“The American people need to be prepared for the fairly likely possibility that the former president will be prosecuted,” Jonathan Chait wrote last week after New York’s Office of the Attorney General announced that the Trump Organization is now under criminal investigation.
In essence, get ahead of what’s coming so you aren’t playing catch-up after the fact. Trump and company are already playing offense.
Chait wrote:
While polling on the matter is scant, I’ve found that even among news-savvy liberals I speak with, few people grasp the severity of Trump’s legal exposure. Trump fans “know” he is a brilliant businessman based on the character he portrayed in a reality show, and Trump haters have heard about his financial difficulties.
His likely criminal record has been discussed much less frequently, and often in fairly long, dense reported investigative stories. The best of these was a 2018 New York Times report describing Trump’s practice of creating fake shell companies to bury profits. The Times described this as “outright fraud” — fraud being a defined crime, not just an aggressive use of tax shelters or operating in legal gray areas. And while most of that fraud took place decades ago, other reporting has built a very strong case that Trump has engaged in tax fraud much more recently.
Donald Trump is no more legally bulletproof than he is 6′-3″ and 243 pounds. Especially should his accountant Allen Weisselberg cooperate with authorities to save his own skin. The public should be prepared for the sun to set on the Trump Organization. The more prepared they are, the less propensity for violence in the streets. (Let’s be blunt.)
The more surprised the public is to learn of charges against Trump (should they be filed), the easier it will be for Trump to depict them as political. Trump’s criminal defense will be the legal equivalent of his familiar political message: corroding confidence in public institutions and spreading his belief that corruption is the norm.
As much as it has been a relief not to watch nonstop coverage of the Trump Show, it is a mistake to ignore what he and his followers are up to. Better to force him to react to a nonstop stream of negative news about himself.
Get the meme rolling. Not only that, but toss in some accelerant. The Trump brand must be further devalued along with that of his party. Whatever disagreements one might have with James Carville, this comment from his recent Vox interview seems like sound advice:
… Democrats can’t fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Which is what Republicans are counting on.
The veritable future depends on turning the insurrection into the GOP’s albatross. Carville added, “So whatever you think Republicans would do to us [had the insurrectionsists been lefties], that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.” Sans threats and violence.
For their part, Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the soon-to-be indicted Rep. Matt Gaetz are actively trying to disappear the insurrection down the memory hole by yanking the media spotlight onto phony election audits.
Trump adviser Roger Stone told a crowd in Tallahassee, “Politics isn’t bean bag.” Veterans of Bloody Sunday have the scars to prove it. If we hope not to suffer more of them, Republicans and Dear Leader need to be consigned to playing defense.