The cross-burning next time
By 
Dahlia Lithwick is excellent on the very perilous time the country is entering, not because the latest indictment of Trump isn’t justified but because it is:
It’s impossible to read the third (but probably not final) indictment of former President Donald J. Trump without feeling that something is profoundly different, and also deeply worrying, this time around. In some sense, the crimes he is accused of have ascended—or perhaps descended—from the workaday efforts of your average real estate mogul to secretly pay off an adult film actor in the Manhattan filing, to the Three Stooges document shufflings of a dumb guy and his valet attempting to hide stolen tchotchkes and sundry nuclear secrets from federal investigators in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, to a deeply serious and frighteningly over-lawyered attempt to steal a presidency and violate the rights of tens of millions of American voters.
If history truly does repeat itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the sad conclusion to this past week’s legal filings is that the farcical happened first, and even second, but the third time was in fact deadly serious. And that arc signals that the most serious violence of Trumpism could be yet to come.
Commenters have noticed that the giddy rubbernecking around the Alvin Bragg indictment and arraignment last April had largely fallen away by the time the former president arrived in a D.C. federal courthouse this week. No slapstick memes about bathroom chandeliers, no adolescent snickering about presidential genitalia and prison garb. To read this week’s 45-page indictment is to be freshly gutted by the events chronicled by the Jan. 6 committee report, and to be vaulted back into the days and weeks in which it seemed entirely possible that Trump would refuse to leave office, and that his most ardent supporters would gleefully provide him the violent assist.
Adam Serwer writes that the difference this time is that Republicans who could bat away financial misconduct and the retention of classified government documents are now claiming that it’s not a coup if a Republican does it.
The Serwer piece is excellent as well — I might do another post on it.
Since we could use some comic relief right now, I will conclude by pointing out that the Dersh is now officially more fash-friendly than Bill Goddamn Barr. What an age we live in! What’s next, Glenn Greenwald palling around with and promoting Nazis?