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To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".
Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).
I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.
But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.
It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.
But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.
I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.
Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.
This is not even close to the same. First, he was term limited. Second, he was an insider whose father was CIA director, VP, and President. Third, he was never at risk of being prosecuted and he knew it.
He was in the club, and Trump wasn't, and isn't. There are no rules to a crooked gave, or at least none worth respecting.
I said before and will say again, Trump's original sin for which he cannot atone and will never be forgiven is that he's an outsider. He steamrolled through the Republican party and then bowled through the anoited Hillary in the general. He laid waste to the carefully curated options that were supposed to limit American choices in our elections.
His impeachment came well before 2021, and from day zero he was hounded by bogus claims and fabricated narratives. Trying to explain everything that happened before by what happened after is exactly backward. The lawfare was a continuation of everything from the Steele dossier, the Mueller report, and his first impeachment. It was nothing new in response to the 2020 election.
It also had nothing to do with NY passing a law to extend the statute of limitations to drag him into court and call him a rapist.
The insiders literally bragged about fortifying the election in the immediate aftermath, which helps explain the six million missing voters the Democrats lost from 2020 to 2024. The sheer arrogance still boggles the mind.
It's insider vs outsider, and now Trump is withholding benefits from those insiders and their organs, as is his right as executive. This is against the unwritten rules, but it's well within the written ones, and it'sthus far tame and bloodless. Nobody is in jail, nobody is being prosecuted, nobody is dying in the streets or falling off balconies (except Michael Hastings and Trevor Moore).
Finally, it's tyrants that we should be worried about. Dictators have always been necessary on occasion, and America has had its fair share of muscular Presidents.
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