Prosecuting Trump would set a risky precedent. Not prosecuting would be worse.
Are we afraid to test the principle that no one is above the law? Why is Congress allowing presidents to break the law and get away with it?
This is not normal
But the United States claims to be an advanced democracy. The costs of not prosecuting Trump have already been significant — and they’re already grounds for fear.
Trump continues to stir up violence; he acts as if he remains untouchable.
He praised the anti-public-health trucker convoy that shut down a key bridge linking Detroit to Ontario and has wreaked havoc in Ottawa: “I see they have Trump signs all over the place and I’m proud that they do,” Trump bragged to “Fox & Friends,” before suggesting that the truckers do the same in the United States, an even greater “
tinderbox.”
Trump’s acolytes take his cue. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
expressed his hope that the truckers would bring their mayhem inside America’s borders, while the Republican National Committee defended the police-beating armed rioters at the Capitol who sought to block Biden’s electoral certification by Congress as engaged in “legitimate political discourse.”
Although Trump has long sanctioned violence among his supporters — calling white supremacists in Charlottesville “
fine people”; ordering the Proud Boys to “
stand back and stand by”; urging a crowd to “march” on the Capitol and “
fight like hell” to overturn the allegedly stolen election; tweeting “
liberate Michigan” to followers a few months before a plot to kidnap and murder the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was discovered — the failure to prosecute Trump for any crimes he himself commits empowers him to do it louder.
