No, Donald Trump is not “getting away with it all”
On Monday the January 6th Committee issued criminal referrals to the Department of Justice against Donald Trump and others, along with a lengthy report which proves their guilt. This comes after a bunch of folks in the media and pundit class spent the early part of this year insisting the committee members were a bunch of hapless cowards who were doing nothing about Trump.
Now these same folks in the media and pundit class are insisting that the DOJ are a bunch of hapless cowards who are doing nothing about Trump. The kicker is that, based on what multiple major news outlets have been reporting over the past several months, the Department of Justice already has multiple grand juries in the process of indicting Trump on these same charges and more.
And of course once the DOJ does indict Trump, these same folks will begin insisting that Trump will be acquitted no matter what. If and when Trump is convicted, they’ll then insist that Trump will still somehow not end up in prison. And when the rest of us point out how absurd this is, they’ll tell us we’re not being “vigilant” enough.
But there’s nothing “vigilant” about always insisting the other side is going to win no matter what. It’s time to call out this stuff for what it actually is: bullshit. There really is no other word for it. Well, two other words come to mind: conspiracy theory. That’s right, at this point it is nothing short of a conspiracy theory to insist that “Trump will get away with it all no matter what.”
Is there some theoretical possibility that the DOJ grand jury indictment process could fall through, or that Trump could be acquitted at trial on all of the numerous charges he’s going to face? Sure. But the notion that Trump will get away with it all no matter what, is based on the premise that he has a magic wand he can wave to just make indictments and criminal trials turn out in his favor. Even if you believe in magic wands, Trump has no history of being able to pull this kind of thing off, given that this will be the first time he’s ever been criminally indicted or faced criminal trial.
Put another way: at this point an optimist would say that the DOJ will definitely indict and convict Trump, while a pessimist would express concern that the DOJ’s effort to indict and convict Trump might face too many challenges. Those are both logically valid positions based on the evidence. But if someone is saying that Trump will definitely get away with it all, that’s not pessimism. It’s hyperbolic defeatism, for the sake of hyperbolic defeatism, based on nothing in the real world.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible that Trump could get lucky and overcome the overwhelming odds that he’ll be indicted and convicted. It’s also theoretically possible the moon landing was faked – but there’s no evidence or logic to support that theory either. It would be absurd to categorize either of these things as being a likely outcome. Anyone who takes either one of these wacky baseless theories, and treats it as if it were an evidence-supported likely outcome, needs to be fitted for a tinfoil hat.
The one thing conspiracy theorists always do is take an extremely unlikely outcome, and insist that it’s definitely or almost definitely happening. And so yes, at this point the people who are insisting Trump will “get away with it all no matter what” are merely pushing conspiracy theories. They’ve arbitrarily decided that something is true, and they’re insisting without evidence that it’s true, and they’re ignoring the mountain of evidence that says otherwise. We need to start calling this stuff out for what it is, because these kinds of conspiracy theories never help the public discourse, no matter how earnestly dressed up they may be.
