This isn’t about Trump. (That GIF aside.)

There’s going to be a lot about Trump, for the next four years (and then, with any luck at all, there will be NOTHING about Trump, ever again; I mean, I don’t care if he goes around the country on a Fuck The Libs Resentment-Palooza tour until the day he dies, but I very much want him to be irrelevant politically after this second term in office) and I’m certainly not going to apologize for that; I have been accused before of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I will be so accused again, but every accusation of TDS rests on the mistaken supposition that Trump is not, in fact, the biggest single influence on American politics and culture right now, and the speaker allegedly with TDS is making an issue about Trump when it’s not about Trump. But he is the biggest single influence on politics and culture right now: not only do half of this country’s elected officials kneel to kiss the ring in all decisions, but somewhere between a third and a half of the voting populace base their identity on him, in part or in total. If I keep bringing up Trump, and blaming Trump for things that go wrong for the next four years, it’s not because I’m obsessed with Trump: it’s because there has never been anyone more successful at taking over this country, mind and soul, in the past. Ever.

God, that’s depressing. The most successful and popular public figure in American history is that fucking stooge.

So when Trump comes up, and we complain about Trump and his actions, that’s not TDS; that’s reality. It is all about Trump. We on the left would really much rather that not be true, believe me. We really don’t want this country to revolve around that asshole. It just does. And so, therefore, does our conversation.

But this? This post, this argument? This isn’t about Trump. Honestly. And I’ll prove it, as soon as I get into the specific argument I want to make.

To show that I’m not simply targeting conservatives (I know, nobody who reads my blogs would think that – except wait…), and not even because Trump is not a conservative (But he’s not) and does not represent conservative thought or values (as he does not), but to show that I’m not simply targeting Trump or his supporters, I’m going to start with myself. I’m going to start with a confession, and then I’m going to proudly declare my innocence of wrongdoing, because that’s apparently what shows that I’m not only innocent, but above reproach.

Okay, that last one was about Trump. More about his supporters. But that’s not the subject.

The subject is wrongdoing.

I did wrong, recently. A couple of times. I have done wrong in the past: not often, because I generally get caught, and then I get in trouble, and I have an almost pathological need to avoid disappointing people – but when I was a kid, I stole, I vandalized, I trespassed; I consumed illegal substances; I threw a big ol’ keg party while my mom was out of town and my “guests” wrecked the house and drove the neighbors to call the cops. I’ve lied, though not a lot and never officially; I’ve certainly been nasty to people in various ways, insulting them or ignoring them or taking advantage of them.

That last one is the kind of wrongdoing I have done recently. On this most recent Election Night, I posted on Facebook, out of a sense of rage and outrage that my countrymen would re-elect the worst president, and the most dangerous man, to hold the office in better than a century (I’m going back to Andrew Johnson for the closest rival to Trump for that title of Most Dangerous, though Warren G. Harding may take the taco for “worst.” Still a century ago.), and I made – something like a threat, I suppose. It wasn’t a threat, but I worded it like a threat: imagine if I said, “If you say that about my mom, I’m going to fluff your pillow until you can’t lie down flat!” See? Sounds like a threat, and in context with the rest of the sentence it might be taken as a threat, because clearly I’m mad about what you’re doing, even though I’m just saying I would fluff your pillow. It isn’t important exactly what I said on Facebook and I don’t want to repeat it, because when I posted it the first time, someone complained to my employer, saying that I was giving the school a bad name, posting political statements and “threats” online. My boss called me in for a meeting to take the post down, which I had already done before the meeting; that resolved the problem because it is clear to anyone who knows me that I do not make genuine threats and I do not cause harm to people, not even over politics, so the only problem was the post.

