Journalist and former editor of the Stars and Stripes for three decades, D. Earl Stephens, has recently opined in a guest essay for Raw Story that “The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.”

Stephens has accused mass media news institutions of committing journalistic malpractice for not “monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote while doing nothing for three hours except to root for the attack’s success.”

To this criminologist, as the custodian of the democratic republic, the Fourth Estate seems derelict in its duty for not correctly framing the genuine issues that confront or threaten American freedom and constitutional democracy.

Should Trump win the fall presidential election, perhaps the most dangerous of these maneuvers will have to do with the forthcoming transformation of the U.S. Department of Justice from an independent and self-directing law enforcement system to one that would become part of a proxy “police state.” A law enforcement system whose absolute discretion of power would become exclusively dependent on a de facto dictator with presidential immunity from any crimes, harms, injuries, or violence that he may inflict or unleash on the people of the United States.

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Chapter Seventeen of Project 2025 outlines other changes that would accompany the former relations between the office of the presidency and the Department of Justice.

A non-exhaustive listening of these changes includes:

• placing FBI agents on loyalist leashes
• curtailing its online investigations of misinformation
• ending investigations of police misconduct and canceling existing consent decrees with police departments
• stripping local and state attorneys of their discretionary power to prosecute
• changing the federal government’s roles from upholding voting rights to suppressing them
• downplaying right-wing domestic terrorist groups and organizations like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
• focusing instead on those groups and organizations advocating for voting, civil, equity, climate, and worker rights

In tandem with these changes in the federal and state relations of the administration of justice, Trump plans on using the military to enforce domestic law violations involving, for example, criminal gangs, protesting demonstrators and securing the borders by using detention camps — all characteristic of illiberal democracies such as today’s Hungary or authoritarian regimes like contemporary China or North Korea going back to the 1950s.

Trump also plans to “target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists.”

Let’s not forget that at least a “dozen times Trump pushed to prosecute his perceived enemies,” including Hillary Clinton, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and Joe Biden.

Presently, Trump continues to bang “the drums of hate” and to follow “the roadmap created for him by” the MAGA 2025 Manifesto. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief is also “backstopped by a radical, bought-off Supreme Court, and bolstered by known election deniers.” Relying on the twisted Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, Trump is now saying that “he had ‘every right’ to interfere in the 2020 election.” During a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired on Tuesday of this week, he also admitted that he did lose the election “by a whisker.”

At this point, Trump is undoubtedly winning this legal battle. It has even been more effective than the tactics of delay, delay, and delay. Then again, with the sentencing for his criminal conviction of 34 felonies in the election interference case being postponed from September 18 to after the election on November 26, the former president has been quite successful at “beating the law” concerning all four of his criminal indictments.

As David Rhode in Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy has written, during Trump’s presidency, he “intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants.”

If this were not enough, the would-be dictator is promising “retribution to anybody who dares get in his way” and, if elected again, clemency for his all-American patriotic “hostages” who have been “unfairly” convicted of crimes for their First Amendment activities at the Capitol on January 6.

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Lest anyone forget, as I have elaborated in great detail in Criminology on Trump, while in office, the president’s practices of granting pardons and awarding clemencies were quite different from those of other presidents, going back as far as the 25th, William McKinley.

For example, Trump did not use the usual vetting process and sold pardons at $50,000 each — often for much more. We learned earlier this week that two of those individuals Trump released from prison were known to be wife abusers, including one who was also a drug dealer as well as a cop killer.

Accordingly, on September 5, at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, a fundraiser for the January 6 riot defendants was held. Tickets at the “J6 Awards Gala” ranged from $1500 per person to $50,000 for a table of twelve.

At a bare minimum, retired journalist Stephens wants to know, “Why haven’t Democracy Desks been set up in these broken newsrooms staffed with journalists who do nothing but monitor the Republicans’ movements as they ruthlessly defend an attack on America and go about annihilating truth, justice, and our right to even vote?”

Instead of Democracy Desks, the mass media is busy spinning their wheels trying to decide what facts to check and what lies to share. Meanwhile, during Trump’s incoherent speeches, they ignore his “word salad” discourse and the abnormal things that Trump says, like his responding to a reporter’s question about inflation when he pointed out that people are not eating bacon because of the use of wind power. In other words, what about the lack of coverage of Trump’s “alarming cognitive decline?”

These media companies are also wasting time repeatedly contrasting two narratives on the aftermath of the 2020 election as well as the January 6 attack on the Capitol as though there are competing interpretations of what transpired back then rather than reporting only on the one factual version.

Where the mainstream media has been at its worst and has failed the American people the most is for the economy. Mainly because the comparative data has consistently shown that the Democratic Party outperforms the Republican Party in general and between Bidenomics and Trumpian economics in particular. Yet most people in the U.S., regardless of political party, falsely believe otherwise. As an educator, I sincerely blame this societal-wide ignorance on the mainstream media.

Each of these commissions or omissions favors Trump and is the antithesis of “objective” or “balanced” journalism. They are nonetheless rationalized away under the banner of objective and balanced journalism. These journalistic inadequacies are also excused because, after nearly a decade, the mainstream media still can’t figure out how to cover Trump. Here’s a clue: why not simply tell the truth?

Similarly, Stephens and many other media critics would like to know how these mainstream news platforms can continue to normalize the illegal and bizarre behavior of Trump and his morally bankrupt political party. After all, at this very moment in time, his MAGA minions are doing everything they can think of to destroy American Democracy as we know it.

Stephens accurately points out that Trump is the “literal definition of a terrorist and/or an authoritarian strongman — a thug. He bows to murderous fascists like Putin and openly revels in their success.” Yet, the mass media currently seems indifferent or oblivious to these facts, not as if they previously paid enough attention to them.

While it has occurred to many in the news media that Trump is a wannabe authoritarian strongman, few think of him as a gangster or as a thug, let alone as a domestic terrorist, even though he is armed with plenty of MAGA backup. Nor has the mass media discussed the various types of violence that are likely to occur should Trump win or lose in November.

Between now and then, as Trump most likely continues to slip in the polls to Kamala Harris, he will undoubtedly become more desperate. In response, he will spend even less time discussing the campaign issues except when he is forced to respond to journalistic queries. For example, “Will he or won’t he” vote for the six-week abortion ban in Florida? Meanwhile, these same journalists seldom point out that, in the first place, this terrible choice about abortion bans was only made possible because of Trump’s three appointed justices to the Supreme Court.

Trump has already been spending most of his time and energy doubling down on demonizing immigrants as well as his political and legal adversaries, which – except for his sycophantic supporters – may not be enough to run on and win the election. Besides, these absurd statements are becoming so stale and boring.

In the wake of “his attacks on immigrants becoming increasingly delusional” and as his fake data and claims about hordes of rapists and murders invading the Southern border are amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media, such dangerous rhetoric is only increasing the number of discriminatory and hate crimes committed against those who may or may not be Latin American immigrants.

This stirring of violence serves as a distraction for the likely far-right MAGA violence that looms shortly. Mass, as well as social, media, law enforcement, Homeland Security and the Democratic Party should all be mindful of and foreshadowing the dangers of this potential violence. Rather than continuing to ignore the signs online and off or sticking their proverbial heads in the sand because they would prefer not to go to such dark and ominous places. Then again, this may very well be the fricken case because they are experiencing cognitive resistance to and/or the unconscious denial of these sordid types of activities.

More concretely, the absence or lack of focus on the likely violence is related to the fact that “mainstream American political journalists have always been shockingly indifferent to right-wing violence emerging in our midst,” says David Neiwert, “America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism.”

From the Ruby Ridge standoff to the Waco siege and massacre of 76 Branch Davidians to the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in the 1990s to the Unite the Right weekend rally in August 2017 by white supremacists protesting the taking down of a Robert E. Lee monument who during their marches chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi-associated phrases at counter-protesters in Charlottesville, South Carolina, to the MAGA rioters assaulting the Capitol in January 2021.

For different but related reasons, both law enforcement and FBI personnel have also downplayed right-wing violence when compared to their concern with both real and imagined left-wing violence attributed to groups or organizations such as the ACLU, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Antifa, the Animal Liberation Front, or Black Lives Matter.

