Commentators have long speculated on why millions of Americans remain fanatically committed to Donald Trump.       

There has been far less speculation on why so many law enforcers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s decades of criminality, if not treason.

Among those guilty:

• The Justice Department did not indict Trump for the series of threats he made—directly and indirectly—against Republicans and Democrats throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign. 
• The United States Secret Service did not charge him with threatening the life of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” 
• The Justice Department did not prosecute Trump for treason, even though he solicited aid from Russia, a nation hostile to the United States. On July 27, 2016. Trump publicly invited “Russia”—i.e., Vladimir Putin—to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

There are at least two reasons why Trump has been allowed to insult and even threaten prosecutors and judges without facing the punishment an ordinary citizen would:

Cowardice: They fear Trump will slander them by claiming he’s the victim of a “witch hunt” to remove him from the 2024 Presidential race.

And/or they fear physical attack from his legions of fanatical followers.

Awe of the Presidency:  They fear their careers will be tainted by prosecuting or judging a man who won the votes of 70 million Americans. 

There are, however, remedies for both cowardice and awe:

Cowardice:  Prosecutors and judges should expect threats and slanders from Trump. This is how he has traditionally responded to attempts to hold him legally accountable. 

If judges and prosecutors fear violence from Trump’s fanatical followers, they can easily obtain round-the-clock protection by local and/or federal law enforcement agencies.

Awe: Trump is no longer President. He no longer commands Presidential immunity nor the powers of that office—such as being able to cite “executive privilege” to prevent the release of documents or testimony.

His refusals to accept this reality should be bluntly ignored. 

More importantly, as President, he:

• Took no action to protect Americans from the deadly COVID-19 virus;
• Constantly sided with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the United States; 
• Attacked the independent judiciary and free press;
• Praised Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen;
• Fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to pledge his personal loyalty to Trump and turn the agency into Trump’s private police force;
• Used his position as President to further enrich himself in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution;
• Attacked and alienated America’s oldest democratic allies, such as Canada and Great Britain;
• Refused to accept the results of a legitimate Presidential election; and
• Incited a deadly attack on Congress so he could illegally remain in office.

Those are only some of the despicable actions he took while in office.

The Presidency has long held most Americans in awe. This is largely because the man (and it’s always been a man) who holds it is elected by all Americans, and not just those of a particular city or state.

And he alone has control of America’s enormous military—the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force—as well as a nuclear arsenal that can literally destroy all life on Earth.

Americans have long assumed that a victorious Presidential candidate has been blessed by God, and thus automatically commands a respect—if not reverence—denied to ordinary mortals.

But respect must be earned. And anyone guilty of even a small number of the crimes committed by Donald Trump long ago forfeited any right to such regard.

Once a President leaves office, he should be treated as any other American citizen—and held to the same standards as an ordinary citizen.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman and father of modern political science, has eloquently warned of the dangers of ignoring this truth: 

…No well-ordered republic should ever cancel the crimes of its citizens by their merits.  But having established rewards for good actions and penalties for evil ones, and having rewarded a citizen for conduct who afterwards commits a wrong, he should be chastised for that without regard to his previous merits.  And a state that properly observes this principle will long enjoy its liberty, but if otherwise, it will speedily come to ruin. 

For if a citizen who has rendered some eminent service to the state should add to the reputation and influence which he has thereby acquired the confident audacity of being able to commit any wrong without fear of punishment, he will in a little while become so insolent and overbearing as to put an end to all power of the law.  

Putting an end to “all power of the law” and setting himself up as “The Law” is precisely what Donald Trump tried to do after losing the 2020 Presidential election—and is still trying to do.

Donald Trump has lost the Presidential immunity shielding him from a wide range of civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.      

He now faces unprecedented challenges from a legal system that had long ignored his rampant criminality.

Thus, regaining that Presidential immunity is arguably the biggest reason why he wants to become President again. 

