Josh Marshall: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It: "The greatest conceit in public life today is the notion that we don’t already know President Trump is guilty... of... conspiring... with a foreign power... and then continuing to cater to that foreign power either as payback for the assistance or out of fear of being exposed...
...a national betrayal that may break some statute laws but which far transcends them and isn’t in the past but is rather on-going.... These are... simply political questions, meant in the sense that the country must make decisions about President Trump’s conduct and and whether he can be trusted with the truly vast powers of the Presidency. The relevant concept is consciousness of guilt.... From the very beginning the President has used every power at his disposal to stop investigations into what happened....
In ordinary life, such flagrant and on-going efforts to prevent the truth from coming out are a clear sign of guilt. We rightly demand a higher standard before the criminal law because that is about taking away someone’s liberty. That’s not the case here. We’re only talking about taking away or restrain the power we have given him to use on our behalf....
Trump is guilty. Why there’s such resistance to this reality is an interesting question. My own best guess is that it is too disquieting a reality to grapple with. Someone who has deliberately betrayed his country and who is compromised by and under the thumb of a foreign despot clearly should not be President. But his supporters don’t accept that. And as long as they don’t there’s no path to removing him from power prior to 2020 and maybe even beyond. That means that for the present we are locked in a situation in which we must operate in a system in which the person with the most power is working for a foreign adversary, whether out of avarice or fear. That is a profoundly uncomfortable reality. Remaining agnostic on the big question is more comfortable.
That’s my theory. But my theory, the why, doesn’t really matter. The fact that the reality is real and that it’s too hard for many to accept is what matters...
#shouldread
