Lock! Him! Up!

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 59 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

Donald Trump is a career criminal. It is obvious that Donald Trump is a career criminal. Normally, I’m sympathetic to career criminals. We have a lot of laws, many of which are very stupid, and we all commit multiple crimes per day, so I tend to be pretty cautious about ever recommending prosecution of anyone.

But when it’s the president? I say that’s the time to go for it. Some people feel the opposite. There have been a lot of takes since Trump left office about how it would be some kind of national trauma if we prosecuted a former president, and the country would descend into partisan warfare. Which, I don’t know if you’d looked out the window recently, but “partisan warfare” is a pretty safe prediction. They say “an incoming President can’t prosecute his political enemies! That’s what they do in banana republics!” Apparently, in sophisticated, advanced countries, we just let our leaders commit crimes with impunity. 

It’s all such bullshit, because these are the same people who say “the President is not above the law.” Well pick one. Either he gets punished for his crimes, or he’s above the law. You can’t have both. And he’s committed a bunch of crimes! The Mueller Report detailed about a dozen counts of obstruction of justice, the phone call to Brett Raffensburger was undeniably criminal, and January 6th commission just finished showing everyone how Trump was well aware that he lost the election and his public legal theories were meritless. Any non-chickenshit prosecutor could indict him for any of those and have a strong chance of winning a conviction. 

When powerful politicians break the law, that’s the one place I think it’s actually important to enforce the law. These are the people in charge of the laws! When a normal person thinks a law is stupid, their best option is often just to ignore it and avoid law enforcement. When a powerful national politician thinks a law is stupid, they can change the law! Or at least try. Politicians should be the highest priority targets for law enforcement, and the President should be the highest priority of all. So I say ignore the bootlickers saying Trump is above the law, and issue the indictments already.