Yes, Trump’s conviction should make you ecstatic | Opinion

Well, it happened fast. Former President Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 charges in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial on Thursday. Much of the commentary in the coming days will be centered on how sad it is for the country that Trump, the former president of the United States and current front-runner planning his second inauguration in less than five months, was convicted of a scheme to fraudulently conceal payments to porn actresses. But it’s not a tragedy, it’s a liberation that, for the first time in his life, Trump is being held accountable for something, and you should feel great about that.

Of course, ideally, the former president would not be convicted unanimously after a short deliberation period during which jurors would review a mountain of incontrovertible evidence that Trump falsified his business records. In a perfect world, the future president would not have his former lawyer take out a mortgage on his house to pay Stormy Daniels hush money. Our esteemed 45th president apparently (according to her testimony) had a brief, joyless, unprotected sexual encounter with his third wife four months after she gave birth to their son (he still denies it). None of this entirely unwelcome information would take up a single byte of my brain storage, and we would all very happily spend the rest of our lives in a world where Donald Trump remains the lecherous, tic-tac-playing host of The Celebrity Apprentice and never runs for president.

But none of this is our fault, and we should feel no guilt or hesitation in celebrating the delivery of long-delayed justice. President Biden’s enfeebled attorney general has long been unable to pursue that justice, effectively allowing Trump and his upside-down flag-waving cronies on the Supreme Court to run out the clock after their failed coup. This is not the fault of the tens of millions of people who, until yesterday, were skeptical that a man who tried to overturn America’s constitutional system on national television could ever face consequences for what he did to the country. This is not the fault of the prosecutors and public officials who are risking their lives to do the right thing as MAGA revolutionaries threaten to expose and blackmail them day and night.

The blame falls on three distinct but overlapping groups of people: First, Republican primary voters, who chose this narcissist with a lifelong track record of personal and professional turmoil as their party’s presidential nominee not once, not twice, but three times.

Second are the Republican senators who had two chances to convict Trump after impeachment and thereby put us all through this scourge forever, but instead chose to surrender like players with a weak poker hand.

The third is the much larger grouping of Republican acolytes, officeholders, MAGAworld wannabe cronies, and the vast cottage industry run by merch peddlers and conspiracy theory-peddling “patriots” that have sprung up around Trump, including a pathetic band of vice presidential wannabes and the later-indicted thugs who tried to violate gag orders on his behalf.

Any one of these three groups could have hijacked the party at any point in the past nine years and put an end to the utter insanity that has seriously undermined the legitimacy and functioning of American democracy, but time and time again they chose to cave to Trump and his minions, and the only group that reluctantly and very rarely did the right thing was quickly booted from office by Republican primary voters like a party intruder.

No one could. They caved every time, each humiliation making the next easier, each moral compromise made easier by the previous one, each affront to the democratic spirit making an even greater affront inevitable, until none of it seemed so bad to them. And now the Republican presidential nominee has become a felon and managed to escape dozens of criminal convictions thanks to six partisan activists who used their total immunity and lifetime benching to fulfill one far-right wish-fulfillment fantasy after another.

These convictions do not make it impossible for Trump to win the election, nor do they necessarily make it less likely. should What they need to do is remind voters that the man they seem on the verge of electing as president is a vile and convicted fraudster.

And this outcome should hearten all those who have spent much of the last decade dreaming of this moment, who have been told by very serious people that it will never come, that it should never come, that prosecuting Trump is somehow more dangerous than him swooping into the White House with an army of right-wing fascists and proclaiming himself the king America has lost for nearly two and a half centuries.

Now voters need to get the job done.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University. It’s time to fight dirty: How Democrats can build a durable majority in American politics. His writings include: 1 week, The Washington Post, New Republic, Washington Monthly Etc. You can find him on Twitter at @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.