In both 2020 and 2024, journalists and law enforcement have not been paying enough attention to online right-wing chatter, such as the rhetoric on Telegram about how the outcome of this election will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.” Or to on the ground real Republican assaults on the First Amendment, including the banning of books and ethnic school curricula, affirmative action, equity, and diversity.

Otherwise, the forces of law and order should not be once again underprepared and unable to respond quickly in anticipation of the different types of violence that ensued after Trump’s 2020 electoral loss to Joe Biden, leading up to and culminating with the failed coup d’état on the day of election certification, Jan. 6, 2021.

Looking forward, two scenarios of MAGA violence will likely occur after the 2024 presidential election: one if Trump wins and one if Trump loses. In the latter outcome, there will also be possibilities for fixing what ails our constitutional democracy.

Scenarios of Violence After Trump Wins

If Trump wins in November, we can anticipate two types of violence-related activities occurring not long after the de facto installation of a dictator as the 47th President of the United States in January 2025.

The first has to do with the peaceful protests that are likely to occur, not unlike the 2017 women’s marches across the country in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and to Trump’s election campaign and history of sexism toward women. The other has to do with the immigration front and the accelerated arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Whether Trump invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807 in both scenarios, he will deploy the military nationwide to address these domestic conflicts.

In either case, armed with AR-15s will be the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other militias like the Minutemen, who will be augmenting the Trumpian government as “citizen cops.” They will be busy rounding up and turning over protestors or immigrants to agencies of law enforcement or the Border Patrol for processing.

Concerning immigrants, recall that this was precisely what was done for several years in Arizona during Trump’s first administration. Now, these noncommissioned “bounty hunters” will, in all likelihood, spread out nationwide, in hopes — who knows? — that Trump might award them the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Scenarios of Violence After Trump Loses

Here, we will see a repeat of what occurred after Trump lost in 2020. States will again be besieged and contested as they were in several swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. These same MAGA-type fraudsters, joined by their election-denying associates, will show up at ballot-counting centers as well as state capitols to create enough chaos and disorder to prevent the votes from being certified in a timely fashion and then, where possible, shift election certification over to Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The goal is ultimately to force the election outcome to be determined by the current Republican-MAGA-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and/or by the MAGA-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

And should Harris still prevail despite this Republican election interference, then extremist expert Neiwert thinks that “we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities” as well as high-profile liberal figures. Neiwert also believes that these MAGA warriors will be leaning “heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda” and against anyone supporting the “demonic liberal agenda.”

At the same time, should the Democrats also retain control of the U.S. Senate and take back the U.S. House – a long shot – then possibilities would exist for accomplishing an array of necessary legislative, judicial, and constitutional reforms.

For example, Democrats would be in a position to abolish the Senate's antidemocratic filibuster rules or pass the No Kings Act to counteract the “unconstitutional” Trump v. U.S. decision by the MAGA Supreme Court that erroneously granted presidents criminal immunity.

With the Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, they would be able to try to pull off a very difficult trifecta. I am referring to the long-overdue abolition of the undemocratic Electoral College that unfortunately still requires the daunting task of amending the U.S. Constitution.

Unless a new or a second U.S. Constitution is written to replace the original one as called for by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law.

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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the politics of emotion has surpassed, if not eclipsed, the politics of self-interest and old-fashioned Republican conservatism.

Like it or not, as Sara Ahmed reveals in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, emotions often shape the contours of individual and collective bodies: They “feel” rather than “think” their way through the caverns of identity politics and social movements.

For example, these politics of emotion and the legacies of our “cultural wars” are engendered not only by the partisan memories of Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election that culminated in the January 6 failed coup d’etat but also from the fraudulent lawlessness surrounding the stolen classified documents as he was leaving the Oval Office.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has maintained that the challenges the United States faces are not logistical. They are metaphysical, and “the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with policies to address this crisis.”

Murphy was referring to what he called the “fall of American neoliberalism.” Or the broken consensus surrounding the U.S. version of liberalism – defined by an emphasis on free markets, globalization, and consumer choice – that has begun to feel to many as a dead end. In other words, no matter what the metrics told us about how well Bidenomics was performing, most Americans weren’t buying it and still have a dismal view of the economy.

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Sensibilities on both sides of the political aisle are also bounded by the omnipotent racial, gendered, elitist, populist, and xenophobic relations of cultural reproduction.

In different but emotionally related ways, the 2020 and 2024 races for the White House have together been about “how the myth of Reagan became the cult of Trump,” enabling a narcissistic sociopath to defy the rule of law and constitutional democracy while aspiring to become the nation’s first authoritarian dictator.

And yet emotionally, this no-holds-barred 2024 contest between Trumpian chaos and Project 2025 versus the Democratic Party is not just about the Harris-Walz campaign to save American democracy from the threat of autocracy and oppression. It is also about returning the two-party political system to some kind of bipartisan normalcy before the democratic republic can get around to hopefully reforming itself from a representative democratic minority into some kind of multiparty democratic majority.

Even if there were not a host of political, economic and ideological courses of action to be wrangling over as part of the upcoming November elections, policy issues with the exceptions of those connected to civil, reproductive, voting, climate and migratory rights have taken a backseat to the negative feelings or emotions of pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame and grievance.

Additionally, there is a huge mistrust in government that Trump, for the past eight years, has been disconcertingly cultivating throughout society. On the other hand, the corrupt MAGA Supreme Court and several of its controversial decisions have also rendered confidence in the Supreme Court to an historic low.

Until one month ago, when President Joe Biden abandoned his flagging reelection bid, the suppressed, positive emotions of joy, hope, love and reconciliation that were previously enjoyed by the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 had laid dormant. The absence of those positive feelings has now returned to the Democratic Party with much gusto, relief and reinvigorated energy.

The bipartisan majority of the American people who support constitutional democracy and law and order — who are also against the Trumpian chaos, danger and lawlessness — have needed somebody in whom they could put their faith. They needed somebody who could take down the former president, with his torrent of ogres pretending to be God-fearing victims of a “deep state” conspiracy. These fascist wannabes are also on some kind of phony mission to allegedly save America from the so-called radical socialists and Marxist communists of the Democratic left. (In reality, hardly any Democrats identify as radical socialists or Marxist communists.)

This is why we have been witnessing independents, undecideds, white dudes, evangelicals, young people, old people, Never Trumpers and many other “racial and gender identity groups, venture capitalists, and even Deadheads” getting on board the Harris-Walz train toward victory — heartened by the retiring of the Biden-Harris train, which had been headed toward all-but-certain defeat.

This is not necessarily because non-Democrat voters have suddenly joined the Democratic Party. Rather, these folks understand how terrible Trump has been and how worse he would become if America gives him another opportunity to lead our nation.

So as the saying goes, they are “putting country over party” this election.

Presenting herself as a pragmatic leader who could unite the American people during her acceptance speech as the Democratic candidate for the 47th presidency of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris stated: “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

At this particular moment, the contrasting negative and positive emotional tropes of Republican “doom and gloom” versus Democratic “hope and joy” are comprised of two clashing populist movements.

The former movement has been metastasizing like a cancer since late 2015. It arrived with the rise of Trumpian disparagements, anguished grumblings and grievances galore that call for cruelty and other means of divisiveness. This MAGA movement has successfully killed the GOP traditions of both Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Republican presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush are certainly turning in their graves over Trump’s GOP takeover.

The latter movement of “reconciliation” has been captured and unleashed by Harris and Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, with a vision that has at least temporarily mended intra-party Democratic divisions and seeks to overcome their urban-rural antipathy. This episodically reoccurring organizing on behalf of the good of the commonwealth consists of generational warmth, love and recovery with the potential for realignment, restoration or rapprochement.

Accordingly, on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we heard from former Democratic President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent. But we also heard from Republicans such as Mayor John Giles from Mesa, Arizona, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Republican political strategist Ana Navarro.

Other Republican officials spoke as well on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The thrust of their comments all revolved around their negative experiences working with Trump and about how terrible he had been during his term as president.

Neither of these populist movements – one vile and the other sublime — can be detached from their antithetical narratives or from the paradoxical currents of the past and present social injustices within the United States. When taken together, these human indignities and lost or unrealized freedoms are at the heart and soul of this nation’s unfulfilled promises.

