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Notes -
Trump indicted with 4 counts over 2020 election
Why not?
Trump is perhaps the most hated man in America. He spent four years operating at the pinnacle of global power, an environment strewn with what are purported to be impartial legal tripwires placed to hinder abuses of power. He's incompetent and sloppy, arrogant, astonishingly vain, and defined by his contempt for anything that blocks his personal ambitions.
The people now indicting him achieved office through a population dozens of millions strong that uniformly believes that he's Satan incarnate, a criminal, a dangerous megalomaniac, a giant retarded toddler armed with a machine gun. They believe that his election was manifest evidence that our political system is deeply, perhaps irreparably broken. They see his Presidency as a disaster that needs to be cleaned up and then prevented from ever recurring. And again, he spent four years being, at the absolute best, sloppy and incompetent in an environment that purportedly is supposed to demand precision on pain of serious legal consequences.
Why not indict him, and jail him too while they're at it? How could doing so possibly be a bad idea? We're a nation of laws, right? He at least plausibly broke them, right? This is what the system does, these are the rules we all agreed to, what possible room could there be for complaint? And sure, there are some people, maybe even a lot of people who are too mind-killed to accept reality, and they're going to complain anyway. But what are they going to do about it?
Nothing, right?
The people doing this have the all the cards. They won the election, the bureaucracy is on-side, half the nation's voters have been screaming for this for four years. This is what power is for, to get good things done even when they're hard, even when bad people stand in the way! How could they not do exactly this, exactly now? If the bad people can't get it through their heads that they've fucking lost, then it becomes necessary to hammer the point, repeatedly and with vigor, until it finally sinks in. If they aren't getting it, then that means you aren't hammering hard enough. At some point in the escalation curve, they'll have to cave, won't they? That's how it works, isn't it? What possible reason could be imagined for doing anything else?
And if such a reason can't be imagined, why would you expect anything other than exactly this?
Also: What, should the entire apparatus of the civil state stand there, limp dick in hand, watching norm after law after precedent get dynamited?
The apparatus demands lubrication, and the only substance at hand is blood. It is good and necessary that blood should flow to feed the state. That is what the state is, that is what the state is for. The state is the threat of violence perpetrated against all by consent of all for the benefit of all.
There has been a defector; why should the government even exist if it can't punish one idiot failson of a fallen business empire?
One thing they shouldn't do is start throwing more dynamite in the flaming pile.
If you want to preserve institutions, constant escalation is not the way to do it. And that of course goes for both sides.
Not that any of this could have been avoided of course. Power can't abide competition so Trump has to be benign or be destroyed. And he wasn't benign.
On the contrary, that is exactly what they should do. Doubly so considering the top-down nature of the affair. The imperative is to send a message that you can play the game or you can sit out, but you cannot try to flip the table. If you can call for an insurrection and then call a mulligan when it fails, there's no reason not to do so every time you lose.
You are literally arguing for Pompey and Cicero's policy against Caesar.
If trying to contest election results inevitably gets repressed as such, there is no reason not to foment an actual insurrection if you think you might lose.
Trump was free to bring his objections in court (which he did, to universal failure) and his allies in Congress were free to raise objections (which they did, though their colleague found them unpersuasive). He was even free to hold a rally in which he whined about how he'd been cheated.
Any claim to merely "contesting" the election evaporated when he sent a mob to attack Congress. It would be irresponsible to let him go unpunished and irresponsible to let the threat of further treason from his followers be a deterrent.
Right, so you're free to protest but only in ways that are ineffective, and if you start doing anything similar to what we do we'll treat it like you're assassinating politicians.
So why exactly should Trumpists not start assassinating politicians given the incentives you're giving them?
You're not answering that question at all and just restating your conviction that self righteous partisanship is sound policy and not the boneheaded foolishness history show it to be at every turn.
I'm sure am glad you weren't in charge of nuclear policy during the cold war.
They were only ineffective because the claim was not meritorious.
One of the Trumpists' most consistent mistakes is that they believe their actions are symmetrical to their rivals.
Because their belief that they are being unfairly punished is mistaken. Doing normal democratic politics has a higher payoff than trying to flip the table when they lose. It's clearly not that they can't win elections, considering they just did.
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