It’s okay to feel sick about this

Donald Trump is losing his criminal trial, in overwhelming fashion. He’s losing in the courtroom. He’s losing in the optics department. He’s losing politically. This couldn’t be going much worse for him. It’s what he deserves, and it’s what we all deserve. Yet even as satisfying as it is to watch him go down in this trial, I also find myself feeling unnerved.

What’s unique about this trial is that it isn’t covering the crimes he committed once he was in power, or the crimes he committed to try to stay in power, or even the crimes he committed once he was out of power. It’s covering the crimes he committed in order to get into power in the first place.

This trial is largely focused on what was going on in 2015 and 2016, back when Trump was still just a candidate, and the damage he was going to do hadn’t yet been done. Back then I was a nobody with no audience, just starting out in this line of work. I was pointing out that Trump’s campaign was being run like an ineffective joke, and that things seemed to be lining up for him a little too conveniently.

It stood out back than that whenever a Republican primary candidate would start to gain momentum and be on the verge of passing Trump in the polls, that candidate would suddenly be besieged with cartoonish scandals. The focus naturally tends to shift toward whoever in politics is surging. But this all seemed too on the nose. And while these other Republican candidates were terrible, many of the conveniently timed scandals surfacing about them seemed to be exaggerated or fictional. I wrote at the time that something seemed off. I just didn’t know what.

I also remember seeing the Access Hollywood tape emerge, and thinking that we were about to see Trump subjected to what always happens to serial sexual predators once one big story breaks about them. I remember waiting for the inevitable other women to come forward. I recall writing how odd it was that it didn’t happen, though I didn’t know why.

Now here we are, eight years later, and Donald Trump’s own associates are on the stand at his criminal trial, confessing in detail about how they were rigging all of this. Trump and Pecker were indeed criminally conspiring to promote fake stories about whichever Republican candidate was surging at the time. And the reason we didn’t hear from the other women post-Access Hollywood was because Trump and his pals criminally conspired to keep them silent.

We’re now getting final, belated, definitive, official confirmation that everything we suspected was hinky back in 2015 and 2016 was indeed hinky. No scratch that, it wasn’t hinky. Lots of things in politics are hinky. This was – to the extent that you’re allowed to use this word these days when it comes to election – rigged.

We knew 2016 was rigged. We knew it at the time. It was what’s coming out in this trial, it was Wikileaks and Russia, it was the Comey letter. It was all of it. Now Trump’s own people are on the stand confessing to the crimes they helped Trump commit in the name of altering the outcome of the 2016 election. It’s total vindication for those of us who knew back then that something was off. But a fat lot of good that vindication is doing us.

See, that’s why this trial keeps periodically hitting me in a bad way. I can’t help but tell myself that if I’d have had a bigger voice back then, or if I’d found some better way to get the point across that I was trying to make, maybe it would have broken through, and maybe this would have all been exposed before election day. And while it’s nonsense to blame myself for the thing not enough people were willing to listen to me about, it’s still human nature. It’s more than a bit of a gut punch to find out that you were right about something all along, and that it doesn’t even matter, because the damage was done anyway.

But here’s the thing. Donald Trump is going down in this trial, and he’s going down in his next trial, and the next one after that. The legal system is going to bury this guy, and his own dementia might get him before that anyway. He’s going to get his. I’m not worried about that. But I’m also not about to let this bastard get away with any more damage than he’s already gotten away with.

The only way to do that is to come out swinging in this election. It’s not enough to simply defeat the rotting carcass that is Donald Trump. We have to run up the score. We have to win so decisively that President Biden has a clear mandate in his second term (and a House and Senate), and that Trump’s tired base gives up and crawls back under its rock.

We can’t undo the past. Nothing about this trial, no matter how cathartic, how vindicating, how record-setting-straight it might be in nature, is going to change the fact that the years since have happened. All we can control is what happens next, and we do that by adopting the correct mindset now. As much as the rehashing of 2016 makes me tempted to feel ill – and may be making you feel the same – at the end of the day what it’s really doing is motivating me to fight even harder and keep winning. Our nation needs the wins to keep coming for awhile. So let’s use this trial as fuel and go make it happen.