Although he no longer holds the Presidency, Trump repeatedly acts as though he does. He has asserted “executive privilege” on behalf of former members of his administration to block their testimony before courts, grand juries and even the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith.

He hid behind layers of Secret Service protection while attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and even New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over his arraignment and trial in the Stormy Daniels hush money payment case.

Juan Merchan

“The criminal is the district attorney because he illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury information,” Trump told supporters at Mar-a-Lago. “For which he should be prosecuted, or at a minimum he should resign.”

As for Merchan: “I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter work[ed] for Kamala Harris.”

In Trump’s vocabulary, “Trump-hating” is the absolute worst sin/crime that can be committed.

Another man he has attacked as a “Trump hater” is Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s also investigating Trump’s role in inciting his followers to attack Congress on January 6, 2021.

Jack Smith

The purpose of that attack: To stop the Electoral College vote count that would certify former Vice President Joseph Biden as the actual winner of the 2020 Presidential election.

In a July 4, 2023 post on his website, Truth Social, Trump falsely claimed:

“As my Poll numbers go higher & higher, the Communists, Marxists, & Fascists get more & more CRAZY with their ridiculous Indictments & Election Interference plans & plots, all controlled by an out of control, & very corrupt, DOJ/FBI. They have WEAPONIZED Law Enforcement in America at a level not seen before.”

Trump’s reference to “Communists, Marxists, & Fascists” as his enemies is particularly noteworthy. 

He was, after all, the President who:

• Defended Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against findings by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency that Russia had interfered in the 2020 Presidential election;
• Boasted that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un “fell in love” after an exchange of letters; and
• Praised Chinese strongman Xi Jinping for making himself “President-for-Life: “No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.” 

Given his subsequent efforts to remain in office despite losing the 2020 Presidential election, it’s clear that he had himself in mind when he “joked” about “giving that a shot some day.”

In his post, Trump continued: “Deranged Jack Smith, who is a sick puppet for A.G. Garland & Crooked Joe Biden, should be DEFUNDED & put out to rest. Republicans must get tough or the Dems will steal another Election. MAGA!”

By “A.G. Garland” Trump meant Attorney General Merrick Garland. By “put out to rest,” he meant that his followers should assassinate Smith.

Despite all this, Trump’s millions of Right-wing followers remain fanatically loyal to him.

Why?

On August 30, 2017, an article in Salon examined why Donald Trump’s base supports him so fanatically: “Most Americans Strongly Dislike Trump, But the Angry Minority That Adores Him Controls Our Politics.”

It described these voters as representing about one-third of the Republican party:

“These are older and more conservative white people, for the most part, who believe he should not listen to other Republicans and should follow his own instincts…. 

“They like Trump’s coarse personality, and approve of the fact that he treats women like his personal playthings. They enjoy it when he expresses sympathy for neo-Nazis and neo-Confederate white supremacists.

Supporters giving the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute to Trump

“They cheer when he declares his love for torture, tells the police to rough up suspects and vows to mandate the death penalty for certain crimes. (Which of course the president cannot do.)

“…This cohort of the Republican party didn’t vote for Trump because of his supposed policies on trade or his threat to withdraw from NATO. They voted for him because he said out loud what they were thinking. A petty, sophomoric, crude bully is apparently what they want as a leader.”

What is harder to explain is why so many law enforcers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s decades of criminality, if not treason. Among those who have: 

• Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates. After Bondi dropped the Trump University case, he wrote her a $25,000 check for her re-election campaign. The money came from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
• Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons. After the Texas case was dropped, Trump cut a $35,000 check to the gubernatorial campaign of then-attorney general and now Texas Governor Greg Abbott. 

On May 30, 2024 former President Donald Trump was convicted by a Manhattan jury of all 34 charges of falsifying business records  He thus became the first current or former president to be convicted of a felony.     

He’s also the first major-party presidential nominee to be convicted of a crime in the midst of a campaign for the White House.

