceful change of power.
“Just say the election was corrupt and left the rest to us,” was the message to Jeffrey Rosen, the Attorney General who took over after the faithful William Barr finally resigned. Even for him, the border went by coup. When Rosen also refused to fabricate election fraud, Trump wanted to replace him with an incompetent useful idiot who was willing to agree to the scam.
The undue pressure on The Department of Justice is one of the hearings’ most smoking guns, Trump’s attempt to put in people who were willing to break the law for him is also reminiscent of Nixon’s last desperate days. But it is questionable whether Trump’s ruthless brutality makes an even greater impression on the many viewers who follow the live drama; how Trump and his accomplices cynically ruined the lives of innocent election officials, hung them out by name and sent the mob after them. Trump’s bullying regime terrorized and threatened ordinary Americans who just did their job.
Now he is felled by his own. The witnesses are Republicans, they are his immediate family and associates, who say that Trump not only lost his footing in the weeks after the election. It was all planned long in advance, and when he did not get what he wanted, he sent the mob to Congress. As he said while watching the attack on TV; Maybe Mike Pence deserves to be hanged?
He’s the problem
Yet few believe he will be prosecuted. It’s not just the general wisdom of the comment fields, where those who were so skeptical that he could not win in 2016, are now just as skeptical that he will not only go free, but will win the next presidential election. Fortunately, the latter will never happen.
This is a nightmare for Joe Biden’s Minister of Justice, Merrick Garland, who will have to consider in the autumn whether sufficient evidence has been presented to start an investigation. Several of the accomplices will undoubtedly be prosecuted without anyone shedding a tear for them, but investigating and targeting a former president is a greater challenge, even in normal times. In today’s United States, it seems almost impossible.
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When the Republicans heard the audio recordings of Nixon in connection with Watergate, marched even the most believers to the White House and said; you have to get off. You no longer have our support. Now there is no such loyalty to the federation left among the Republicans. An aging Republican state senator in Arizona testified weeping about how the family had been harassed and threatened with death for months by Trump’s mob after he approved the election result. He was hanged as a pedophile in his neighborhood. He certainly blamed Trump for it, and yet, if Trump goes to the polls next time, he will vote for him again.
Why in the world? The explanation is simple and timeless: Money and religion. As long as the low-church Protestants get restrictions on abortion and LGBT rights, and the rich get tax breaks and deregulation, there is a bit of fascism to live with.
Merrick Garland is sweating where he sits and follows the hearings. Right now, it may seem like he is doomed no matter what he does. How can he start investigating Biden’s predecessor, who is also a possible presidential candidate in the next election without being accused of political witch-hunts and thus further divide the country? Can he trust that the evidence is good enough to hold in a trial? What if Trump is acquitted?
But Garland probably also thinks about the verdict of history. What if he does not do so when the documentation is so overwhelming? The fear of Trump’s far-right followers is great, but at the same time there is a large majority in the United States who will react strongly if Trump escapes. The hearings have sky-high viewership, and a majority of Republican voters actually follow the hearings closely or fairly closely. A recent poll shows that as many as 58 percent now believe that Trump should be prosecuted. It’s startlingly high.
Republicans may have made a historic mistake in refusing to participate. Thus, the hearings have been allowed to continue without interruptions, fogging and circus. It has got the truth on the table and facts out to the people. It’s been a while since America experienced that, and they’re embracing it.
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