Because President Joe Biden decided that he would not be running for re-election and would be endorsing Vice President Harris as his replacement to take down his former rival as well as the “grand old party,” this political contest now feels completely different from what it felt like only five weeks ago. Going as far back as the political dust settling after the 2022 midterm elections, and less than two weeks later when Trump announced his third candidacy for the presidency as a means of trying to prevent, or at least delay, his four criminal indictments from materializing.

The recent changes in feelings away from Democratic party angst and resignation to Democratic party optimism and eagerness were only intensified after Minnesota Governor Walz became Harris’ running mate. During the week of the DNC, those positive feelings and expectations were further heightened and solidified because of a collective sense of empowerment.

This emotional high was a function of Democrats “leaning in” to who they really are and what they value or stand for. Not since the days of President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and the rise of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s has this been a part of political reality. So what was wonderful for this old political junkie was watching and listening to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as former first lady Michelle Obama being their real selves rather than their suppressed selves from the past when they mostly played defense and treaded lightly.

In other words, this unexpected campaign season dropped on the Democratic Party at the last possible moment has been liberating and exhilarating not only for the Democratic Party, but most importantly, for the Harris-Walz ticket allowing them to be themselves. As the Minnesota governor and former defensive high school line coach stated during his acceptance speech for the vice presidency: “So let me finish with this team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team.”

Overnight, the popping and TikTok-savvy dynamic duo changed the public spirit and common geist. Not only because they read the mood of most Americans but also evangelizing a vision of present-day hope and change that’s now being sung across television and TikTok and Taylor Swift fan chats in ways impossible just six weeks ago. They also possessed the skill sets to out-meme and out-troll Teflon Don as no other aspiring presidential candidates – Democratic or Republican -- had ever been able to.

For example, how cool it was when Harris-Walz, on day two of the Democratic National Convention, simultaneously rallied live at the filled-up Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee — where the Republican National Convention nominated Trump the month before — and beamed it live to a capacity Democratic convention crowd at Chicago’s United Center. The split screen of the two events was equally striking as viewed by most Americans.

The Harris-Walz team also can take the attention away from Trump — except for when the former president is making a buffoon of himself, which, lately, is just about every day.

On the same day Harris and Walz did their dueling rallies bit, Trump was addressing a crowd of law enforcers and invited supporters in Howell, Michigan, former home to the 1970s-era Ku Klux Klan.

A meeting hosted by Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy was closed to the public and allegedly in violation of campaign electioneering law. But word quickly spread that Trump promised that he would stop the “Kamala crime wave” if voters returned him to the White House — and if he didn’t become president, Trump warned that “World War III” would be coming.

Trump’s tangible campaign strategies are limited by his old and tired refrains of scaremongering and belligerence. He simply cannot shake his addiction to denigrating his nemeses, real or imagined. Nor can he escape from his pathological deceitfulness and cultural warfare par redux ad nauseum.

In fact, Trump’s obnoxious verbal attacks and perpetual lying have become so stale and pathetically predictable that they are losing the power that they once held. Now they provide his adversaries, the mass media, and everyone else – exceptions being MAGA sycophants, FOX News and other far-right media platforms – with unending grist for mocking and trying to shame the grand old delinquent and his gang of minions as being weird and despicable.

Of course, Trump’s handlers and other allies have all been wishing that the insurrectionist-in- chief would return to or stay on message. Unfortunately for the Trumpists, he has been staying on the MAGA message of mean-spirited missives, race-baiting and conspiracy theories.

As for the rest of America? Fortunately for us, the ex-president’s need to address the concrete issues and policies of the election will never happen.

There are two reasons for this.

First, the Trumpian Republican Party has no policies of merit to speak of on any of the major issues of our time — health care, the environment, the cost of living, infrastructure.

Second, even if the Republicans did have any substantive policies for addressing these issues, we all know that Trump would not be capable of speaking about any of these off the cuff — even superficially, let alone in detail — because he is simply speaking ignorant about them.

Trump today is trapped, frothing at the mouth about his favorite “oldies and baddies,” whether they are relevant or not, truthful or fictional.

For example, without mentioning the serious issues of gun violence or mass shootings with automatic weapons in the United States, the former president falsely rants about nonexistent violent or urban crime epidemics and homicidal killings while the rates for both of these are at 50-year lows. And when it was Trump himself who was shot in the ear and nearly assassinated during a July campaign rally by a 20-year-old man wielding a mass shooter’s weapon of choice, the AR-15, Trump doubled down on his support for unfettered gun ownership. No matter that one of Trump’s own supporters was murdered in the melee.

Trump also rattles on about “high” inflation and a “free-falling” economy when the former is the lowest in the post-industrial high-tech world, and the latter is the healthiest it has been since at least before the Wall Street implosion in 2007.

As the Big Mac-loving Donald and his captured GOP leadership know all too well, they have no life-affirming, freedom-expanding agenda to pivot to. They have nothing of value to sell to the American people. There’s no beef for their “nothing” burgers let alone any seeds for their “impossible” versions — both of which they are serving up to American consumers with plenty of Trumpian packets of “secret sauce” word salads.

Absent from their daily toxic menus of trickle-down “leftovers” is any mention of huge deficits, costly tariffs and tax breaks for the uber-wealthy, or the plethora of deregulations for corporate monopolies — all subsidized by average American taxpayers and at the expense of a sustainable environment for all.

As enumerated in Republicans’ dueling policy platforms – one from the “official” 2024 GOP Platform consisting of 20 promises and the other from the “unofficial” Project 2025, otherwise known as Trump’s 2025 Presidential Transitional Project – the MAGA agenda for America is dangerous and negative, the stuff of repression, authoritarianism and anti-democratic constitutionalism.

These kinds of deceitful tactics have always been the former president’s go-to modus operandi, from the alternative realities of Republican disinformation to the election denying of Biden’s victory in 2020 to the early preparation by the GOP as in Georgia and elsewhere not to certify the 2024 election should Harris defeat Trump.

In the current Republican Party’s alternative world order, there is Trump’s continuing fictional portrayal of election interference by his adversaries rather than by his own 2020 non-fictional fake electors and their coast-to-coast efforts of election interference for which these individuals are being criminally prosecuted.

There is also Trump’s uber-fake issue of threatening hordes of migratory criminals invading our nation and savaging the American people. These are little more than fabrications, as border crossings are lower today than when Trump left office. Besides, migrant rates of crime, while not zero, are nevertheless much lower than non-migrant rates of crime, as numerous studies have revealed over the past decade.

In stark contrast, the defining Democratic issues of the Harris-Walz political campaign is standing up for the rule of law and for American democracy.

Former federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney for San Francisco Dennis Aftergut has, for example, reduced the political race in 2024 to a matter of the “defenders of the rule law working against Trumpist attempts to erode it.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic agenda of Harris-Walz – focusing on lowering the price of groceries and prescription drugs, the costs of housing, child tax credits, paid leave, and expanding health care — are constructive and meaningful add-ons when juxtaposed with the harmful agendas of the Republicans.

Moreover, implementing most of this Democratic agenda would help the United States catch up with most of the rest of the world’s developed democratic nations, which have been providing these services to all of their citizens for decades.

In other words, there’s nothing “radical” about what Harris is proposing. This is not “communism,” as Trump incessantly brays. And, there’s nothing here that the majority of Americans don’t support, such as the rights of girls and women to reproductive health care.

During her nearly 40-minute acceptance speech at the United Center in Chicago, Harris not only hit it out of the arena on domestic policies but she also nailed it on foreign affairs.

From the importance of NATO for world security to her positions on the Russian-Ukraine War to Israel and Gaza: “I will not cozy up to tyrants and terrorists, like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump.”

Throughout her acceptance speech, candidate Harris did a masterful job of prosecuting the case against Trump and why he should never again be anywhere near the White House. She also made it crystal clear why the future of American democracy is on the line and why this is one of the most critical elections in the life of our nation.

As for those skeptics questioning whether the Democrats are experiencing a “sugar high” or if Harris has the “chops” going forward, let me remind everyone that it only took Kamala 48 hours to “seal the deal” on her nomination after Biden announced that he would not be running again.

And by the end of August, or after six weeks since securing the nomination, she will have likely raised more than $600 million across her presidential campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and other closely aligned political committees.

As far as Harris sitting down with the press to do interviews and her upcoming debate with Trump on Sept. 10, both will be putty in her politically enlightened hands.