On April 1, CNN reported/editorialized: “The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been investigating Trump in connection with his alleged role in a hush money payment scheme and cover-up involving adult film star Stormy Daniels that dates to the 2016 presidential election.”

Throughout the trial—which began on April 15—Trump aggressively attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as pursuing a leftist agenda to prevent him from running for President in 2024.

“If they can do this to me,” he has thundered in countless fund-raising appeals to his Right-wing followers, “they can do this to you.” 

Which raises the question: How many others have tried to illegally pay hush-money to a porn “actress” to silence her during a Presidential campaign?

Nor is that the end of Trump’s prosecutorial troubles.

On June 13, 2023, he became the first ex-President to be formally booked by the Justice Department on federal charges.

Seal of the Department of Justice

He’s now facing 40 felony charges based on his retaining and hiding classified government documents from authorities.

 These charges include: 

• Willfully retaining national defense information: Storing 31 classified documents at his estate at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.
• Conspiring to obstruct justice: Conspiring to keep those documents from the grand jury.
• Withholding a document or a record: Misleading one of his attorneys by moving boxes of classified documents so the attorney could not find or introduce them to the grand jury.
• Concealing a document in a federal investigation: Hiding Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago from the FBI and causing a false certificate to be submitted to the FBI.
• Scheme to conceal: Hiding his continued possession of documents from the FBI and the grand jury.

Donald Trump

Each charge carries a maximum fine of $250,000, with maximum prison sentences between five and 20 years.

According to Trump, facing 40 felony charges is “an honor because I’m doing it for you, I’m doing it for our country, to show how evil and sinister a place it has become. Make America great again! We’re not going to let them get away with it.”  

In short: To save America, Trump has volunteered for this indictment. He isn’t the one who illegally removed and tried to retain almost 300 highly classified documents. 

You did.

And he, like Jesus, is taking your sins upon himself.

Trump has repeatedly tried to make himself appear the victim of “a Democratic-led witch hunt.” But if politics has tainted the dispensing of justice in Trump’s case, it’s been on his behalf. 

As President, he had immunity from criminal and civil lawsuits. He couldn’t be tried at local, state and federal levels.

And he had good reason to avoid facing trial at any level. He was facing at least five cases while he held office:

• The Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal case against the Trump Organization: For  falsifying New York business records to conceal his hush money payoff to porn “star” Stormy Daniels for his extramarital tryst with her. 
• The New York Attorney General’s civil investigation into the Trump Organization: For engaging in years of financial fraud to obtain a host of economic benefits.
• The E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit:  For calling her a liar after she claimed he raped her in the 1990s. 
• The Mary Trump lawsuit:  For defrauding his niece out of millions of dollars.
• The Trump Tower lawsuit: Five people claim that Keith Schiller, the Trump Organization’s then chief of security, hit one of them on the head when they were protesting outside the company’s Manhattan headquarters in 2015. 

Since leaving the White House, Trump has seen additional cases pile up against him.  Among these:

• The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election.
• The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s inciting an attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.
• The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s illegally taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate and refusing to return them to the government.
• The House of Representatives’ January 6 lawsuit for trying to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021.
• The Eric Swalwell lawsuit by the California Representative for trying to block the Electoral College vote count.
• The Capitol Police January 6 lawsuits for emotional and physical injuries sustained by officers during the January 6, 2021 attack by Trump’s followers. 
• The Michael Cohen lawsuit by Trump’s former attorney and fixer. He claims Trump retaliated against him after he said he was writing a tell-all about his years working for Trump.
• The Class Action lawsuit against the Trumps [Donald, Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric] and their business. This alleges that “the defendants used their brand name to defraud thousands of working-class individuals by promoting numerous businesses in exchange for ’secret payments.’” 

Now his Presidential immunity is gone and he faces unprecedented challenges from a legal system that had long ignored his rampant criminality.