The only people who've ever held Trump meaningfully accountable over the last nine years have been ordinary Americans and they've spent that entire time being lectured to and berated by elites who've failed to do anything.
All this nonsense post-2016 about how Trump's victory illustrated the dangers of the democracy when most people voted against him. Twice now. Meanwhile the holy institutions we're all supposed to be praying to and prostrating ourselves before have saved or elevated him at every opportunity.
It's absolutely wild that the dumbest and most venal of elites has all the rest of the elites breaking society to keep him from facing even a single consequence for a lifetime of open criminality. The class loyalty and kompromat involved here are epic.
To a degree, yes. But I think this rally around the Trump phenomenon is unique. The guy committed a violent attempted coup and stole nuclear secrets and is walking around free. Not to mention has decades long documented history of spending time with pedophiles. He's untouchable
I think that someday, when all the books are written, it will be profoundly disturbing to recognize both the scale and the depth of the acts that were documented in the collective Kompromat that Trump... and Putin collected and then used on American Politicians.
Institutions are fundamentally about protecting and serving people! Shared this by Frederick Douglass a bit ago. Society is superior to its forms, the spirit above the letter, the people more than the country and superior to the Constitution. When institutions protect fascists, we go around them.
This is from "Sources of Danger to the Republic," a speech given Feb 7, 1867 and published in the St. Louis Missouri Democrat. I got it from Nicholas Buccola's The Essential Douglass.
And there's no chance that he'll get the most votes this time around either. The screwed up EC institution is the only thing that makes him a viable candidate.
It's both. My theory is that no president is ever going to go to prison for any reason, simply because the justice system is largely an illusion that's only real for us commoners, and punishing a former president sets a bad precedent by making the iillusion real.
I think this is also why they’re so quick to dismiss UBI pilots and killed covid aids asap
They can’t have us seeing that a better world is, in fact, possible and not just lefty dreams
They want us assuming that the status quo is the natural order of the universe and can’t be changed
the bullshit about how trump couldn't be investigated or indicted for any of the various criminal stuff he was doing was laundered via trump DOJ leaks to the new york times and the washington post in early 2018
they worked together to mainstream this idea that trump couldn't be held accountable
If there's one thing ALL the extremely wealthy and powerful would like to avoid it is the precedent of people like themselves having to answer for anything, ever. The Democrats in charge are just as averse to this eventuality as Republicans. Most importantly, so are the oligarchs who own them both.
The media fucking loves him. They have been basically an arm of his campaign in this election cycle.
His political success has exposed deep rot within almost all of our major political institutions, but the Establishment Media most of all.
it's class-interest. He's "an elite" and they are "elites", so holding him to account would establish a precedent of "holding elites to account" which might impact THEM someday.
The "institutionalists" don't want to reckon with the fact that about a third of the country would rather burn the whole country down than work across identity categories to improve lives, including their own.
The stupid rich support Convict Drump because they only see tax cuts. The MAGAhats support SingSing Don because he’s a facist. Both groups have no idea how much danger they are in if Don Criminal gets a second term.
It's because a ton of people who already have wealth and power would have a lot more wealth and power if he were not held accountable, so they're throwing in with him and hoping for his success
These same folks are also the ones who keep telling us that, actually, institutions holding him accountable would be taking the will away from the voters...who as you point out are ready for some fucking accountability.
Feels like the Democratic leadership's new "strategy" to win elections is to make sure that the survival of democracy is always on the ballot, which feels like an insane gamble to make when you have their track record.
At some point an ordinary American is going to come to a very predictable conclusion about Trump and justice and those same elites will continue to lose their minds while everyone else is like, "of course."
