Trump should be indicted. But...

Expect violence.

Two things can be true:

• Donald Trump should be indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

• Doing so is going to cause some major problems.

The first point may seem obvious to you. The Jan. 6 committee hearings have done a great job of filling in details and laying out a case against Trump, but the story it’s telling is one we’ve pretty much known since … well, Jan. 6. Donald Trump couldn’t handle a loss. He made up a lot of stories to pretend he hadn’t lost. A lot of people believed him. And they attacked the Capitol. Nothing about that story has really changed. We just have the emails now.

But the committee’s hearings do seem to have coalesced a sense among some reluctant observers that a Trump prosecution is needed.

Walter Olson🌻 @walterolson

With regard to prosecuting an ex-President, I’ve come around to the view (which I held out against for a long time) that the law should take its course and justice be done.

Walter Olson🌻 @walterolson

It seemed for a long time a happy aspect of American exceptionalism that we had never had to do this. But we are not so different from the rest of the world. We too are vulnerable to criminal conduct by a head of state, and need to deter it.

Some folks have resisted the idea of prosecution, because at root level Donald Trump is a political problem — he’s still got a lot of supporters — and the legal process isn’t going to dispose of that problem. That’s a decent point: We’re too far past the point of no return for an indictment to solve the bigger challenge of a GOP that seems to have embraced Trump’s authoritarian politics whole-heartedly. I’m not sure there’s anything that can solve that.

Which brings us to the second point.

I’m persuaded that Trump should be indicted. But we should realize that the indictment will probably serve as an invitation to civil war. At the very least, we can expect to see some major political violence.

Trump unleashed violence on Jan. 6 to keep a job he’d been fired from. You really think he wouldn’t do it again in an attempt to stay out of prison?

Remember what he said at the beginning of the year:

“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal," Trump said, "I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere. Because our country and our elections are corrupt."

I think we can safely put “protest” in square quotes. What he probably means is violence, rioting.

Even if Trump didn’t go out of his way to incite a fresh wave of right-wing violence, it might not matter. There are plenty of people willing to pull the trigger.

One in five adults in the United States, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some circumstances, a new mega-survey has found.

They discovered that mistrust and alienation from democratic institutions have reached such a peak that substantial minorities of the American people now endorse violence as a means towards political ends. “The prospect of large-scale violence in the near future is entirely plausible,” the scientists warn.

Remarkably, just over half of the sample group – 50.1% – agreed with the contention that in the next few years the US would confront another civil war.

A Trump indictment might just be the spark that lights the powder keg.

I’m not sure there’s any way out of this crisis, except through. To surrender to the threat of violence is to give up on the rule of law. Trump should be prosecuted because he committed crimes against American democracy, and if he’s not prosecuted he — and others like him — will just try again and again until the democracy is gone.

But there will be consequences. Some Americans will be hurt or killed as a result. We shouldn’t blind ourselves to that. There is no happy ending here, only painful necessities. God help us.

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