But the post might, conceivably, have been bad for my employer, because people might have taken it the wrong way, and that might have done harm to my employer’s reputation and so on. So okay: I did wrong. I did the wrong thing in putting other people at risk for the sake of my online statement of my opinion in a less-than-friendly way. I got consequences, then, for my wrongdoing: I got called in by my boss for it, and asked to remove it. Not a serious consequence, but about what the act deserved. My boss was very cautious in that meeting, partly because he and I were friendly and he didn’t want to upset me, but more because I could have raised a big ol’ stink about my freedom of speech and censorship and so on; but I didn’t do that. I accepted that my act was wrong, if not very wrong, and a natural consequence of that was that I should eat my words – or delete them, rather. So be it. Deleted.

Then I got in more trouble for something else I did. That one I don’t want to talk about, because I dispute part of what I was accused of, but not the other part; and again, I don’t want to put my employer or my employment at risk by talking publicly about what happened. It was not that severe, please believe me; my violations fifteen years ago (Wow! Is that really how long ago it was?! Yeah, 2010. Wild. Back when Trump was just a shmuck in New York with a bad reality show, rather than the guy who turned our entire country into a bad reality show.) were much worse, and I’ve written about those in detail before. All I want to say is, I got written up for that recent one, a warning placed in my employee file, and I acknowledge that I shouldn’t have done what I did. My actions – my words, to be a little more specific – were wrong.

When I violated the rules in Oregon fifteen years ago, I acknowledged that, too. What I did was this: I posted angry, insulting things about my students during class, from my school computer, which I should not have done; I named three of my former students and insulted them in a second post a month later. After four years of wrangling, I was found to have committed gross neglect of my duty as a teacher and an employee of the St. Helens School District, and I served a 30-day suspension without pay for it. I accepted that punishment, even though I still think it was undeserved. I mean, sure, I shouldn’t have used class time to write angry things about my students; but how many times have people called friends and bitched about work while at work? How many private messages and emails, and letters and diary entries, have been written by people on the clock, complaining about the people who own the clock? I always thought the violations in Oregon should have been handled the same way these more recent (less serious) violations were: I should have been called in for an uncomfortable meeting; my violation should have been put into my employee file so my future employers can know what I have done in the past; I should have been asked to remove the offensive posts – which I also did, in that case fifteen years ago. Give me a warning, get me in trouble, so I won’t do the same thing again.

It’s funny, though: I thought, when I got called in for that meeting in Oregon about my online activity, that I was going to hear about a complaint filed against me by a local political figure whom I had lambasted a couple of times on my blog, and who I figured would absolutely go to my employer about his ire over my words; I was ready and willing to defend my First Amendment rights, that time. It went further than that because my superintendent was advised by the district lawyers to report me to the state, mainly to cover her and the district’s asses; and, my union lawyer told me, the state wanted to make an example of me because it was 2010 and they wanted to establish a precedent regarding teachers on social media: and my case connected to both a blog and Facebook. (That was another parallel: I had posted something – certainly more insulting, but also ENTIRELY unrelated to the blogs – on Facebook, something which got reported to my district by an irate homeschool parent who had a bone to pick with public school teachers. The district Googled me and found my much-more-offensive blogs. Guess I haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut, huh?) So essentially, mine was a political prosecution: it was a savvy political move for my district, and then an aggressive political move for the state agency. They went after me to serve their own agenda, not because my actions deserved that punishment, not because there was any real risk of me being in front of a class. I spent the entire four years between my offense and my punishment teaching, successfully, without any further incidents. I did nothing else wrong. As I said, nobody who knows me would believe that I would actually do harm to a student, nor to my employer.

But whether my actions were justifiable, or whether the punishment was deserved, or whether I was thrown under the bus for political reasons, or not, the fact is that I broke the rules, and I got punished for it. And I accept that: I accept my punishment as what should have happened to me in response to my wrongdoing. I accept it because there are worse people, doing worse things, and they should also get punished for their wrongdoing, because they actually do harm, which I maintain that I did not do (Mainly because nobody, certainly not the students in question, ever read those blogs.), but if I get away with doing wrong by breaking rules, then it makes it easier for them to get away with doing wrong by doing harm. It is not lost on me that, at the very same time my district was throwing me under the bus for saying mean things on a blog, there was another teacher at the school who was receiving multiple complaints for acting inappropriately with students, but the school ignored those complaints and did not punish that teacher at all; ten years later, I had moved out of the state, and that other guy was in prison for sexual abuse of a student.