By the end of this abbreviated political campaign season, “Kamala Harris, for the People” and her platform of economic populism and social justice for all, as contrasted with the former president’s kleptocratic alternative for the few both at home and abroad, should provide more than enough currency to carry the day on Nov. 5.

Emotionally speaking, there is another more profound and more troubling reason that Trump must be defeated by Harris this fall.

It concerns a question asked by Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, when she was 78 years old.

“What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother asked her soon-to-be ex-daughter-in-law Ivana Trump.

We now know the answer all too well. Trump is the kind of son who would become the president of the United States and go down in U.S. history as bringing out not only the worst in the greatest number of Americans but also an even more significant number of U.S. citizens and others suffering from severe bouts of post-traumatic Trump syndrome.

As Harris herself has declared in unison with so many others, the correct decision for America is clear: “We’re not going back.”

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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Over the course of the past year, the relationships between law, politics and justice in our contemporary democratic republic have been torn open. We’ve all witnessed firsthand how each of the criminal indictments of former President Donald Trump have struggled to be adjudicated in their respective jurisdictions.

In effect, these criminal cases have all demonstrated just how arbitrary and capricious the rule of law can be when subject to the decisions of unprincipled and unscrupulous jurists of the highest courts in the land. Or, more pointedly: When legal conflicts are resolved by corrupt political hacks trying to pass themselves off as neutral umpires calling balls and strikes as they interpret constitutional law, we’re in for some serious civic trouble.

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More than a year removed from the last of Trump’s four criminal indictments, only one of these has gone to trial.

One might argue that in the interim, Trump’s criminal justice and substantive crimes have been hijacked from the American people by the Supreme Court, which this year granted Trump significant presidential immunity rights. You be the judge of whether the high court’s ruling came down for the primary purpose of making Trump’s alleged criminal wrongdoing disappear.

In fact, it is now quite likely that Trump’s three pending criminal cases and straightforward violations of the criminal law will never go to trial.

Say even one or more of these remaining cases eventually finds their way to trial. And say that Trump is found guilty of felonies.

That may very well not be the final resolution of these matters as we have learned from Trump’s Manhattan hush money case. This is because an anti-democratic alliance of Boss Trump, the GOP and the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court has worked to ensure that justice for Trump is delayed indefinitely, no matter the evidence against him and no matter what a jury of his peers determines.

Anyone who believes no president is above the law should recoil: The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of presidential immunity — and against the Constitution in order to protect the insurrectionary and treasonous behavior of Trump — is to date the most radical expression of weaponizing the law this nation has seen in decades. Or beyond.

Where do Trump’s cases stand?

At this point in time, only the first of these criminal indictments has gone the distance and was decided by a jury of Trump’s peers — or so we thought.

After a New York jury this past spring issued guilty verdicts on each of Trump’s 34 falsification of business records counts — each stemming from his interfering in the 2016 presidential election by paying hush money to a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair — I more than suggested that “Justice delayed is not always justice denied.”

Boy was I wrong.

At the end of the 2023-24 Supreme Court term, the MAGA majority of justices had ruled to the surprise of virtually every knowledgeable person on Earth that Trump enjoyed presidential immunity from criminal prosecution whether he committed his offenses during, after or even before his presidency.

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Who knew? Certainly not the authors of the Declaration of Independence or the fathers of the U.S. Constitution – the only “originalists” if there ever were any.

As a result of this “unconstitutional” decision, Trump’s scheduled sentencing for July 11 was delayed until September 18 — after the earliest of early voting ballots will have already been cast in the 2024 presidential election.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, Trump’s “lawyers are urging the judge in the New York hush money case to overturn his conviction and dismiss the case.” In addition to other legal arguments, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has responded that the immunity ruling has “no bearing on this prosecution” because the lawsuit was about conduct and events that occurred before Trump became president.

Even if Trump’s lawyers are correct about this new law after the crime, the case should still be immune from the decision. Just as a person cannot face criminal punishment except for an act that was criminalized by law before the act was performed – the principle known as “no crime without a law” — a person should not be exonerated or exempt from criminal punishment because of a “new law after the crime.”

Judge Juan Merchan has told the parties that he will issue his decision by Sept. 6. I am confident that he will rule against Trump and that sentencing should be on schedule for Sept. 18. However, I am also confident that Trump’s legal team will appeal that decision. And, even if that appeal does not delay sentencing, Trump's attorneys will file additional appeals to overturn the sentence — prison time remains a possibility, even if it’s unlikely — as well as to toss the case out for a second time.

Meanwhile, in the election interference case in the District of Columbia, Judge Tanya Chutkan will soon be reclaiming jurisdiction to assess whether the charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith fall within or outside of the new guidelines of presidential immunity.

Of course, if Chutkan rules in favor of the prosecution, Trump will appeal that decision as well.

Based on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ separate opinion in the immunity ruling and her concerns about the legality of the special counsel’s appointment, Judge Aileen Cannon on July 15 dismissed the “slam dunk” classified documents case in Florida.

Smith has appealed this ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and has not yet asked the 11th Circuit to expedite this case. Thus, in all likelihood, a hearing before Cannon will not occur before sometime in the middle of October. Some time afterwards she will undoubtedly rule in favor of Trump. Then, the special counsel will appeal her decision.

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And so it goes: “Procedural justice” at work delaying and stymying “substantive justice.”

None of these appeals will ultimately be resolved for months if not years after the November election. The same can also be assumed should Trump file an appeal to toss out the Fulton County Georgia RICO case — this time for prosecutorial immunity rather than as he has previously done for the violation of his First Amendment rights.

So we now find ourselves in a situation where long before justice delayed is no longer justice denied, the American voters will decide.

As former U.S. prosecutor for the Southern District of Alabama and distinguished professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, Joyce Vance, has written: “Trump now faces prosecutors both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion, where voters will decide whether to send a felon” — or, instead, a prosecutor in presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris — to the White House.

In a nation that has seen the value of the rule of law diminished by the MAGA Supreme Court, the choice seems rather clear.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

While writing Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024), I had never imagined that even this extreme Supreme Court supermajority would rule in favor of Donald Trump’s quest for presidential immunity.

Alas, after the Court’s outrageous decision on July 1 that eviscerated the Constitution and confirmed Trump is not subject to the criminal law, I know that the wannabe dictator — Teflon Don — has been feeling legally, if not politically, vindicated. I also know that our Founding Fathers, informed that a president of their democratic republic had been granted the status of a king, would spin somersaults in their graves.

Because of the long-coming decision of this Supreme Court’s Christian nationalist MAGA majority, justice in Trump’s four separate criminal cases have been delayed, and possibly, eliminated altogether. More importantly, the justices’ legal chicanery has retroactively allowed a former president and all future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions by untenably conflating “private interests” with “official duties.”

In very different words, these Supreme Court justices have “nullified” Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Ideally, a decision of this magnitude should have been a unanimous one — 9-0 — with justices across the ideological spectrum speaking with a unified and principled voice.

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Instead, the three justices that Trump nominated “cemented a 6-2 conservative majority that pushed the court further right, not only in embracing a broad view of presidential immunity, but also on an array of other topics – most notably, reducing the power of federal agencies, a long-favored target of conservative lawyers and legal scholars,” in the words of former Supreme Court litigator Amy Howe.

Certain justices themselves agreed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for one, wrote in her powerful dissent, the Supreme Court has made “a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law,” noting that the Court gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

As she opined, we should all fear for our democracy.

The question for this criminologist became: “How or why did crime and criminality – specifically a criminal conspiracy to overturn a presidential election – become the official business of a constitutionally empowered president of the United States?”

To find out how the Supreme Court avoided the answer to my question, obstructed justice or impeded due process, and eventually rendered such an absurd and perverted decision, you will have to read their convoluted logic for yourself and attempt to make sense of text that stubbornly defies logic, legal foundation or conservatives’ beloved principle of “originalism.”

Or, less painfully, you can read about it from Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who’s now a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law. As she wrote in Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance: “Presidents are kings” in the Supreme Court’s estimation.

To summarize Vance’s key takeaways:

The Supreme Court's decision “signals that they believe it’s more important to create a powerful presidency … then it is to be concerned with how a president could abuse that concentrated power, including to try and overturn an election.”

