Convicted like you’ve never seen before
It’s a first America doesn’t need, and yet it does.
The Washington Post reports yesterday’s news:
Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case, becoming the first former U.S. president to be tried and found guilty of a crime.
All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way.
The officials “at the very center of the 2008 crash — former Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and former head of the New York Fed and Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,” wrote Ryan Cooper in 2018, wanted their successors to have “quiet authoritarian power to make sure financial elites like themselves do not pay for their misdeeds.”
You noticed? So did the rest of us.
The system was rigged, Elizabeth Warren said even before becoming a U.S senator. It wasn’t just conservative panic over shifting demographics and the election of the country’s first Black president that led in 2016 to the election of a chaos agent — Trump — as president. It was the sense that the elite are above the law, as indeed Trump proved his entire life. Why wouldn’t people resent it?
But Trump the huckster promised his aggrieved MAGA shock troops that rather than restore order he would make the rigged system work for Christian white nationalists. He is a crook and a liar, but he’d be their crook and liar. Trump alleged that the 2016 election was rigged even after he won it. He swears to this day that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was rigged. It was anger over that supposed rigging that fired up the mob he sent to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Movement conservatism, the financial crisis, Russian disinformation and more have worked for decades to erode U.S. public confidence in the country’s basic functions to the point that MAGA Republicans are prepared to cast it all aside. The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, the works. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule, immune and imperious.
What those of us not in Trump’s thrall and with a shred of faith left in America’s promise of equal justice under law was, in successful Trump prosecutions, the restoration of a rule of law that would apply to everyone.
“Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Let that sink in,” is the headline on Jeremy Stahl’s Slate commentary.
“We’re not out of this yet.” — Han Solo
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