And I got called morally reprehensible. (To be fair, I don’t know what they called that other guy. It was probably worse.)

That irony, though, that discrepancy between my crime and punishment and the abuser’s crime and punishment – that injustice – does not mean that I should have gotten away with what I did: it means that both the other teacher and I should have been punished for our actions, preferably in an appropriate way. I should have been written up; he should have been at least fired and banned from being around children, and maybe arrested (I do not know if he had actually broken the law and harmed a student when the complaints were made. Neither does the district: no investigation was carried out.). He did harm. I broke the rules. We both should have consequences.

We live in a society of laws. I actually could have stopped at “We live in a society,” because society does not exist without rules of some kind; and the important ones that restrict the misbehavior of everyone in the society should be called laws. Without laws, there is no society. (I invite any anarchists to explain to me where I’m wrong on that, but not here and not now.) That is not to say that I think that humans are inherently evil and will always do the wrong thing without a threat from the state to keep us in line; but I think we all do wrong things, often without realizing what we are doing. I honestly didn’t even remember doing the thing I got written up for recently, just as I didn’t remember the blogs I had written in violation of the rules in Oregon when I first got called in for a meeting with the superintendent. But now that I have gotten in trouble for doing those things, I can guaran-fucking-TEE you that those things will not happen again: because I do not want to get in more trouble, and now I know clearly what actions of mine will get me in trouble. It’s not just that I don’t want the trouble, either: I don’t want the other consequences of committing those acts again. I do not want to have the reputation of someone who would break the rules like that. I do not want to lose my job, my career. And I recognize, and regret, whatever harm I have done, both actual and theoretical: because I can see that someone who read what I wrote in Oregon could have been genuinely hurt by it, even though I don’t think anyone did. It could have happened, which is why I shouldn’t have written what I wrote and posted it.

Okay. That kind of sucked, honestly; I don’t like talking about the things I’ve done that are wrong: I want to justify all of them, to explain or excuse everything that I have done, so that nobody thinks I am less than a good person. I want to be a good person, and be known as such. It’s important to me. I would hope it would be important to all of us, even if there weren’t direct consequences for misbehavior. But it’s not, not for all of us. Which is why the rules have to apply to everyone, both people who will not do wrong again, and people who will, but who might not want to have consequences again after they have them the first time.

Now let’s talk about Trump.

Donald J. Trump is a felon. He was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, tried, and convicted by a jury of his peers. He is still appealing the decision, under the argument that some of the evidence in his trial should have been inadmissible because the Supreme Court decided that the President of the United States – specifically Donald J. Trump – is above the law (HA I wrote “against the law.” Thank you for that, subconscious. But it is not what I meant. More’s the pity: we’d be a lot better off if Donald J. Trump was against the law.), and that appeal may bear fruit, because every other judge in this country does what the Supreme Court majority has failed to do: actually follow precedent and respect the rule of law and the role of the courts. So if that appeal does bear fruit, then Trump’s conviction will be overturned. And then the breaking of our society will be complete: because then Trump will actually be entirely above the law, untouchable and unrestrainable.

Please understand me. I am not talking about what Trump will do as President; part of me – the cynical, angry, irony-loving part – is looking forward to that, because I want everyone who voted for cheaper eggs to see what they actually brought down on all of us; and more importantly, I want the actual villains, the bastards who want to tear down the government so they can abuse all of us for profit, and who installed Donald Trump (because he was able to bring together all of the disparate parts of his base to vote for him and because he distracts everyone who opposes those profit-driven bastards) to regret the achievement of their actual goals: because they will make the world a worse place, and no matter what they think their money will insulate them from, they still live in the world they are fucking up. There will be consequences for their actions, and I want those billionaire corporate overlords to suffer those consequences along with the rest of us. (I’m tempted to just drop a picture of Luigi Mangione here, but I don’t want anyone to take this as a threat. I don’t think what Mangione did was right, he is a murderer; but it is an example of the consequences you risk when you make the world a worse place, and then live in that same world. I will also note that Mangione is facing the consequences for his actions.) The people that support Trump and who use Trump to achieve their own agenda want him to get away with anything he wants to do because they want him to keep doing what he does: mainly flinging shit everywhere he can, because that’s what distracts the rest of us from the agenda going on behind Trump. I mean, come on: the Gulf of America? Conquering Greenland? He’s just a gibbon flinging shit, and we can’t tear our eyes away.