This was “a long decision with lots of moving parts” because there were five separate opinions written. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurrence, as did Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “who joined most of Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, but not all of it.” Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who also wrote a separate dissent.

As Vance underscores, “the opinion itself is hard reading, even for appellate lawyers or those used to contemplating constitutional issues.” It is not law “written for the public, and that is an abdication of the Court’s responsibilities. Speaking of abdication of responsibility, both Justice Thomas and Justice Alito participated in the decision, an ongoing sign of the ethics dysfunction at the Court.”

Once more, the “Court has frittered away public confidence in its integrity as a democratic institution just when it’s needed the most, as the 2024 election, which like the one in 2020” may also end up in the courts.

The issue that the Supreme Court agreed to decide — which it never should have after trial judge Tanya Chutkan and a three-judge appellate panel had ruled unanimously that Trump could be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6 — was this: whether, and to what extent, Trump enjoyed “presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

As Vance writes below, the conservative supermajority issued a fairly direct answer finding that there were “three different categories of presidential conduct, and a different rule about immunity applies to each one,” as follows:

1.) “A former President has immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken with his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority — his official authority stemming from the Constitution and our laws. This is for the exercise of his core constitutional powers.”

2.) “He had presumptive immunity from prosecution for other official acts, unless the government establishes that permitting them to prosecute will not create a danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch. The Court calls this the ‘Twilight Zone’ of official acts, which includes areas where a president has shared immunity with Congress.”

3.) “There is no immunity for unofficial acts. [However,] there may be an issue about how to decide whether conduct is official or unofficial, but if it’s the latter, no immunity.”

Vance notes that had President Richard Nixon known he had this type of immunity, “he wouldn’t have resigned” from the presidency in 1974.

It also turns out that Nixon, during one of his exclusive 1977 interviews with David Frost, foreshadowed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling 47 years in the future.

In response to Frost’s query about him having broken the law in relation to “a president believing that something is in the best interests of the nation,” Nixon legendarily replied: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The three dissenting Supreme Court justices, Vance and this criminologist are hardly alone in our dismay. When I hunted through Google News for any commentaries that concurred with the Supreme Court’s pro-MAGA decision, I could not find any — save for Fox News, New York Post and several pro-MAGA publications.

Here are representative samples of what I did find:

From The Bulwark: “The Supreme Court is protecting the president from you. It should be the other way around.”

From The Washington Post: “Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling poses risk for democracy.”

From the Los Angeles Times: “We should all dissent from the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and not respectfully.”

From CNN Politics: “The Supreme Court just gave presidents a superpower.”

From PBS: “A President could pocket a bribe for a pardon, stage a military coup to retain power, order the killing of a rival by the Navy’s SEAL Team Six – and be protected.”

From Project Syndicate: “The US Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution entitles former President Donald Trump to “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions related to his efforts to overturn the November 2020 election.”

From Talking Points Memo: “The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to American democracy.”

From Slate: “In its awful immunity ruling… benefitting Donald Trump, the court seems so worried about future threats to democracy that could come from the possibility of bogus future criminal prosecutions of former presidents [that have never happened before in US history] that it is willing to let a legitimate election prosecution over a current threat against democracy go by the wayside.”

From The New York Times: “The Supreme Court creates a lawless presidency.”

From Salon: “The Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can be a dictator.”

From Politico: “The Supreme Court gave Trump a stunning Gift – and rewrote the Constitution.”

From Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid: “Raise your hand if you remember learning about the separation of powers, and the fact that we have a democratically elected President with limited powers, not a fascist empowered dictator with unlimited powers?”

From Mother Jones: “The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights.”

Last month, in another assault on constitutional democracy, a 6-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts for the Supreme Court concluded in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine is dead, and that the era of executive branch agency rule is effectively over.

Elie Mystal, writing for The Nation, underscored the danger of this anti-scientific decision by detailing how it represents the unifying mission of The Federalist Society, Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation, Trumpism and the Supreme Court supermajority.

“We just witnessed the biggest Supreme Court power grab since 1803,” Mystal lamented.

Mystal, a constitutional scholar, was referring to the fact that the Supreme Court “has given itself nearly unlimited power over the administrative state, putting everything from environmental protections to workers’ rights at risk.”

One might say that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” dreamed of and advocated by Steve Bannon, the once pardoned and now federally imprisoned advisor to the former president, is well on its way — especially should the felon and corruptor-in-chief return to the White House this coming January.

After all, the ideologically driven and anti-constitutional Supreme Court supermajority has now transformed itself and the presidency into imperial powerhouses. In the process, they have abandoned any semblance of legal principle and cultural tradition while setting both the First Amendment and stare decisis on fire.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

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Before Donald Trump criminalized the White House, Republican Party and perhaps the Supreme Court, he was the CEO of the Trump Organization — a fraudster, racketeer and patriarchal Boss of a family owned and operated criminal enterprise. He spent five decades in New York and beyond avoiding charges and prosecutions for sexual harassment, tax evasion, money laundering and nonpayment of employees.

If this wasn’t enough, Trump also busied himself by allegedly defrauding tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, attorneys, students and charities, not to mention making use of undocumented workers.

In retrospect, Trump’s lifetime of lies and lawlessness appear to have prepared him for the fateful moment in which he now finds himself — in a court of law, answering for the first 34 of 88 felony counts that stem from alleged crimes he committed immediately before, during and after his presidency. Trials involving Trump’s alleged 2020 election interference and illegal retention of national secrets loom.

As the fraudster-in-chief and Benedict Arnold of our time, Trump continues to maintain his innocence and blames everybody but himself while attempting to make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

In light of Trump’s defiance, and the potential for more illegal Trumpian interference during the 2024 election, in which he is almost certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee, now is a good time to go beyond Trump and explore the criminal culpability of Trump Crime Syndicate lieutenants and Trump’s kitchen cabinet of MAGA knaves and rogues.

These are the people who have aided and abetted Trump, and continue to assist him in his single-minded quest to become the most powerful man in America.

They are worth your attention precisely because of the danger to democracy that they represent.

Criminalizing the power of the pardon with the intent to defraud

At the federal level, a gaggle of powerful Republican actors were deeply involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. These include — and are not limited to — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

At the state level, dozens of Republican fake electors and Trump stakeholders have been criminally indicted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.

All of these criminal indictments for election interference like Trump’s indictments are “basically telling the same story of corruption and venality” except for their “different charges” according to Kenneth F. McCallion, a former Special Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney with the DOJ who also worked for the New York attorney’s general office as a prosecutor on Trump-related racketeering cases.

But before proceeding further with this examination of presidential crime, politics and accountably, it is important to highlight Trump’s unprecedented usage of the pardon power, which facilitated the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Republican electioneering of 2024.

Prior to Trump, the presidential power of the pardon had always been about showing mercy and compassion. It was most certainly not a tool for rewarding criminal loyalty and weaponizing criminal conduct.

Excluding Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and former “partner in crime,” the Boss pardoned several of his other loyal associates, especially those within the Trump Crime Syndicate.

For example, in relation to Russian election interference in 2016, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Revealed for the man he is in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report The Torturers’ Lobby, Manafort in 2019 was found guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to disclose an offshore bank account.

Manafort also pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the federal District of Columbia. Most of these crimes were connected to his lobbying work in Ukraine.

Then, just days before his longtime friend and campaign adviser Roger Stone’s 48-month incarceration was scheduled to begin for seven felony convictions, including impeding a congressional inquiry, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.

And when Trump was literally leaving the Oval Office and almost out the door, he granted clemency to his former chief political strategist Steve Bannon who had defrauded Trump donors out of more than $1 million to allegedly help build the border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Trump also pardoned retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the only one-time White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russian investigation carried out by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In the cases of both Stone and Flynn, Trump’s “forgiveness” came after Bill Barr, Trump’s third of five attorneys general, failed to shut down these investigations on the spurious grounds that these two perpetrators, Stone and Flynn, had been the victims of witch hunts and overzealous prosecutors.

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We have also known for nearly two years since former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before a House select committee that the pardon power does not prohibit preemptive pardons. Nine members of Trump’s kitchen cabinet requested them in the wake of Jan. 6, demonstrating their full knowledge and intent of criminal wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, and Flynn are back supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign as they did in 2016 and 2020. And, Trump and Putin are closer than ever. The Russian president has even publicly endorsed him this time round . It didn’t hurt that Trump seemed to have Putin’s back most, if not, all the time since he took office. Trump opposing NATO as well as Ukraine helped as well. Trump’s pardoning his own men involved in the 2016 interference seemed to condone it. His illiberal authoritarian and anti-democratic credo was another plus.

