General Discussion

We could call this suggested indictment "The Conspiracy to Bring Down American Democracy," since that's precisely what it is. Even with Trump and a lot of other folks facing multiple indictments, the plan is ongoing. The coup attempt is still underway, although its headquarters have been moved from the White House and the Willard a thousand miles south to Mar-a-Lago. The former president is still this country's criminal in chief, and he desperately wants to weasel his way back into power.

And there are plenty of people out there ready to help, or actively conspiring to assist him in this larger criminal enterprise. Consider those behind the darkly funded No Labels effort, which makes a false equivalence between a well-intentioned political party trying to govern in good faith and a cult of personality trying to end democracy as we know it.

Sowing mistrust and hatred is the only real platform of the MAGA party in its determination to wield minority power into the indefinite future. It's mind-boggling that so many of Trump's co-conspirators in the ongoing plot against democracy are still walking around bloviating about Democratic conspiracies and the "deep state" and generally behaving like troubled middle schoolers, often in the very halls of the U.S. Capitol their followers attacked.

Is there a way to charge Trump, the entire Republican Party, Fox News, et al., with a criminal conspiracy aimed at "Soliciting Followers to Become Crap Citizens" or some such thing? Can we get that in front of a grand jury ASAP?

Trump recently made a characteristically puerile reference to hell that struck me as classic psychological projection — claiming, oddly, that Nancy Pelosi both came from hell and will be going back there — so I think it's fair game to end in the hot place. I'm not a particularly religious person, so when the concept of hell comes up my mind always goes to Dante's "Inferno," the best known section of his "Divine Comedy." As the poet outlines the circles of hell, I would imagine that both Fred Trump and Roy Cohn are doing time in one or another of the lowest levels. As for Donald John Trump himself, the multiply-indicted and twice-impeached former president of the United States and reality-TV host, it's not easy to say where he might land in Dante's scheme. Perhaps he would tarry briefly with the corrupt politicians and sowers of discord and falsifiers in Circle Eight (Fraud) before landing forever in the icy lake of Circle Nine (Treachery), where betrayers and traitors spend eternity.