But when the specific way that Trump is enabled is to take away the consequences for his actions, the damage done is so much more serious than Trump making a fool of us all on the international stage. So much more serious than Trump increasing oil drilling in this country, even though that does nothing good and creates irreparable harm. Trump’s backers only did it, I don’t doubt, so that Trump could keep flinging shit (That’s why the Supreme Court left themselves as the arbiters of what should be considered an official act, and therefore immune to prosecution, so that if a president whose name is NOT “Trump” pulls any shenanigans, the Court can send them up the river), but what they have done is create a situation where there is no consequence for breaking the rules, and more important, no consequence for doing harm.

To be entirely clear: the case where Trump was actually convicted was a rule-breaking case. He didn’t do any immediate harm with that one. But the rules he broke were about election finance, and transparency, and to allow those rules to be broken without consequence allows other people to do the same: and that does unimaginable potential harm in the future, because it allows even worse people than Trump to hide where they got their money, and how they spent it, in pursuit of power. That’s the scary part. And the MUCH WORSE part is that the other cases, the ones that have been dropped or dismissed, those were even closer to doing actual harm: and the January 6^th case was entirely about Trump doing actual harm. People were hurt on January 6^th. People died. Our country, our democracy, was endangered. Trump was partly responsible for that harm. And Trump got away with it. Without any consequence, at all. The Senate refused to impeach because he would face criminal charges – and then he didn’t face any criminal charges because the Senate didn’t impeach, which allowed him to run for the White House again. And he won because Americans wanted cheaper eggs, and forgot about everything Trump did wrong: because there were no consequences, so there was no clear line drawn as to what is allowed and what is not. If what Trump did was allowed, then he did no wrong: and if he wasn’t punished, then it was allowed. That’s the situation that was created. That’s the damage.

And it was done for Trump, but the problem going forward is not only Trump: it’s everyone else who might now do the same things, or much, much worse, and get away with it because Trump got away with it. I am definitely not saying that Trump should have been singled out for his actions, or that Trump should have suffered extra undue consequences; I don’t think the courts or his conviction should have stopped Trump from running for office, for example. I said, well over a year ago, that I didn’t want Trump to lose the election by going to jail: I wanted us not to vote for him.

I guess the rest of the country doesn’t have my hangup about disappointing people. Or at least 75 million or so of you.

I do think Trump should have been impeached. But when he wasn’t, I was willing to accept that, because I was sure he would be tried and convicted for his crimes; even when the trials got delayed and delayed and delayed, I wasn’t worried, because I was sure he wouldn’t be elected again. Surely people wouldn’t support that guy, the one who did all those wrong things. But since so many of you all did, I don’t want the courts to take away the choice, the votes, the will of the people. As a result of the last election, I now want Trump to be president, and I’m not saying otherwise in this argument.

