I read Prof. Gary Bass' Op-Ed in The New York Times on Monday about Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in l'affaires Trump, and particularly liked his lede. It gets right to it:

Donald Trump openly flatters foreign autocrats such as Vladimir V. Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and in many ways Mr. Trump governed as authoritarians do around the globe: enriching himself, stoking ethnic hatreds, seeking personal control over the courts and the military, clinging to power at all costs. So it is especially fitting that he has been notified that he may soon be indicted on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, by an American prosecutor who is deeply versed in investigating the world's worst tyrants and war criminals.

The piece is called “What Jack Smith Knows” and yesterday we found out some of what Jack Smith knows when he issued an indictment against Trump and six co-conspirators on the following charges:

• conspiracy to defraud the United States
• witness tampering and conspiracy against the rights of citizens
• obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

I.e., per the Times, Trump and Co. “employed a variety of means to reverse his defeat in the election almost from the moment that voting ended.” So what Jack Smith knows is what we all lived through two and a half years ago. Better, I guess, is what he can prove, and apparently he proved enough before a grand jury for them to recommend the charges.

NPR has a little aside in their article on the indictment that gets at the heart of it, too:

Trump, who has been summoned to appear in court on Thursday, is still the leading candidate in the Republican primary race.

We're in a court of law now, with the most serious charges you can level against someone who took the oath of office, and the press seems to have finally woken up to that fact. Slate's headline reads: “U.S. v. Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation's History,” and Peter Baker in the Times begins his analysis thus:

What makes the indictment against Donald J. Trump on Tuesday so breathtaking is not that it is the first time a president has been charged with a crime or even the second. Mr. Trump already holds those records. But as serious as hush money and classified documents may be, this third indictment in four months gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy.

Um ... yes? Glad to have you guys on board finally but please keep that thought in mind as you do your jobs in the months and years to follow.

But we're back to the shooting-someone-on-5th-Avenue thing. Yes, he's awful. For the millionth tiime he's awful. How do you make people see it? How do you make his support fall away? I still think the Jim Gaffigan approach is the best. Don't talk down. Talk level. “You know this... You know he's dangerous, that he lies, that he's trying to subvert democracy...” That probably didn't work either, but it's the best approach I've encountered.

It's sad to me that with all of the problems we need to focus on we have to waste time on this nothing windbag, this bloated egomaniac, this sad sack, chest-beating clown. But that's the job. Onward. 

I've got more reading to do.