Trump’s minions began their election interference in 2015 and never stopped

Let’s begin with the criminal prosecutions related to the 2016 Russian election interference investigated by Mueller.

Mueller’s investigation led to the indictments of 34 individuals and three Russian companies. Five Trump associates and campaign officials were convicted of felonies including those mentioned above. Mueller’s final report, while finding insufficient evidence of a Trump-Russian conspiracy, did conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and expected to benefit from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Key players in the 2016 Russian collusion affair

• Paul Manafort (discussed above) according to the U.S. intelligence community was also believed to have passed internal Trump campaign and polling strategy information to Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik.
• Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of Manafort and also a former Trump campaign official, was also charged in two separate federal courts and he too plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States, lying to federal prosecutors, financial crimes, and lobbying without a license.
• Michael Flynn was also pardoned by Trump and worked on the 2020 as well as the 2024 presidential campaigns. Since 2022 Flynn has had a ReAwaken roadshow with the Army of God for Trump. He was the first to plead guilty in 2017 after admitting that he made false statements and omissions in FBI interviews only days after Trump was sworn in to office. The former Army general “impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”
• Roger Stone (discussed above) was the subject of the video, The Roger Stone tapes, that reveals Stone working from the Willard hotel in D.C. with Giuliani and others, and quickly checking out while the riots were taking place.
• Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and “fixer” for more than a decade, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to one count of making a false statement to Congress as well as to other crimes committed in his taxi related business in the Southern District of New York. He spent almost three years in prison serving time concurrently for both convictions.

Cohen and David Pecker are two of the key, among, many witnesses from Trump’s inner circle testifying against their former Boss in the New York presidential election interference case.

By contrast, defendant Trump has no witnesses on his behalf. He also has no family or friends except son Eric who showed up in court on April 30 for the first time. Otherwise surrounded by only his attorneys who are devoid of any facts and some twisted law, maybe, if they are lucky.

And through testimony on Friday the defense had scored no points during cross-examination that so far could create reasonable doubt.

2020 Election Interference as part of Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet

Turning next to a review of three of the 2020 Trump election interference cases. I do so without concern with the consequences for or accountability of the fake electors because none of these individuals were either affiliated with the Trump Crime Syndicate or members of the former president’s kitchen cabinet.

Although a number of them were or are elected state officials and high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaigns of 2020 as well as 2024.

• Jeffrey Clark, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia
• John Eastman, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia and Arizona
• Rudy Giuliani, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Jenna Ellis, convicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Sidney Powell, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
• Kenneth Chesebro, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
• Peter Navarro, convicted and in prison
• Steve Bannon, convicted and out on appeal
• Mark Meadows, DOJ witness, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• Boris Epshteyn, unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
• An unidentified political consultant is also a DOJ unindicted co-conspirator

Nixon’s Watergate was ‘much ado about nothing’ compared to Trump’s failed coup and insurrection

To put Trump’s minions in perspective, a brief examination of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen is required.

In response to the criminal cover-up of the crimes involved in the attempted burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Nixon was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" on March 1, 1974, by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. This was a wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names at the time to prison.

Compared to Trump’s failed coup, Nixon’s Watergate break-in and cover-up was no big deal; it certainly was not an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law. There was no violence toward the Capitol or danger to members of Congress and the vice president.

Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case. These included Nixon's highest-ranking officials such as the former Attorney General and chairman of his 1972 presidential campaign John Mitchell. Along with the disgraced Mitchell there was John Dean, White House legal counsel, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Halderman (White-House senior staff), Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, and James McCord, Security Director of CREEP. They were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the January cover-up trial of 1975. All of these men carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself.

What stands out as a huge difference between the Watergate crimes responsible for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the US and the Jan 6 insurrection was that Nixon became an unindicted co-conspirator while still in office. And he received his comeuppance after only a little over two years since the crimes occurred. At the time, Nixon had been president for the better part of six years.

Trump after eight years of election interference and four years as president has yet to receive his criminal comeuppance. Even if he is convicted later this month on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, his appeals could delay his well-deserved imprisonment from occurring for at least another year or two.

By contrast, three years after Jan.6, and the violent assault on the Capitol building there have been 749 convicted and sentenced offenders. At least 467 rioters have been incarcerated in either jail or prison for an array of offenses including assaulting law enforcement officers, felonious obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder.

More than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy were convicted of the serious charges of seditious conspiracy. Additionally, 53 persons have been indicted as fake electors, many of whom have been high ranking Republican officials in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.

Compared to racketeering, Trump and company’s very complex and organized election interference that included more than 2000 rioters besieging the Capitol on Jan. 6, and hundreds more working away in seven swing states including Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Paradoxically, it may seem strange given the reaction of the Republicans and the Department of Justice to Nixon and Watergate, that Trump and his election interference crimes have been given a free pass by the Supreme Court.

With respect to Trump’s inner circles, a few have already pleaded guilty and many more will be held to account regardless of whether Trump is, although this is certainly a reflection on a man who boasted of surrounding himself with the “best and brightest” the nation has to offer.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Now that the first criminal trial of Donald Trump is underway in a New York courthouse and is potentially the only one that will be decided before people start voting around Labor Day, there are two political objectives that I believe are necessary to implement if the United States is ever to “fix” what ails or troubles our American democracy:

1. Defeat Trump’s third attempt to become president and re-elect President Joe Biden to a second term of office. This will require aggressive election campaigning and coordination by anti-Trumpers, never Trumpers, Democrats and independents and has everything to do with saving our multiracial pluralistic democracy from its imminent demise should Trump and his minions retake control of the White House.
2. The second goal involves changing the anti-democratic elements of our political system, such as the Electoral College, which have been in the works since after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. These political efforts will have to be expanded and more organized than they have been up to now. They are also predicated on the defeat of Trump and possibly the implosion of the Republican Party.

By no stretch of the political imagination will these objectives be easy. The first of these will be comparatively a lot less difficult to achieve than the second. However, the second of these will be impossible to accomplish without achieving the first.

READ: That time Trump admitted he’s been lying

Regarding the 2024 election: To counter Trump and to establish a blue wave this fall, Biden and his re-election campaign should pivot and lean into anti-establishment populism that has increasingly attracted blue-collar workers. Much of the legitimate anger felt by such Americans has been captured by the propagandistic America First/MAGA movement. In turn, most of this anger has been successfully misdirected at the rule of law, the Democrats and Biden.

This same anger was also captured by the genuine ways in which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did so in the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020. Unlike Trump and his cronies, Sanders was not gaslighting his constituents to win them over.

If “Middle Class Joe” can successfully recapture this anger like Bernie did, then the anger can be redirected back at Trump and GOP, where it justifiably and overwhelmingly belongs.

‘Make ends meet’

Most people in our body politic — Republicans and Democrats — understand that neither our political or economic systems are as healthy or as fair as they could be. At the same time, most Americans of both parties do not understand why these unhealthy and unfair realities still persist in the richest country with the strongest economy and the lowest inflation worldwide.

Similarly, because average Americans are better off today than they were four years ago according to the available measurements, many voters do not appreciate that millions of Americans are still suffering.

For example, millions of people — from families, to the elderly to single men and women experiencing homelessness — are struggling to “make ends meet.” And they are being stymied, paradoxically, by the relatively higher wages in more than a generation coupled with the higher costs of student debt, childcare, rent, mortgages, food and so on. Higher costs of entertainment, leisure activities and even going out for dinner factor in, too.

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On the one hand, Biden and the Democrats need to confront these realities. They need to explain what they have been doing to improve these social conditions such as canceling student debt. They must also explain what they’ll continue to do to improve these social conditions should Biden be re-elected, like establishing universal childcare for all families.

On the other hand, the Democrats need to emphasize what the Republicans have never done and will continue not to do to address these social conditions. In fact, it is Republicans’ lack of policies and resistance to improve these social issues in the past, present and foreseeable future that will continue to exacerbate them.

