Donald Trump: innocent until proven guilty

Donald Trump disgusts me. He is repugnant.

I loathe the damage he has done to my country and its future.

I have contempt for the legion of cowards and cynics who abandoned their country in a moment of crisis to seek his favor and advance their self-interest. Whether it is the depravity of Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Zucker, who whored himself to Trump for ratings, hedge fund titans like Steve Schwarzman, who bankrolled a fascist movement for one more dollar, or Lindsey Graham, whose neediness for attention obliterated his oath of office for relevance, my contempt is immeasurable.

According to Donald Trump, I was the very first person on American television who saw that he could win. I dismissed the conventional wisdom that said he was a clown and a joke. I have always taken him both literally and seriously.

I was sitting on an MSNBC set during the Republican convention in 2016 during Michael Flynn’s speech where the “Lock Her Up” chant first broke out. I described it as “banana republicanism:”

The American people elected a sick, corrupt and incompetent man to the presidency of the United States. In May 2020, I talked about the damage inflicted on the country by Donald Trump. The consequences will play out for decades to come:

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This is brutal

I have long argued that Donald Trump is both a symptom and a cause of America’s decay. The simple truth is that no healthy democracy would ever elect such a man. A decent society doesn’t tolerate lie machines like Fox News, or conmen like George Santos in their parliaments and congresses.

In September 2020, I predicted the consequences and dangers of what would happen if Donald Trump refused to concede an election. The violence could be seen coming from a hundred miles away:

Leading up to the 2020 election, I decided to do something about it. I resigned from a lucrative corporate board and left my analyst job with MSNBC. I shut down my consulting business, and wound down my client relationships. I founded the Lincoln Project, which raised nearly $100 million, and accumulated a billion dollars’ worth of impact in the fight against Trumpism.

Despite the smears and accusations from the corrupt right-wing media, ineffective Democratic Party SuperPACs, unstable internet trolls and access media journalists, the Lincoln Project spent more than 80 per cent of every dollar raised on voter contact programs. It deeply destabilized Trump while I was involved.

My opposition to Donald Trump led directly to FBI agents arriving at my house to tell me about a bomb threat. Boxes filled with human excrement routinely arrived at my house where my children sleep. I was routinely threatened and smeared as a pedophile. I was held responsible for another man’s secret life and harassment about which I had no knowledge. I was forced to move when Fox News and the Associated Press published outrageously dishonest news stories claiming that I had purchased a home with Lincoln Project funds — even though I had bought it in 2018, two years before the Lincoln Project was conceived — and then also published my address.

I am not cataloguing these things because I want thanks or credit — though it meant a great deal when President-elect Biden called me after the election, and said he felt like I had played a key role in his victory. I am saying these things because I am about to make an important point — and I want to remind people of my bonafides to make it on the eve of Donald Trump’s long-overdue arrest.

Donald Trump is innocent.

Let me say it again. Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty.

This moment requires restraint from Donald Trump’s fiercest and most committed antagonists, of which I am certainly one. This moment requires Trump’s most ferocious opponents to be better than his most committed fanatics. This moment requires those of us who despise Trump the most to be the loudest voices for his constitutional rights to due process.

Though he disgusts me — and you — he has rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States. Trump’s attempt to burn the US Constitution to ashes does not exempt him from its protections.

We have arrived at an hour that is no cause for celebration. It is a tragedy.

Revenge is not justice anymore than is vengeance. This moment of tragedy and shame has been a long time coming, and now it is here. An American president will be handcuffed, fingerprinted and processed as an accused criminal.

We are a nation of laws, and the days ahead will test America. We live in a land where no person is above the law, including Donald Trump. Yet, we are also a nation where no person should be targeted by the law for the achievement of a political end, or the aggrandizement of a prosecutor’s ambitions.

The entire world will be watching. The American justice system must rise to the occasion in a way that our broken political system has failed to do over the last eight years. Putting the country first in this matter requires abandoning every preconception about what Trump did or didn’t do. A jury of his peers will decide his guilt or innocence. That’s the way it works.

One of America’s two major political parties has detached itself from core tenants of liberalism and democracy. The abandonment of them by the only political party America has left that believes in America will be a disaster as great as Trump’s presidency — and then some. It would mean that we have lost the country to Donald Trump, the most vile of men.

Being better is hard. These will be hard weeks and months ahead, indeed.