8/14/2022

What About Those of Us Who Want Donald Trump Prosecuted? Talk to Us, Media

If there's one thing that runs through most political coverage of just about anything, it's that something is only good if Republicans believe it's good. Whenever some dullard pundit smirks pure bullshit about "bipartisanship," it inevitably means, "Here's a Democratic idea that is worthless unless Republicans buy into it." But a Republican idea never needs the approval of Democrats. I'm not talking votes alone. I'm talking how issues are covered. 

During Trump's presidency, we got a nonstop stream of yokel safaris, where some reporter from, generally, the New York Times, although they were certainly not alone here, goes to a stronghold of Trump support like Sisterfuck, Ohio, and interview the Sisterfuckians about how much they love Trump and what he was doing, which was always "a lot." You had to struggle to find articles on what Democratic voters thought. And then, with the election of Joe Biden, the media still ventured out to Sisterfuck, Cousinream, and Blowagoat to get their oh-so-American opinions on how much they hate Biden and what he's doing, which is always "a lot," with an added "and the election was stolen."

This is reaching its peak with the people decrying the FBI's search of Donald Trump's garish nightmare country club and home, Mar-a-Lago. As Michelle Goldberg points out (yes, in the New York Times), there is a strain of "centrist" thought that the search was out of bounds because it will divide the nation further, that it will "deepen" the country's "civic wounds," as Damon Linker wrote. Linker goes on to say that the high probability of violence in response to a Trump prosecution means that prosecution should be avoided: "I simply don’t agree with those who insist that not going after Trump will be even more dangerous than pursuing his prosecution." 

Certainly, voices on the right are screaming this, with politicians coming just up to the line of threats of violence (although certainly Republicans in Congress are threatening the FBI and the Justice Department, not to mention Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray personally, with investigation and defunding). And, yeah, the fucknut squad is doing what it's been jonesing to do, which means some of them are starting to die for the lies that Donald Trump keeps telling. But those dumb shitheads were just itching to try out their ARs and their YouTube military training on a government building. Most of them will just rant into the TikTok void for likes and subscribes, the currency of our moronic present. Of course, it takes only one getting a bomb next to or in a building or a few guns into an office to fuck things up for a whole lot of people. So I'll keep the mocking of these ignorant, delusional prickmites to a simmering minimum. 

The point here is not just that, obviously, prosecution shouldn't be based on how much upheaval it will cause to numbskulls who have smeared a viscous coating of lies on their naked flesh and are pretending it's armor. But media coverage is focusing only on the violent fucknuts. It ignores the much, much larger portion of the population who want to see that orange motherfucker behind bars for crimes he flaunted in our flustered faces.

Yeah, what about those of us who want Donald Trump indicted and prosecuted? We deserve to be heard, too. Prosecuting Trump is not merely for some abstract concept like adherence to "the rule of law." That has meaning. We have seen powerful people get away with crimes time and again. We needed George W. Bush and his crew of war criminals prosecuted. We needed the motherfuckers who almost blew up the economy of the world in 2008 to face justice. And we got nothing. We got the false promise that forgiveness would temper their behavior, only to see that forgiveness shit on and tossed back at those who did the forgiving, using it as a ticket to go further and act with impunity to wreck shit even more. 

We have to know that there is a limit. We have to know that in a nation that incarcerates more (mostly poor) people than any other, in a nation that tolerates mass murder on a daily basis, in a nation that does nothing to stop the unending harassment and threats that stream through our social media, in a nation that allows for lies to become policy, whether with climate change (until last week) or the election or abortion rights or education, in a nation as fucked as this nation is, something fucking matters, and that something has to be the very foundational idea that a president isn't above the law. The Obama administration, including Joe Biden, dropped the ball big-time with the Bush criminal enterprise. It can't happen again, so soon, because all faith in this delicate web we call "democracy" will fucking collapse. That's way more dangerous than Skeeter pretending he's Rambo and trying to take out an FBI office. We can stop the Skeeters, even if they do cause harm. We can't stop a web from collapsing once the threads are plucked free.

Jesus fuck, at least Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest had the good sense to realize they had gotten away with it and went the fuck away. I sincerely believe that if Trump had accepted the results of the election and let everything go ahead peacefully, he would have gotten away with it, too. Instead, he's fucking daring anyone to stop his criminality. Trump is fostering this violence now. He could stop it, like he could have stopped the January 6 insurrection. But he won't. So he must be stopped by legal action.

Interview us, CNN and MSNBC and, yeah, even fuckin' Fox "news." Talk to those of us who need this prosecution to happen. What we have to say is far more important than what a bunch of lunatics ranting about civil war on The Donald think.