As political scientist Damon Linker wrote in an April 8, 2024, opinion piece for The New York Times, “Biden needs to meet the people where they are.” Because if America is not exactly broken as Linker claims, or is only half broken as I argue, there are still plenty of legal reforms that need to be realized across the political economy of the United States.

Hence, Biden — the idealist, the institutionalist, and middle of the road centrist — should continue to celebrate our vibrant economy as well as those bipartisan accomplishments during the first two years of his administration.

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That includes the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021 that has already funneled billions of dollars into blue and red states alike. And the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in August 2022, the most comprehensive climate legislation in U.S. history.

It must also include repeated mention of the bipartisan foreign aid bill passed by the House for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan over the weekend.

At the same time, Biden should also be underscoring all the negativity, chaos and counterproductive activities of the do-nothing and obstructionist Republican majority since they recaptured control of the House back in January 2023.

For example, Republicans have not passed any legislation whatsoever to run on, as Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) put it. Moreover, as obstructionists, House Republicans even tanked the toughest bipartisan bill in decades on “border security” introduced by the Senate earlier this year — for no other reason than Trump wanted it unaddressed so that he could have one issue of substance to talk about.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are forming yet another circular firing squad in what could lead to their third House speaker in seven months if the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) get their way.

Highlight Trump's idea void

To re-accentuate: Whether we are talking about lowering the costs of education, childcare, and medicine; protecting the rights of ordinary workers, consumers, or women’s reproduction; or expanding the basic necessities of health care and social security for all, Biden should be stressing what he has been doing. And what he intends to do when re-elected by focusing attention on a concrete Democratic platform with a reform agenda to address the broken parts of our political and economic systems.

The Biden campaign should further emphasize how neither Trump nor the GOP have ever had any ideas whatsoever, let alone an affirmative platform — recall that the Republican National Convention of 2020 had no new party platform at all — to address even one of these anti-establishment populist grievances. Besides deregulation of all things and tax breaks for corporations and the richest Americans, they have no other agenda other than feebly trying to cut medicare and social security for all.

With or without Trump, Republicans do have Project 2025. This not-very-covert authoritarian agenda to control the government Trump-style recommends repealing both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

And should the insurrectionist-in-chief, who is facing 88 felony counts across four criminal cases, be elected to POTUS for a second time, both the agendas of the far right and the Supreme Court majority of gutting the Constitution of many of its checks and balances will continue as they have been doing officially since at least 2010.

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In sum, with a soon-to-be-criminally-convicted Trump back at the helm in the White House, corruption and lawlessness will run rampant. With a strongman presidency, the nation will become a legal oligarchy creating a nearly bullet-proof immunity for the morbidly rich, fuller personhood for corporations and less-than-equal rights for individuals.

Post-Trump, but not post Trumpism, there are several efforts that are already underway with the goal of countering the anti-democratic and rule of law authoritarianism. If incorporated as a whole, then they would transform our democratic political system from a “tyranny of a minority” to a “tyranny of a majority.”

This is the only way to overcome the duopoly of political power in the United States that is at the root or heart of what currently ails and threatens American democracy.

Institutionally, and in no particular order, these aspirational reformist changes include:

1. Doing away with the undemocratic Electoral College, political gerrymandering and all forms of bicameral filibusters.
2. Overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, privately financed elections, Supreme Court decisions that facilitate political and economic corruption, and those parts of our legal infrastructure that are increasingly enabling, for example, regressive taxation, the lack of universal health care and the inadequate ecological protocols, debt relief, and international humanitarian engagement.
3. Expanding the number of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the eight U.S. territories.
4. Employing the same types of dynamic practices of change, revision and innovation characteristic of the 50 state constitutions as a means of reforming our U.S. Constitution which comparatively has been largely static, if not stagnant, and which has not been meaningfully amended for more than one-half of a century.
5. Establishing a multi-party and proportionately representative democracy to replace our antiquated two-party or bipartisan representative democracy.

A tyranny of the majority — or direct rule by the people, which has nothing to do with mob rule or rule by the masses — in conjunction with the other constitutional and legislative reforms would expand the democratic representation of the people at the federal level not unlike at the state level. Where, for example, people have direct rather than indirect representative power by way of referendums and initiatives.

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To not institutionalize these political and economic changes, or to remain a tyranny of a minority as we have been for the last 250 years, will only perpetuate the dysfunctionality and extreme partisanship that has become synonymous with American democracy and its body politic.

If not countered or checked, our tyranny of a minority will also allow for future wannabe authoritarian presidents to pursue any of their uninhibited dreams of an illiberal democracy, at best, or a fascist regime, at worst.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Donald Trump has always been terrified by the thought of going to prison. At the same time, his fear of imprisonment has always been mitigated by his Houdini-like ability to evade the administration of criminal justice.

Ergo, Trump’s myriad repeated motions — legitimate and illegitimate — to delay or dismiss his four criminal trials from ever coming to fruition.

Most notable is whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Although the oral arguments before the Supreme Court are to be heard on April 25, we probably will not have the answer until the end of the current session in late June or early July.

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These tactics have always been motivated by Trump’s shamelessness and dogged determination to keep his never-ending lawlessness and scamming alive. In order to do so, he must keep his derriere unincarcerated and/or return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States.

Trump has also been more afraid of the Manhattan criminal case than the other criminal cases slated for courtrooms in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

This is because Trump has correctly or incorrectly believed that, in those cases, there would likely be one juror or more out of 12 that would emerge to prevent guilty verdicts — remember: they must be unanimous — from materializing.

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Up until now and before the selection of the criminal jury begins on Monday in The People of the State of New York vs. the former POTUS, did Trump ever have to seriously confront the reality of criminal imprisonment for one day, let alone, for the rest of his life.

According to New York law, if convicted of the 34 criminal counts each subject to as many as four years of imprisonment to be served consecutively, Trump could be looking at as many as 136 years of captivity.

Realistically, that would never happen to Trump — or anyone else for this type of election interference, campaign corruption and financial criminality. For any other average person convicted on all of the counts, the sentence would probably be from two to four years, served concurrently.

But I suspect that Judge Juan Merchan, who was recently sued by Trump over his handling of the case, will at maximum impose a sentence of home confinement rather than any formal type of criminal incarceration.

This penal leniency in sentencing will come from a judge who has endured months of Boss Trump railing against him and repeatedly attacking his daughter. This unseemly behavior finally resulted in a “gag order” from the judge to protect his offspring. It also resulted in another frivolous denied motion to an appellate court by one very desperate Trump hoping for a stay or looking for any kind of delay.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan in 2011. Marc A. Hermann/New York Daily News/TNS

My reasoning about Merchan’s leniency is twofold:

First, Merchan — like Judge Scott McAfee in the Fulton County, Ga., case against Trump and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan overseeing the Jan. 6 case in D.C. — have all been adjudicating fairly. They have also been bending over backwards on behalf of Trump for a variety of reasons.

(This is in stark contrast to Judge Aileen Cannon overseeing the Florida stolen classified documents case who has been acting unfairly on behalf of Trump and with malice against the prosecution.)

Second, unlike Trump’s three other criminal cases I cannot imagine any judge sentencing a former president to prison for the Manhattan crimes.

But home confinement — however luxurious — would nevertheless mean Trump loses his freedom.

Up to now most thinking people have supposed that the Manhattan trial would be the least significant of the four criminal trials Trump is facing as he runs for president here in 2024.

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Compared to the three other trials – two about Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and one for allegedly stealing classified documents and obstructing justice – the charges, on balance, don’t seem as legally or politically fraught.

However, the significance of the Manhattan criminal trial both legally and politically is about to make history.

There are several reasons for this.

For openers: time.

The misleading “hush money”-labeled criminal case has become not only the first but possibly the only criminal trial of Trump to be resolved before people start voting, which in some parts of the country will be in September.

Unlike the other three criminal matters that occurred during or after his presidency, the issues at play in the Manhattan trial occurred in 2016. They took place just weeks before the 2016 election and immediately after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which revealed Trump making lewd and obscene comments about women.

Although the former president’s falsification of business documents and his fraudulent payments for services rendered continued like monthly clockwork during the first year of the Trump administration.

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Importantly, unlike the three other criminal indictments that were “speaking indictments,” or went beyond the elements of the charges, the Manhattan indictment following New York law did not. It only provided the minimal identification or listing of the 34 counts against Trump.