No: I am saying one thing. Trump was accused of crimes. Credibly accused of crimes, because in all four criminal prosecutions, he went through a grand jury process and was indicted: for falsifying business records in New York, for conspiring to suborn elected officials and steal the election in Georgia, for taking and keeping and mishandling classified government documents in Florida, and for conspiring to overthrow the government in Washington, D.C. Those accusations should have all gone to trial, unless there was a reason in advance to discard the accusation without trial (And the dismissal in the Mar-a-Lago documents case was not, in my opinion, valid, because the judge, an inexperienced political appointee with loyalty to Trump, based her dismissal of all charges on the idea that the special prosecutor does not have authority to investigate and bring charges: and that’s horseshit. But I’ll tell you what, I would be willing to accept the court’s ruling on the appeal that Jack Smith brought to overturn that dismissal and reinstate the charges, because I trust that other judges are willing to do what Aileen Cannon is not, and follow precedent and respect the rule of law and of the courts. I’d even be willing to accept it if our corrupt Supreme Court did their bullshit again and upheld Trump’s invulnerability, because that would be another dagger that might help to get rid of those particular destroyers of our society, which should absolutely be the consequences for the Supreme Court majority’s wrong actions – and the three other prosecutions would have gone forward. I would accept that BECAUSE I ACCEPT THE RULE OF LAW.). The trials should have offered Trump a chance to face his accusers, to see all those who testified against him, and to be competently defended. The proceedings should have been ruled over by an impartial and competent judge, in every case. Trump should have been convicted – or acquitted – by unanimous vote of a jury of his peers, randomly selected and vetted by both Trump’s accusers and his attorneys. And he should then have the right to appeal, to object to any injustice in the procedures: as he has been doing all along, and as has borne him fruit, quite spectacularly.

And then, if any of those convictions happened and held through appeal, Trump should have been punished.

His punishment should be appropriate to his crime. In the case of his sole criminal conviction, I think the punishment given to any first-time felon would be acceptable in this case; I’d expect it to be a fine, maybe some community service, maybe some probation. Maybe an auditor, of some kind, to watch over his business records and make sure he doesn’t do the same thing again. And he should have, and bear, the label “Felon.” The reputational damage, and the consequent damage to his career. I mean, 75 million people decided that Trump was above the law and that he should be put back into the White House to get us cheaper eggs and destroy the lives of as many people as possible, and that’s – well, it’s not “fine.” But it is part of our system: being a convicted felon is no bar to running for, winning, or serving in the Presidency, and I accept that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

This is the part that drives me nuts, the worst part of all of this. I hate Trump and what he stands for, and I hate what he has done to my country, and I dread what he will do to my country in the next four years. But the thing that makes me start yelling cuss words, out loud, even when I’m just listening to podcasts and walking my dogs, is hearing about how Trump has taken such an enormous shit on our justice system: and how it has broken under the weight of Trump’s feces. Forgive my continued scatological metaphors, but they show both the contempt, and the filth, that Trump has dropped onto the fundamental structure of our society, by breaking the law, and getting away with it, with the help of his supporters and backers. Gotten away with doing wrong, without consequences. Of any kind.

Have other people done it before him? Of course: in our capitalist society, there have always been two tiers of justice, justice for the poor and justice for the rich; and Trump already enjoyed all of the protections of wealth – it’s how he was able to delay three of his four trials until after the election, and how he has been able to delay or avoid actually paying all of the money in his two civil cases (He has posted a bond that will pay E. Jean Carroll if he loses his final appeals to her two successful lawsuits, and the other case for falsifying business records, which ended in a $454 million fine, was reduced to $175 million, which he paid. Why did he only have to pay a third of the original fine? Because he’s rich, that’s why.). But now there are three tiers of justice: one for the poor, one for the rich, and one for Donald J. Trump. Maybe for future Republican presidents (Forgive my cynical assumption that our current Supreme Court would be much more willing to find that a Republican president’s criminal acts are immune than a Democratic president’s acts, but – come on. We all know who and what we’re dealing with, now.), but for now, Trump is the only one who gets to get away with everything.

For now.

Again: I don’t want him removed from office for his crimes. (Other than the January 6^th case. That crime was sedition, and someone guilty of sedition should not be in elected office of this country. He should have been impeached for it. He wasn’t because of partisan politics, not because he wasn’t guilty or didn’t commit a wrong act. But since the actual charges were conspiracy and obstruction, I am still willing to accept that a conviction of those crimes would not equate to sedition, and would not bar him from running for office. Though in that case I’d be yelling a lot more.) I am not opposing Trump here on political terms. Let him run the country: let him fuck it up and show all of you who supported him what you have done. And hey, if he manages to do some things right, as he did some things right in his first term, I will applaud him for those things. Go ahead and reform prisons more. Release money to the general public to help us endure a crisis, like a good Socialist would. Love it. Thank you for that, Donald. Do it more.

