Why it's time to call out Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes

I don’t really want to call out Charlie Sykes, but I have to. The reason has to do with more than his recent just-wow column. It has to do with the role The Bulwark founder plays in the liberal imagination. Basically, he’s the conservative who tells liberals that they’re right. That’s bad, because some liberals want to be right more than they want to fight.

Over the weekend, MSNBC email-blasted his latest piece – “Judge Merchan made sure the rule of law won.” Merchan is the judge who presided over New York state’s hush-money case against Donald Trump. He was convicted in May on 34 counts of business fraud and other felonies. He was sentenced Friday, but received no jail time.

“That means that 10 days before his inauguration, the incoming president was officially sentenced as a convicted felon,” Charlies Sykes wrote Friday. “As he had signaled he would do, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to ‘unconditional release,’ letting Trump avoid jail time so that he can assume the office of the presidency. But the conviction is now an indelible part of Trump’s record” (my bold).

This is, well, I’m not sure what to call this. Even with this conviction, nothing and no one has held Trump accountable for pretty much anything. The media failed. The law failed. The courts failed. The Congress failed. The American people failed. Trump has done whatever he wanted and gotten away with it. He even pitted democracy against democracy, and a majority of voters in 2024 gave that their blessing.

The man’s above the law.

His sentencing proved it. Hell, the election proved it.

“The conviction is now an indelible part of Trump’s record,” Sykes said.

Un hun, but it gets worse.

Sykes said that “in some respects Trump still remains above the law,” because he dodged punishment, but nevertheless asserts that the president-elect has “finally been held accountable for his crimes.”

Again, I’m not sure what to call this? If you are found to be guilty of committing nearly three dozen crimes but are not punished for having committed nearly three dozen crimes, have you really been held accountable? Anyone with any kind of moral core would say no.

It gets, well, worser.

Sykes wrote that “Trump himself knows” that “the stigma” of being held accountable “will linger and the sentence is an extraordinary inflection point in presidential history: Amid all the posturing and pomp in the lead-up to the inauguration; amid all the saber-rattling and sycophancy of the past few weeks; and despite the failure of so many of our constitutional guardrails — one fact is unavoidable. As of today, Donald Trump is a convicted criminal in the eyes of the law.”

I don’t know about you, but to me, if crime and punishment have been reduced to the level of stigma and unavoidable fact, there’s no way in hell anyone can claim that the rule of law defeated Donald Trump.

But being wrong isn’t the problem.

America needs liberals to fight like they have never fought before. Democracy was used against democracy. The majority of voters put a criminal in charge. The J6 insurrection has now been codified and institutionalized. The old constitutional order is breaking down. Trump and a murder of billionaires are set to loot the public till.

This is not to mention the fact that Wall Street is now demanding that corporate executives get in the business of bribing the president-elect for the purpose of getting ahead of competition around the world. What we are seeing, according to Scott Galloway, is “absolutely no different from how Putin became the wealthiest man in the world.”

I don’t want to aggrandize Sykes, but he does inhabit a space in our discourse that’s bad for liberals, even as he makes them feel good, which is to say, he’s the conservative apostate and former Republican who makes a fine living telling liberals that they were right all along – and the last thing liberals need to hear right now is they’re right.

Why?

Because liberals have a bad habit of confusing fighting with being right. For non-liberals, fighting is fighting, whether right or wrong. It’s not that simple for liberals. They have to be right if they are to fight. Indeed, being right is so important they might not fight at all, because for a lot of liberals, being right is the virtually same thing as winning.

If liberals want to stop America from being Russia, they got to fight.

This is why I don’t really want to call out Sykes, but have to. I don’t really want to, because he’s just some guy, who cares. I have to, because he tells liberals what they want to hear to avoid conflict.

He tells them no matter how many laws Trump breaks, no matter how many billions he steals, no matter how much violence he unleashes, and no matter how much ruination he brings to the republic, he’ll never shake the stigma and unavoidable fact of his conviction – as if being called a felon ever stopped a felon from committing even more felonies after a corrupt system set him free to commit all he wants.

The only thing that can stop him is fighting.

Being right isn’t enough.