Plenty of Blame to Go Around

This piece ran as a newspaper op/ed at the end of January, 2025.

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Plenty of Blame to Go Around

We’ve just witnessed something that would have been impossible in America in earlier times: In the intense battle we’ve seen in recent years between Donald Trump and the Rule of Law, Trump has emerged victorious in an extraordinary way.

Not only has Trump not been held accountable for his most serious crimes, but he’s become the President, the man supposedly responsible to see that the laws be “faithfully executed.”

Looking forward, future historians will probably see that this extraordinary development had a huge impact on the future course of America. But – looking back – we discover something hugely important also if we ask “How did this happen?”

For Trump’s victory over the Rule of Law exposes a systemic deterioration of the many “organs” of the American body politic. (On both sides of the political divide.)

We can start with what is revealed by Trump’s acquittal in two impeachment trials, despite Trump’s guilt (and the necessity of removing him from office) could hardly have been clearer. What enabled Trump to escape the tools the Constitution gives us for dealing with a lawless President was the vote by the Republicans in the Senate to acquit Trump– in violation of the oath they swore in becoming jurors in those trials.

This exposed how this once-respectable party had largely devolved into an organization of opportunists ready to sacrifice moral integrity to maintain their place of power and status in the system,

That devolution made it possible for the most impeachable President — by far — this nation had ever had to go on to become the first loser of a Presidential election to refuse to concede his defeat, to openly launch an Insurrection to seize power against the will of the people, and to continue dominate a major American Party that had devolved into moral bankruptcy.

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Meanwhile, it was the failures of Liberal America and the Democratic Party that made possible this profound deterioration of America’s conservative party. Over the course of the decades, as the GOP was being taken over by what might be described as a sociopathic force, Liberal America failed to perceive what was happening. And its political arm – the Democratic Party – continually shrank from the battle that needed to be fought to protect America’s basic democratic values.

The Liberal failure to understand, and failure to fight, was epitomized by how Attorney General Merrick Garland facilitated Trump’s victory over the Rule of Law.

Trump recognized he had virtually no chance to succeed at trial for his crimes – neither those regarding his attempt to overturn the election he’d lost, nor those involving his theft of highly sensitive documents. (That’s because in a trial, facts matter, and Trump’s continual lies would not help him.

Trump one legal strategy, therefore, was delay—hoping he could run out the clock and never face the force of the Rule of Law in a trial.

AG Garland, out of the weakness into which the Liberal world had deteriorated over decades, shrank from the confrontation with Trump—a confrontation that Garland’s oath required him to seek in the face of the most serious crimes in American history. Rather, out of fear of being accused of acting politically, Garland acted politically: while going after the foot-soldiers in the Insurrection, Garland did nothing for two years about Trump, who’d summoned and incited the insurrectionist mob (until his hand was forced by congressional hearings).

Had it not been for that indefensible two-year delay, the trials would have happened– and the Rule of Law would have yet defeated Trump. But Garland’s weakness – shrinking as the Liberals so often did from the battle — enabled Trump to run out the shortened clock.

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But Garland’s delay would likely not have saved Trump had not the blatantly corrupt Supreme Court not chosen to serve the criminal rather than the Rule of Law.

Even before it handed down its historically terrible, “presidential immunity” decision – dealing a blow to the basic constitutional principle that “No one is above the law” — the Court indefensibly gave Trump an additional six months of delay. They assured there would be no trials before the election, despite the obviously huge public interest in knowing what a trial would reveal before people would be called upon to vote for President.

The Court’s conduct revealed that the institution charged with assuring the Rule of Law had devolved into a purely partisan force.

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But it’s not only at the top of the power structure that America’s “immune” system failed to defeat the invading “virus” of lawlessness that Trump represents.

The Liberal side of the American people – as I’ve written about at length elsewhere – shared Garland’s inability to understand the nature of the battle that needed to be fought, and shared also Garland’s mistaken belief that refusing to fight was the way to achieve peace.

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Meanwhile, it is the people of Conservative America that have boosted Trump’s power at every stage. And it is they who – by electing Trump President — have now empowered this lawless man to kill all the remaining cases against him. (Cases that would almost surely would have held Trump accountable had he lost).

This embrace of a man who committed crimes, and then waged war on the American system of Justice, represents a stunning devolution of the base of the Party of Law and Order (and of patriotic values).

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All of which raises the question: what accounts for this deterioration of so many parts of America over recent decades?