We all witnessed the Trump crime
All Americans were it’s victims, yet some voluntarily look away.
The Most Visible Crime In U.S. History
We watched what Trump did. We saw how, in the days after the election, he elevated obviously false arguments about fraud and boosted obviously unreliable storytellers who were saying what he wanted people to hear.
We marveled at the anonymous quote a Republican official gave to The Washington Post: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. … It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.” For many observers, it seemed obviously fraught to let a sitting president blow off steam by energetically eroding confidence in the results of the election, even if we didn’t yet know that he very much was plotting against Biden.
His allies sat down on Dec. 14, 2020, and pretended they were casting electoral votes on his behalf even in states he lost. In many cases, they did it on camera. They talked about it. It was all out in the open, to the extent that it seemed like … maybe this was just taking complaints about losing the election and turning them up to 11? The nation was the proverbial frog in warming water; sure, it was uncomfortable, but acclimation occurred quickly.
By early January 2021, the water was scalding. Reports of angry meetings at the White House. Disruptions in the leadership of the Justice Department. Warnings about the threats posed to state election workers. And Trump, running out of options, demanding that his supporters come to Washington on Jan. 6. His millions of supporters were being crowded into a narrower and narrower path toward retaining him as president, jostling and growing angrier. And the path led to the Capitol steps.
We saw all this happen. We saw what happened next.
The Trump era has been defined in part by emphasizing the concerns of him and his base above those of everyone else. This was a function of the novelty of Trump; he is skilled at getting attention and is indifferent about straying outside constraints. It was also a reaction to the 2016 election itself: that his victory was so unexpected triggered a hyperactive focus on the movement that undergirded it. His base was given outsize primacy, particularly since it constituted a minority of the electorate, not to mention the population.
But the 180-million-plus American adults who didn’t cast a vote for Trump largely saw what unfolded in the aftermath of the 2020 election for what it was: an aggressively hostile reaction from an established fabulist aimed at keeping him in the White House. A president who came to the job without any demonstrable respect for the institution itself tried to avoid having to give it up. And he was willing to do whatever he could to make that happen.
And we saw it. We saw the fake electors and we saw the riot and we saw a pillow salesman show up at the White House with plans to declare martial law. We watched all of this and — those of us who were not snookered into believing that the election was stolen or who weren’t willing to delude ourselves into accepting some alternative narrative about the election being “rigged” — wondered why there were no apparent consequences.
What makes Trump’s third indictment different is that we saw what the grand jury felt constituted a crime unfold in front of our eyes. What makes it different is that we were all the victims of the alleged criminal behavior. All of us, every American. Even Trump’s supporters.
What makes it different is that, for the first time, there may be actual consequences for what Trump tried to do.
