Aaron Burr, the vice-president of the United States was tried for treason for aiding the British during the American Revolution. Acquitted in 1807, Burr spent the rest of his life trying in vain to rebuild his reputation. His personal reputation destroyed, he spent the rest of his life vainly trying to rehabilitate himself by writing a self-serving memoir and wandering the US and Europe. He died in obscurity in 1836 on Statin Island, of all places.
Richard Nixon, pardoned by Gerald Ford, skulked off to California, and appeared in television interviews attempting to recalibrate his reputation and legacy. His crimes in office consisted of dirty tricks and covering up a third-rate burglary of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon had a famous enemies list and sabotaged an early attempt to end the Viet Nam war in order to advance his election prospects in 1972. But Nixon never tried to effectuate a coup d’etat. Gerald Ford lost the next presidential election because the electorate was not amused by his decision to pardon Nixon’s criminality. Ford announced, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
Au contraire. It was just beginning; that pardon set a dangerous precedent. A precedent that if one is in the highest position of trust, the chief magistrate of this great country, you are not subject to accountability. Your self-serving hubris will and should prevail. The law be damned. Justice be damned. Tell the peasants “l’etat c’est moi.”
Some have argued that Donald Trump should be pardoned for his criminal activities to avoid a national trauma that would be provoked by a trial and even a conviction. They argue that a trial and conviction will increase polarization, fueling the ilk of Sean Hannity. Propaganda has been fed to the public for years now, by billionaire media moguls, interested only in their unparalleled profits, exacerbated by the continuing Trump circus. And yes, CNN and MSNBC have enjoyed the ratings also on their evening Trump bashes. Being in a media silo is a stupefying hypnotic mushroom induced religious experience.
Arguing that a Trump trial will increase polarity is fear itself. It is an acquiescence that our justice system is hopeless. That accountability for the prominent is untenable. That the wicked should go unpunished for their misdeeds. That some future president can come along and do whatever they want to impugn the law and escape accountability. This is unacceptable in a country with a constitution and the rule of law. Acknowledging misdeeds in one part of an argument and then saying there should be impunity for those deeds is cognitively dissonant and intellectually dishonest, a fear ridden Dickensian, existentialist, despair ridden determinism. It is depressing beyond the wildest imagination.
I prefer the Churchillian outlook, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
We have gone so far down the rabbit hole--a mishandled pandemic, the minority election of a man exacerbating our national malaise of disunion, 5 years of distraction from the real problems facing the nation, and now those who wish out of fright not to punish those who would subvert our democracy.
Our country has been through, to name a few traumas (and this list is by no means exhaustive,) a civil war killing 700,000 Americans, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the failure of reconstruction, the Jim Crow south, two horrific world wars, a disastrous war in Southeast Asia, a civil rights revolution, desegregation, a white population that still fears its loss of tribal status, the assassination of a young and promising president and his brother, race riots in Los Angeles, racial profiling, and a party that has now become anti-democratic.
We can certainly tolerate the trial of Donald Trump. On TV. In living color. On every channel. Unvarnished. Unedited. Unexpurgated. No sound bites. On the internet live stream. Show them how American justice works. I have tried many cases in front of many juries. Let’s do it. Let’s see the evidence.
Television for all those who think there is no justice for the privileged and for those who question the justice system. For all those low information, Fox watching naifs who are sending in $25-35 of their hard-earned money to a scoundrel ostensibly to make America great, but instead who is using 23% of the money to pay his lawyers ($23M and counting).
Many of the little people who smashed into the capitol have been convicted and sentenced, testifying that they did it for “their president.” What about their leader?
Let’s send the message for the generations to come that a president is not a king, just as George Washington showed us when they offered him a kingdom.
No pardon for Donald Trump.
