Splitsville CRIME AND PUNISHMENT?

The Newer-Than-Tomorrow Newsletter for fans of THE SPLIT

You may think it looks easy for us here at Splitsville to (as is our wont) divide the country into “two distinct nations occupying a single geo-political entity” or “border” or some goddamn thing. And it is! Watch.

Today we live in a country consisting of two nations: the nation of people sick to death of the Trump crime syndicate and praying for their punishment, and the nation of everybody else. We number ourselves among the former, as do you, most if not all of your (and our) loved ones, and decent people from sea to shining sea. Among the latter we find the sizable army of MAGA choads (or “chodes,” depending on your spelling preferences), members of the 1% who, bought off by his tax cuts, deny that he is going to tank the economy, mainstream media exex who think that coddling Trump is good for business, and assorted sadists, Nazis, Musk-loving incels, racists, imbeciles, and other members of the remains of the Republican Party.

Thatsa lotta assholes. So it is all the more incumbent upon us to proclaim, loud and proud (well, loud and nauseated), that Trump is a criminal, his KA’s (i.e., his entire administration) are accomplices, and they should all be arrested, tried, convicted, and thrown into the Black Hole of Calcutta, whatever and wherever that is.

(We just looked it up. Perfect!)

We find ourselves in this justice-dealing vein after reading two cracking-good, damn-smart pieces about just this very topic. You must read them, too. Begin with the excellent Jason Linkins, deputy editor of The New Republic, who never minces words and doesn’t slice, dice, finely chop, or mince them here, either:

Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.

Linkins then, well, links to a parallel piece by the even-more-terrific Jeb Lund who, writing in The Nation, repeats the theme:

I will vote for any Democrat who promises to prosecute every member of the Trump administration who can be prosecuted and to jail them for as long as the law allows.

To read the two in counterpoint is to alternate, as between the coarse and fine lenses of a microscope, in examining a record of depravity and criminality demanding comparison to those of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Here’s Linkins on the long view, as regards Trump’s cancellation of life-saving foreign aid:

As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.”

Add to that, this:

Back in March, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration’s decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively.

Imagine being indifferent to that—let alone being happy about it. Imagine wanting to “shrink the size of government” and, when fielding the suggestion that this or that program of foreign aid be canceled, not asking how many it will hurt. Or, worse, asking, and being indifferent to the answer. (“How many? “Three million, sir.” “Okay, what’s next?”)

Lund—and yes, both writers have the same initials; we’re sure it means nothing—details the crimes closer to home:

If you were to ring them up just on violations of data protections for people’s Social Security information, the indictment would start at over 330,000,000 counts. The number of federal workers fired illegally surely reaches into the tens of thousands. They are illegally impounding billions of dollars and illegally reaching into bank accounts to steal lawful deposits. They are using the Social Security Administration to pronounce thousands of people dead because they feel like they ought to be…They are using the Department of Justice to criminally harass critics of a Sieg Heil–ing automaker whose wares they’re advertising in the White House driveway. They are extorting private law firms, publishers, and broadcasters. They are gaming the markets and tipping off their pals, and they are selling a fraudulent financial instrument whose biggest buyers are rewarded with face time with a corrupt president. They are illegally arresting judges who inconvenience them with applications of the law. They are spending public moneys through the nose to kidnap legal residents and traffic them to a torture gulag in El Salvador, where they’re paying a criminal to detain them.

And this is the short version. He goes on. Lund ends a different paragraph about the Trump administration’s crimes with, “If you tried to tally them on a conventional home calculator, you’d get one of those results with a ‘^’ and an ‘E’ in it, like at some point the damn thing just gave up. The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.”

The thing is—But wait. There is more than one “thing.” (Michael Palin Spanish Inquisition Voice) Amongst the array of things that there are, are such diverse elements as:

· Everybody knows this—which means that everybody knows that everybody knows this. The corruption, the kidnappings, the extortions—they’re all taking place in the open. Why? Because Trump is playing to his base, a mob of cretins who want the modern world destroyed because they marinate in resentment and are too stupid to imagine how its destruction will affect them. When they find out, it will be too late. And, at Trump’s instruction, they’ll blame Biden.

· There is nothing the regime won’t try, because there is no reason for them to think they will have to pay a price for breaking the law. Why should they? The history of Trump’s first term was one of corruption and incompetence tolerated by the Republican Party and feebly sanctioned (in both meanings of that word) by such sober, judicious, impotent “institutionalists” as Merrick Garland and Robert Mueller—after which the Supreme Court rewarded Trump’s announced criminal-fascist intent with presidential immunity.

· Another reason Trump thinks he can maraud through legality and decency is that Republican impunity for criminal behavior goes back fifty years, to Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and was sustained by Democrats themselves during the eight catastrophic years of the George W. Bush administration of liars and war criminals. Even the sainted Obama urged us to “look forward, not backward.” (That’s what we’re going to say to the cops when they attempt to arrest us for our next crime wave. Or for what we’ve written.) Yes, the Dems voted to impeach Trump twice. We saw how that turned out.

· The mainstream media spent half of Trump’s first term pussyfooting around what was obvious to all—that Trump was and is a pathological liar—and is now according him the same consideration. Part of this consists of media oligarchs covering their asses. Another part stems from their desire to maintain “access,” although coddling liars to maintain access to their lies strikes us as the height of neurotic self-sabotage.

Previously in American history—in the cases of Leopold and Loeb, of Sacco and Vanzetti, of Bruno Hauptmann and the Lindbergh kidnapping, of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the controversy, the concern, and the campaigns were over the verdict. (And even Nixon was persuaded by Republicans to resign.) Today? We should live so long. In the face of blatant, mammoth, and obvious criminality, we’re left hoping against hope that at least some of these vile specimens will be charged with something.

Jeb Lund ends with this:

The only way to make the law matter again is to primary everyone, and do it ourselves. If you are running in a Democratic primary this year or the next, here are the words that will send me and millions more crawling over glass to give you money: I will wage holy war on corruption, from the Supreme Court to the sheriff’s office to every snot-nosed fascist with a DOGE lanyard; I will scourge these diseased kidnappers and killers and thieves from public life, and I will jail them long enough that all of us have the privilege of eventually forgetting them.

To which we’re all, Yes, please. Lock them up! Then throw away the key. Then find the key, show it to them, and make sure they see you throw it away again.

NB: We are pleased to announce that The Split has now been OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED. It is available in hardcover, softcover, and e-book formats, any or all of which you can access with the mere click of a “button.” Which button?

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