{"id":27811,"date":"2022-06-24T16:15:49","date_gmt":"2022-06-24T16:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=27811"},"modified":"2022-06-25T13:33:27","modified_gmt":"2022-06-25T13:33:27","slug":"trump-is-a-domestic-enemy-treat-him-like-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/trump-is-a-domestic-enemy-treat-him-like-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is A Domestic Enemy – Treat Him Like One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection have already provided conclusive evidence that the effort to overturn the 2020 election was a conspiracy directed by a corrupt sitting president who knew the effort was based on lies and encouraged violence in pursuit of power.<\/p>\n

The damning testimony before the committee and the persuasiveness of its case has been widely analyzed. But a frank discussion of accountability for the insurrection has been muted.<\/p>\n

There is a reason for this. The gravity of the crime exceeds any an American president has ever been suspected of committing, and the scale of culpability is greater than many citizens are comfortable contemplating.<\/p>\n

Another reason, one that puts the country in peril, is that too many Americans\u00a0continue to support<\/a>\u00a0the perpetrators.<\/p>\n

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, set the tone for the hearings a week ago in his\u00a0opening statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was domestic enemies of the Constitution who stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol who sought to thwart the will of the people to stop the transfer of power,\u201d he said. Later he said, \u201cUltimately, Donald Trump \u2014 the president of the United States \u2014 spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy \u2026 January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup. \u2026 Violence was no accident. It represented Trump\u2019s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson\u2019s use of the phrase \u201cdomestic enemies\u201d was deliberate. He noted the Civil War-era adoption of language regarding \u201call enemies \u2014 foreign and domestic<\/a>\u201d in the federal oath to account for the South\u2019s rebellion.<\/p>\n

In other words, the crimes committed by Trump and his co-conspirators are categorically akin to war-waging against the United States.<\/p>\n

What is the appropriate punishment? If Trump and those who joined him in this violent attempted coup \u2014 including lawyers John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and\u00a0seditionist members of Congress<\/a>\u00a0such as Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, other senior officials such as Trump\u2019s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as the hundreds of extremists who stormed the Capitol \u2014 are enemies of America, what\u2019s to be done with them?<\/p>\n

The answer comes to mind more readily than it\u2019s given voice. We know the essence of the appropriate punishment for the crime. We don\u2019t know yet how to engage it.<\/p>\n

Plenty has been said about specific federal laws Trump likely violated. These were suggested by the committee in March when it asked a U.S. district court in California to compel Eastman to turn over documents. It argued that Eastman\u2019s attorney-client privilege defense was invalidated because his relationship with Trump involved the likely commission of\u00a0two federal crimes<\/a>: obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Judge David O. Carter agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,\u201d\u00a0Carter wrote<\/a>. \u201cTheir campaign was not confined to the ivory tower \u2014 it was a coup in search of a legal theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

These specific alleged criminal violations are an inherent theme of the committee\u2019s recent public hearings. It\u2019s as if the panel is \u201claying out a road map for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland\u201d to initiate criminal prosecutions, as\u00a0The New York Times<\/a> put it.<\/p>\n

\n
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The depth of catastrophe that awaits the country if Trump and the Republicans are rewarded for the insurrection cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Yet a case involving mere criminal codes and a jury of peers, as necessary as it is, would fail to account for the enormity of Trump\u2019s betrayal of America, because a crime on the scale of a violent attempted coup by the country\u2019s own president eludes the ability of any court to fully address. Only a tide of public scorn, a thorough condemnation by the citizenry, the eternal reprobation of history might match these misdeeds.<\/p>\n

And such contempt must also target the Republican Party, which as an organization has been indispensable in propping up its criminal figurehead and clearing space for his treachery. Trump and his abettors should face the kind of society-dispensed justice reserved through the ages for a nation\u2019s most hated scoundrels.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not happening.<\/p>\n

Garland, to the\u00a0exasperation<\/a>\u00a0of many democracy-approving Americans, appears ambivalent about prosecuting Trump and other high-level seditionists. It\u2019s not hard to find people rehearsing the\u00a0usual arguments<\/a>\u00a0against prosecuting a former president \u2014 the national trauma would be too great, it would be labeled politically motivated, it could trigger a partisan tit-for-tat \u2014 even though failure to punish Trump would prove that individuals who are in a position to inflict the most damage are the most immune to accountability.<\/p>\n

In fact, the culprits are not only getting away with grave crimes. They\u2019re thriving. Trump is\u00a0preparing to become president<\/a>\u00a0again. Election deniers are the\u00a0topline GOP candidates<\/a>\u00a0for the highest offices in Colorado and elswehere. Republicans in November have a good shot at taking back the majority in the U.S. Senate and are\u00a0almost assured<\/a>\u00a0of regaining a majority in the U.S. House. When that happens, seditionist lawmakers will assume even higher positions of power \u2014 one of the most dispiriting examples being Jordan, a virulent\u00a0Trump sycophant<\/a>\u00a0who is in line to be the next chairman of the Judiciary Committee and is already\u00a0salivating over<\/a>\u00a0the retaliatory investigations he plans to launch.<\/p>\n

The depth of catastrophe that awaits the country if Trump and the Republicans are rewarded for the insurrection cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n

That Americans must even now tolerate the presence of seditionists in elective office demonstrates that Jan. 6 was not a crisis averted but only a spectacular expression of a crisis underway.<\/p>\n

That Americans must watch as a free Trump prepares a second run at the presidency reveals that the justice system, so dependent on the good faith willingness of public officials to uphold the law, is outmatched by unbounded deceit and corruption.<\/p>\n

That Americans in vast numbers continue to support Trump signals that the country established by the U.S. Constitution is already mutating into a dark new form that the Founders wouldn\u2019t recognize<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection have already provided conclusive evidence that the effort to overturn the 2020 election was a conspiracy directed by a corrupt sitting president who knew the effort was based on lies and encouraged violence in pursuit of power. The damning testimony before the committee and Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1287,40,5,58,6,1],"tags":[26,1477],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27811"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27875,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27811\/revisions\/27875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}