NY Times
Good lord. Apparently we are at the Trump appeasement stage of denial in elite land. This take is the epitome of the 'very serious person' opinion that makes a 'coastal elite' want to see the entirety of the elite pundit class fired into the sun. Damon Linker essentially exposes himself as a moral and ethical wreck.
IMO this piece is driven by his fear that his precious corrupt, broken system is on the verge of failure. I mean he says we need to move on because we survived a 'stress test' by getting through the Trump administration, the auto-coup, and 1/6! (To paraphrase) - 'We made it through the bad times so we should move on because the risks are too high to try to address the corruption. These people might revolt!' He seemingly is ignoring that bad times are ahead and doing nothing only continues to increase the risks he is worried about.
Douhat wrote a similar argument yesterday. The 'very serious people' see the war coming and think we can wish it away by hiding under the covers. They are fools. Unfortunately they are examples of the thinking of the elite who have led us here and may lead us into tyranny or civil war. Keep preparing. We're all on our own when our own Neville Chamberlain's have such loud voices.
Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.
But this is a fantasy. There is no scenario following from the present that culminates in a happy ending for anyone, even for Democrats.
Down one path is the prosecution of the former president. This would be a Democratic administration putting the previous occupant of the White House, the ostensible head of the Republican Party and the current favorite to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 2024, on trial. That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.
Some will say that Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves it — and he does. If Mr. Garland does not press charges against him for Jan. 6 or the potential mishandling of classified government documents, Mr. Trump will have learned that becoming president has effectively immunized him from prosecution. That means the country would be facing a potential second term for Mr. Trump in which he is convinced that he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.
...
But we’ve been through a version of the turbulent Trump experience before. During the Trump years, the system passed its stress test. We have reason to think it would do so again, especially with reforms to the Electoral Count Act likely to pass during the lame duck session following the upcoming midterm elections, if not before. Having to combat an emboldened Mr. Trump or another bad actor would certainly be unnerving and risky. But the alternatives would be too.
We caught a glimpse of those alternative risks as soon as the Mar-a-Lago raid was announced. Within hours, leading Republicans had issued inflammatory statements, and these statements would likely grow louder and more incendiary through any trial, both from Mr. Trump himself and from members of his party and its media rabble-rousers. (Though at a federal judge’s order a redacted version of the warrant affidavit may soon be released, so Mr. Trump and the rest of his party would have to contend with the government’s actual justification of the raid itself.)
Edit: It's been a few hours and I'm still astounded at how dumb this piece is. I mean it reads smart but it's smart dumb. Meaning he actually argues with a straight face this:
As we’ve seen over and over again since Mr. Trump won the presidency, our system of governance presumes a certain base level of public spiritedness — at the level of the presidency, in Congress and in the electorate at large. When that is lacking — when an aspersive figure is elected, when he maintains strong popular support within his party and when that party remains electorally viable — high-minded efforts to act as antibodies defending the body politic from the spread of infection can end up doing enduring harm to the patient. Think of all those times during the Trump presidency when well-meaning sources inside and outside the administration ended up undermining their own credibility by hyping threats and overpromising evidence of wrongdoing and criminality.
He seems to not see that the poison that is killing this nation is elite impunity. He ignores this to take a hard stance that this is a political problem that can't be solved through the legal system. Instead of recognizing the system itself might be corrupt he instead bins the whole idea. The obvious problem here he seems to be hand waving away leads to an internally incoherent position. He argues that the politics are too unstable to survive the legal system doing its job so we must rely on the political system to save us. That's what I mean by smart dumb. It sounds smart but he seems to be (wishfully) leaving out all the problems with his argument.
IMO I've long argued our path to surviving this worsening and intensifying crisis was a very tricky middle path with cooperation between our legal and political apparatus. We needed to use the legal system to restore faith in institutions broadly enough that we could restore stability. We also needed to also talk frankly about our political and systemic problems to get people to recognize the danger we are in. Unfortunately with folks taking Linker's approach, to wit, Biden, Garland, and a host of 'very serious people' we are doing none of these things and it looks like calamity is ahead.