For example, without the lengthy and detailed indictments laying out the evidence in greater detail, most Americans do not understand why the misdemeanor crimes of paying off one porn star and one playboy bunny to keep them silent about their sexual liaisons with Trump became felony crimes.

Similarly, this case also involves election interference and campaign fraud – the kind that may have helped Trump get elected president in the first place, in 2016. In other words, this case is not merely about falsifying business documents and tax records.

Trump’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was not limited to the burying of negative information that at the time would have been detrimental to his campaign victory, but it also includes evidence of Trump paying his then-”fixer” Michael Cohen to hire an IT firm to rig early CNBC and Drudge polls to favor Trump in 2015 — and then stiffing RedFinch Solutions $50,000 for its services rendered.

Not unlike the House Select Committee’s public hearings on January 6, where all the witnesses who testified against Trump were from the former president’s inner circles, the same will essentially be the case in the Manhattan trial. At this trial, we can expect several of the witnesses testifying against Trump to be part of the conspiracy to cover up his sexual affairs from wife Melania as well as the general public — a general public that may have voted differently had they known Trump was cheating on the future first lady with an adult film actress.

Unlike the House Select Committee hearings, which were televised but paid attention to by about 23 percent of the electorate and changed few opinions about Trump’s culpability, the untelevised criminal trial in Manhattan will be followed much more closely by most Americans.. And whether convicted by a jury of his peers or set free by a hung jury, Trump stands to suffer significantly from some six weeks of gavel-to-gavel news coverage of his criminal behavior.

As the Manhattan trial is about to get underway, there does seem to be some poetic justice at play. Just as District Attorney Alvin Bragg was the first to bring a criminal indictment against a former president of the United States he has also become the first law enforcement official to criminally prosecute the 45th president of the Untied States.

It is also worth noting that Bragg had no problem with any of the other criminal cases going ahead of his trial as he has always regarded the 34 felony criminal counts in the Manhattan case as ordinary or garden variety white-collar crimes. Rather than the more serious crimes involved in Trump’s three other criminal prosecutions.

On the one hand, I am feeling good that people will finally learn all about election interference and the “catch and kill” scheme that is at the heart of the Manhattan trial. Not to mention the collaboration between Trump and the National Enquirer news organization.

On the other hand, I am disappointed that Bragg’s team of prosecutors had not investigated deeper, or if they had done so, that they had decided not to bring additional counts against Trump involving another type of election interference.

Specifically, I am referring to candidate Trump’s collaboration with the National Enquirer to manufacture scathing front-page stories about two of Trump’s most competitive opponents in the 2016 presidential race. Namely, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

To recap where we are with respect to legal accountability and the administration of criminal justice for the 2024 presumptive nomination for president:

• In the short term, as the Manhattan trial finally begins, the Liar-in-Chief and his lawyers' efforts to delay, disrupt, and discredit one of the four criminal cases against Trump have at long last been exhausted.

• In the longer term, at least for now, Trump and the GOP’s repetitive attacks to delegitimize the justice system and rule of law as a whole, as well as their efforts to spread fear throughout those institutions tasked with holding Trump accountable for his anti-democratic behavior, are still alive and unwell.

Hopefully, the Manhattan trial will begin to turn the tide against Republican lawlessness, corruption and authoritarianism.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Since 2023, when Donald Trump was criminally indicted in a combined four criminal cases on 91 felony counts, I have repeatedly been asked to explain how one-half of the American public seemingly does not care about the alleged crimes committed by their former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Conversely, not once has anybody asked me to explain why the other half of America cares so deeply about holding Trump accountable for his alleged willful retention of national defense information, obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States government, soliciting and impersonating public officers, conspiracy to commit forgery, false statements, falsification of business records and obstruction of justice.

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The answer to this two-sided question — why an exaggerated half-and-half America does or does not “give a damn” about Trump’s crimes — has less to do with whether folks think the former president is a criminal.

Nor is this division about whether people believe juries will find Trump guilty or innocent of violating these particular criminal statutes.

The answer has much more to do with the social reality that these transgressions are not ordinary or commonplace offenses as criminologists refer to them.

Rather, these offenses are ideological or political in nature — as evidenced by the unsigned majority opinion of SCOTUS’ ruling on the 14th Amendment earlier this week.

Supreme Court, off-course

While I agree with the 9-0 decision that individual states should not have the right to disqualify insurrectionary candidates from running for national office, I also agree with the three liberal and one conservative justice who concurred that the conservative majority went too far in limiting the ability of federal officials to disqualify candidates that have violated their oaths of office.

More importantly, I agree with constitutional law professors William Baude, Michael Paulsen and Laurence Tribe, as well as Judge Michael Luttig, who argue that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the part that speaks to disqualifying people from holding office — “requires no legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action in order to effectuate its command,” as neatly summarized by Cornell University law professor Michael C. Dorf.

Instead, Section 3 is “self-executing” in the same way that treaties are self-serving. Because the Supreme Court rejected the very idea, Trump supporters and others may believe that there are no laws in place to enforce the law.

As I wrote last week in Raw Story, Trump just received the gift of time, and democracy’s clock is ticking because the United States has no laws in place against domestic terrorism and acts of rebellion or insurrection.

Had there been a federal law against insurrections in place, then Special Counsel Jack Smith would have been able to straight-up indict Trump or his unindicted co-conspirators for their crimes.

Meanwhile, what I am more disturbed about is that SCOTUS has needlessly delayed the January 6th trial from March 4th to now at the earliest late summer. All because it unnecessarily granted certiorari as well as a stay after a panel of three DC Circuit Court Appellate judges had ruled unanimously in a striking 57-page opinion that the US justice system allows for a former president to face charges for actions he took while in office.

In addition, the panel held that a potentially criminal president should be held accountable because the interests of the people outweigh any “chilling effects’ this may cause on the office of the presidency.

'Self-interest of their perpetrator'

So what do criminologists mean when we maintain that Trump and his conspiring allies have been engaging in ideological or political offenses?

A classic definition was put forth in 1972 by the late M. Denis Szabo, a Canadian criminologist. He wrote in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy that ideological or political crimes are “those infractions committed for reasons over and above the self-interest of their perpetrator and which are an attempt to achieve changes of a political, social or religious order.”

Few people on either side of the political aisle would disagree with the assertion that Trump has been attempting to achieve changes in the order of things in the United States not only on the day of January 6, 2021, but pretty much every day since.

The Republican-Democratic divide, however, has to do with whether Trump committed these infractions over and above his self-interest.

Democrats are of the belief that Trump’s offenses were all about himself and his quest for unchecked power and that he should be held accountable for his illegal actions.

Republican supporters of Trump are of the belief that his actions — as well as his inactions — on January 6 were not about the former president’s personal grievances per se.

Rather, they believe that the criminal indictment regarding Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are about an “illegitimate” 2020 presidential election, one that Trump actually won.

They also believe that the felony charges against Trump are principally retribution for Trump protecting his supporters from all manner of bogeymen: the Deep State, crooked Joe Biden, a weaponized Department of Justice.

Thus far, the Supreme Court’s rulings in both the 14th Amendment and presidential immunity case have helped to reinforce Trump’s narrative that these criminal indictments aren’t really about him, they are about his legions of MAGA followers.

In equating his problems with their problems, Trump has ample fodder — bogus as it may be — to once again argue that his legal troubles are not of his own doing, but rather, the work of political adversaries who have been conspiring to interfere with his retaking of the White House from Biden in 2025.

Back in the early 17th century when the secular aspects of political power were developed and kings became increasingly independent of the church, central power was becoming more important than local power. During the transition, a legal tradition was born in democratic- pluralistic societies to remove political crimes against the state from the regular courts. These political criminals would receive leniency that often involved exile or banishment “for the good of the state” by reducing the potential for social conflict and violence.

These criminal and penal relations become more complicated when the crimes like rebellion or insurrection are perpetrated by agents of the state no less than by the sitting president.

So because the Supreme Court has both dodged the constitutional question of insurrection and delayed the adjudication of the January 6 criminal trial until after people will have started voting shortly after Labor Day, we won’t actually learn whether Trump supporters would have abandoned him after this particular criminal conviction.

I suspect, however, that they would be more likely to accept Trump's criminal conviction by a jury of his peers than they would another loss by the American people.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of numerous books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy, to be published April 1.