The Hope of a Nation: Defenders of the Constitution

Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, has spelled out the entire case against the racketeering enterprise that was Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. It is difficult to wrap your mind around what has happened. It is an inconceivable situation and yet in her 98-page indictment against Trump and his henchmen and women, she gives us all of it. From the Oval Office down to breaching voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia.
District Attorney Willis has been called “fearless” and “tough as nails.” She would have to be both to indict a former president, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and the other 16 defendants, labeling his presidential campaign a criminal organization. She has said repeatedly she will follow the facts and the law. And if you commit a crime in her jurisdiction, you will be prosecuted, whomever you are. And she means it.
The sheer brazenness of the attempt is breathtaking. And how close they came to carrying out the scheme is terrifying. As pointed out by an MSNBC commentator, the attempt to corrupt the Coffee County voting machines, was a key element that would allow the conspirators to use it as an excuse to claim the entire election was suspect and the legislatures had to decide the vote.

They thought an actual coup was possible and what is even more amazing is that millions of people still believe the mob boss and wannabe ruler-in-chief, is a paradigm of what an American leader should be, and they want to put him back in office.
Trump will be the Republican nominee and the worst is still possible. My son David, who was a long-haul truck driver taking him to virtually all of the contiguous states across the country, said the Fox News propaganda machine is the primary information source across most of the highways he’s traveled. We have to remember our information bubbles are not universal, and we are not out of these dark and dangerous woods yet.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing Trump’s trial in Washington, is confronting a defendant who is determined to test her patience by giving her only bad choices. In Trump, she has a psychotic defendant facing an existential threat, with no interest or ability to abide by constrictions on his words or deeds. She either lets him behave as no other defendant in history has ever done, with his ranting against her, the prosecutor, and witnesses, or having the presumptive Republican nominee for president arrested and confined to a jail environment with secret service protection.
His millions of supporters will rant and rave that their White supremacist leader, who they hoped will stem the nation’s demographic evolution despite their gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts, is being treated as the common criminal he is. For them, democracy is the problem and only an authoritarian can save them.

The drawback to living in New York, is that our votes will not decide the presidential race because the Founding Father did not want the popular vote to decide elections, and hedged their bets on the People by making the electoral college tallies the votes that matter. So, it wonderful that Joe Biden won the popular vote big, but troubling that he won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, the so-called swing states, by a total of less than 45,000 votes.
We can hope that fair trials in Washington and Georgia, will be enough to swing voters to the Democratic side of the election and preserve the democracy we were beginning to enjoy.