One Small Step

A long awaited, long overdue, baby step toward accountability. Tectonic nevertheless.

A relatively short King’s Necktie today, for reasons that I will explain later. But after almost six years of writing this blog, there’s no way I was letting the (first) indictment of Donald Trump go uncommented upon.

The Least of His Crimes

Ever since Trump left office, I have been among those who have written at length about the desperate need for accountability for this hideous pox on the American body politic. (You can read some of those screeds here and hereand here and here.) It is an essential task for the republic if we wish it to stand in any kind of credible form.

The argument that indicting a former chief executive would set a terrible precedent is spurious, as we have already explored. Ask Berlusconi, or Sarkozy, or Fujimori, or Park Geun-hye, or Bibi for that matter (and he’s still in office). Yeah, it’s uncharted terrain here in the US, but not because it’s some sort of breach of the Constitutional order. Both Nixon and Bill Clinton made deals as they left office to avoid prosecutions that they knew were an absolute legal possibility, and a likely one. (And they were both lawyers.)

As I and many many others have written ever since January 6th, the real danger to the rule of law would be allowing a…