Trump’s MAGA movement caught many Americans by surprise. They’ve never seen anything like it before. This is the first time anyone has tried to overthrow our democracy.
To outsiders, Trump looks like a pied piper leading a crowd of zombies into a never-never land of lies, fantasies, and conspiracy theories. It’s more complex than that.
Trump rocketed to political power by marshaling subterranean currents of White Grievance and turning them into an organized movement to stop the clock on America’s racial progress and entrench White Christian dominance.
This got him the kind of blind loyalty Hitler evoked among the German people. On January 13, 2016, Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” (see article here). No joke; he was right.
The Republican Party has been swept up and engulfed by this movement. Thus, it’s not surprising that Republicans, instead of supporting our laws, are outraged (see story here) at Trump being indicted for stealing classified documents and trying to thwart government efforts to retrieve them. Their outrage isn’t justified. These are crimes.
This isn’t a politically-motivated effort to knock him out of the 2024 race, and won’t do so. To get these indictments, one of America’s best prosecutors presented real evidence of actual criminal conduct to a grand jury of ordinary citizens, who returned a “true bill” (explained here). You can’t get a true bill by making stuff up.
An MSNBC article here explains in a single succinct phrase why Republicans are outraged that Trump will be prosecuted for his crimes, and why even a jury convicting him won’t make a dent in his supporters:
“Trump has yet to do anything since his rise to power to lose the support of his core base; his political identity involves openly arguing that political and legal rules should be broken in order to make America great again.”
In short, Republicans aren’t just behaving badly; it goes beyond that. They want to make politics above the law, but only for their side. Trump’s position is because he’s a major political figure, the laws of our country don’t apply to him. His party agrees. And breaking laws that protect us from them is a major part of their scheming to turn America into an authoritarian state. We shouldn’t stand for it.
Our nation benefits from having two competitive political parties, but it doesn’t benefit from a party like this. Voters should refuse to vote for any Republican running for any office until this ungodly mess gets straightened out.
Related stories: A disturbingly large number of Trump supporters reacted to the indictments by calling for violence, see stories here and here.