Former President Donald Trump is either a threat to democracy or he isn’t. Democrats must either throw him in jail or admit the entire New York trial was a complete and total sham.
If you could go back in time and prevent the Holocaust by killing baby Hitler, would you do it?
As difficult as that ethical dilemma may be for some, the Democratic Party currently faces a far easier ethical question now that a Democratic district attorney has convicted Trump in a court run by a Biden donor: Should Trump be put in jail for causing his own records to record payments to lawyer Michael Cohen as legal expenses and not as reimbursements for a loan.
If we are to believe the rhetoric of Democratic politicians and Judge Juan Merchan, this should be an easy decision. Trump is not only a convicted felon, but he is a threat to democracy itself.
Why would any person who honestly believed Trump was a threat to democracy not do everything within his or her power to prevent Trump from becoming president again?
Merchan has already held in a pretrial ruling that Trump “paid an individual $130,000 to conceal a sexual encounter in an effort to influence the 2016 Presidential election” and that that effort was a “serious allegation.”
If it was such a “serious” allegation, it needs a “serious” sentence. And we already know Trump doesn’t take fines seriously. Trump happily wrote Merchan check after check for disobeying his gag order, and it was only when Merchan threatened jail that Trump stopped.
As the New Republic‘s Timothy Noah noted, “of course,” the case against Trump “was brought for political reasons.” “Trump’s falsifications may have put him in the White House! That makes Bragg’s decision to proceed with the case more defensible, not less.”
Ask yourself who was defrauded, allegedly, when Trump’s accountants recorded Trump’s checks to Cohen as “legal expenses,” as they always had? It certainly wasn’t Trump or the business whose records were allegedly falsified.
No, the only victim here, if there is one, is the public, who allegedly might have voted differently in 2016 if they had heard another story about Trump cheating on his wife. Voters have now heard this story, too. In fact, they heard it long before the trial began or the charges were even dropped. In other words, there is no victim here. There is no crime. Voters have heard the story.
The danger, however, is that voters might not care about Stormy Daniels. They might not believe, as Democrats do, that Trump is a threat to democracy or that democracy is on the ballot. Without interference from politically motivated prosecutors and judges, Trump might defeat President Joe Biden. And that can’t be allowed.
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Merchan and his Democratic Party can’t admit this, of course. They have to go on pretending the rule of law is somehow served by prosecuting Trump for a victimless years-old record-keeping crime. That is why Merchan will probably choose something lighter than a jail sentence. That is why you see news stories pretending that there is some kind of precedence for sentencing Trump. They have to keep up appearances. They have to pretend this isn’t all political lawfare designed to keep Trump from winning the election.
But if they were honest, if Democrats believed their own rhetoric about who Trump is and the danger he poses to democracy, they would lock him up and throw away the key.