So much for all hell breaking loose
The entire time Donald Trump was under criminal investigation, much of the media tried to convince us that 1) he wasn’t under criminal investigation, 2) he’d never be indicted even if he was under investigation, and 3) we shouldn’t want Trump to be indicted because if he ever went on trial it would mean the violent demise of our nation.
In reality the grand jury activity that was periodically spilling over into public view was enough to make clear that Trump was under investigation and on track for indictment, disproving claim number one. Then of course the indictments did start coming down, disproving claim number two. Now we have proof that claim number three was also nothing more than ratings-driven media hyperbole.
Donald Trump just spent five weeks on criminal trial, and no more than a small handful of his supporters ever bothered to show up. Even when they did, they were just flag waving idiots. And now that Trump has been found guilty, what’s come of it? Nothing. There’s no rioting in the streets. There’s no attempt at organized violence. There’s just a bunch of whining. That’s it.
This was, of course, always going to be the case. The only reason January 6th happened was that Trump abused the office of the presidency in order to steer law enforcement away. With Trump no longer in power, his supporters know that he can’t run interference for them, and that if they were to go up against law enforcement, they would simply lose. Right wingers are bully-cowards. They only make a move when they think the deck is stacked in their favor. When presented with a level playing field, they run and hide and whine. It’s their nature.
This is yet another instance where we were force fed a metric ton of doomsday hysteria about how Trump was never going to be held accountable in any way, and that it would somehow be worse for us if he were held accountable, yet it turned out to be 100% false. More to the point, it was obvious all along that it was false. We have to stop listening to the people who feed us this kind of doomsday hyperbole just to keep us tuned in. Vigilance means focusing on actual realistic threats, not fretting over hyperbolic nonsense.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report