And I am in no way singling Trump out for any of this. You want to put Biden and Obama on trial for having documents in their homes? Do it. If they committed wrong acts, then they also should suffer the consequences for what they did. (Just bringing documents home is not a wrong act. No one is saying that is all Trump did, other than Trump. And he’s lying.) Any Democrat who claimed that Trump’s win in 2016 was illegitimate, who argued that the government should in some way block his election because he received assistance from Russia, and who the right has since accused of obstructing or conspiring to overthrow a legal election – put them on trial, too. Or rather, go through the process: have an investigation, put the facts to a grand jury, and have anyone who is then indicted put on trial, with attorneys, with the full protections of the law.

Right after Trump goes to trial for taking and mishandling classified documents, and for conspiring to overthrow Joe Biden’s legitimate election win in 2020. Because his trials were already in motion. He had already been indicted by four grand juries. He already had attorneys defending him, and judges overseeing the cases – three of them impartial. I’d like to see him go to trial for sedition, too, since he’s guilty of that; but I’m willing to accept the process, and the DOJ’s determination that Trump should be prosecuted for conspiring to obstruct and overthrow the election, and I want him to go to trial for that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

More than that, in fact: I cherish it. I believe in it. I know that society needs it. And whatever may occur with a president who makes bad political decisions, who cuts taxes to raise the deficit and concentrate wealth in the top 1%, who destroys environmental regulations and makes climate change even worse, who flouts international diplomacy and all norms of politics and decent behavior, I will accept all of that. All of it. Because the law in my country says that Donald Trump was twice elected President, and that means he gets to fling shit everywhere he wants to, and we all just have to clean it up. Or live in the stink.

But I will not accept that Trump has gotten away with committing crimes, and suffered no penalty for it. (He is innocent until proven guilty, so even though I’m PRETTY GODDAMN SURE he would have been found guilty in the Georgia case [where he was on tape committing the act] and the Mar-a-Lago documents case [where the crime was photographed sitting in his goddamn bathroom, and he is also on tape committing the crime], I will accept that he has not yet been found guilty of those crimes: but he sure was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and he should have had a punishment for that. First time offender or not. 34 fucking FELONIES. So I get to say that he has committed crimes. And the fact that the judge in that case had to forgo any punishment because it would interfere with Trump performing the office of the Presidency is horseshit: and it’s why I get to say he got away with committing crimes without punishment.) The fact that he has done so undermines the basis of our entire society. Trump has broken the rule of law, and without law, we do not have a society. Everything the most rabid conservative, who thinks every Democrat is a Marxist Socialist unAmerican Commie, accuses the left of doing, the right has done in uplifting Trump while he committed crimes and avoided paying for other crimes. The outrage over the tearing down of the DOJ and the FBI, the way the Supreme Court just fucking spit on both the Constitution and the separation of powers in deciding that Trump should be immune to prosecution for all of his acts while President, should have been deafening, and it should have come from the right: from those who (loudly) support law and order, who cherish the traditions of our country, who defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. I can’t accept that law enforcement watches this guy commit every crime possible, and cheers when he gets away with it. I can’t accept that military members, in large numbers, watch him destroy this country’s entire system, and still salute him. And vote for him. It is insane. It is deranged. It shows how damaged our country is, by all of this, how broken our society is, now.

75 million people voted for Trump, and even more supported him, even though he committed crimes, simply because people want him to be in office, because they think he will be good for the economy, or hard on immigration, or a strong defender of this country. (All political reasons. Political reasons to oppose the due process of law.) But no matter how much he fights for what he calls America, Trump is destroying it, he is destroying us, because he is destroying the rule of law.

I won’t accept that.

And neither should you. Whether you voted for Trump, whether you support him politically, or not.

No one should be above the law. Not me, and not Trump. Or else there is no law. And no America. At least no America worth defending. And nobody is worth that. Not even Donald J. Trump.