Donald Trump tried to overturn the result of a free and fair election. For that alone he should be behind bars, of either a prison or a mental institution. In addition, on December 6, 2022 a New York jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 tax fraud charges.
For good reasons, in November 2020, Donald Trump got fired by the majority of American voters. Already before the election took place, President Trump made remarks that made it increasingly clear that for him, there was only one possible and acceptable outcome of the 2020 presidential election: his reelection.
One narrative was an imaginary “voter fraud” based on the fact that Democrats use postal voting aka mail-in voting more than Republicans, which means that, on election night, Republican candidates look better than in the end, after all mail-in ballots have been counted.
Donald Trump did not just prematurely and falsely claim that he had won, spread lies about widespread, systematic voter fraud, he went futher. For instance on January 2, 2020 he made a one-hour phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican with the task to oversee the elections in the State of Georgia. Raffensperger taped the call; audio and transcripts available on the web. Immediately, Donald Trump made the false claim: “… I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia.” It is unclear if Donald Trump really believed his many false fraud claims made in the phone call but Trump made clear that Raffensperger should find enough votes to make him win in the State of Georgia.
Late on December 19, 2022 local time, after a roughly 18-month inquiry into Donald Trump’s final days in the White House, a United States congressional committee inquiry composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans came to the (political) conclusion (with no legally binding power) that Donald Trump should face four charges: inciting, assisting, aiding or comforting an insurrection; obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to make a false statement.
The congressional January 6th committee came up with a unanimous, non-binding decision and released a 154-page executive summary of its investigation. But it’s up to the Justice Department to decide whether to charge Trump.
The congressional committee rightly suggested that Donald Trump and some in his administration tried to stop Joe Biden from becoming the next U.S. president by, for instance, inciting a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6th; the congressional panel named Trump’s last chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as his lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro as potential co-conspirators. Donald Trump publicly made dozens of false statements, saying and tweeting that he had won the election, claiming (without any proof) that there was massive, systematic voter fraud. The Justice Department should be able to show that Donald Trump is a criminal who tried to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Democracy is at stake. Donald Trump belongs behind bars. Full stop.
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Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, 2017. Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead.
Article added on December 20, 2022 at 13:24 Swiss time.
