The Verdict: Our Country Is Worse Off

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Prominent members of  the judicial system of the United States of America decided that it would be in this country’s best interests to bring to trial a former, admittedly controversial, president. The accusation was for an offense that previous to this case was regarded as at most a misdemeanor, but through judicial sleight of hand was turned into a felony in order to bypass the statute of limitations for the alleged crime. 

Imagine that the prosecutor in this case ran on the position that he would take on this president. The case would be tried in a city which has perhaps the highest percentage of people who voted for his opponent. Imagine a judge being “randomly” selected for this  high profile  case who  just happened to sit on two other cases involving the same former president. Imagine that he issued a gag order allegedly to prevent this former president from speaking about the case, but the same gag order was not applied to a key witness, a convicted felon. And imagine the trial was scheduled about six months before the presidential election.

Imagine that somehow a total of 34 felony counts would be issued against him. Clearly the high number of counts would give the impression that there’s a lot to investigate here. Perhaps the thinking is that 34 lesser counts may add up to a higher guilt content than say one really awful charge – like assault and battery. 

But again, perhaps when the number of counts are so incredibly high and the alleged crime so difficult to ascertain, the public may start to question the entire process. 

If you omit the name of the person being charged here, then perhaps citizens could be more objective about the entire affair. But as soon as the name Donald Trump is inserted that changes the way people think about what is fair and unfair.

Our current President Joe Biden’s  reaction to this verdict was to merely say “justice was served.”

But was it? 

What do each of the counts alleged? I couldn’t find one person who could explain it to me in a comprehensible way. I can only conclude that ordinary Americans, like the ones serving on this case, probably didn’t understand them all either, but the judge in this case seemed to give them a pass by saying their reasoning for a guilty charge was not so important as long as they were unanimous that he was guilty of falsifying business records to cover up an illegal conspiracy. 

As an ordinary citizen I might contemplate that by signing one of the many legal documents that nearly everyone has to sign from time to time, such as tax returns, loan agreements, lease agreements, waivers to participate in sports, and numerous other documents with lots of red tape that we couldn’t really comprehend. And if someone in power decided to go after us, they probably could find something in our past to indicate we did something wrong. 

So the vast number of Americans can relate to Trump’s predicament.

Thinking back to less partisan times, I thought about another previous president…Richard Nixon, who faced even more dire charges. He was only the second president in our history to face impeachment hearings, which at the time was Huge news and rocked our nation. His alleged crime, however, was one everybody could understand: breaking and entering and then trying to cover it up. 

When he realized that there was no way he could defend himself from these serious charges, he did the rational thing which was to resign. Gerald Ford then became our next president. And one of the first things he did was to pardon Nixon saying:” The prospects of such (criminal) trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate…

Ford put the health of our nation  before his own personal politics and many historians believe that he paid a heavy price for this later losing the election to Jimmy Carter. 

Today, we’re seeing the exact opposite when one party decides that they will do whatever it takes to bring down their opponent no matter the ugly consequences for the wellbeing of our nation.