The American media complex is never going to fully accept that it created a situation where Trump could be president and usher in four straight years of criminal activity. It will never accept that it looked at the Clintons and the Trumps and said that one was unacceptable and one was perfectly fine because it brought in better ratings. We're never going to see them admit they were wrong.
What we do need to understand is that dislodging these people from power will take the full weight of the criminal justice system. It is no easy thing to get a Republican politician out of office by shaming them into resignation. They just don't understand the basic concept of shameful conduct in office. Their Dear Leader had plenty of chances to resign for the good of the country and he said fuck it and never did.
Ben Rhodes is on to something here:
Mediocre people don't cross state lines and have sex with teenage girls. They don't assault women at beauty pageants. They don't rape and extort and carry on brutal relationships with damaged individuals. They don't steal millions of dollars and align themselves with the Russian government. And they certainly don't act or look like Trump or Matt Gaetz. Oh, good Lord. If they were mediocre we could certainly handle them.
No, these are extraordinarily talented grifters and con-artists. They are playing the media like the Devil wields a fiddle. Look at every Sunday show. You'd think it was 2013 all over again. The Trump people are not collapsing so much as they are growing a newer, slimier exoskeleton that will allow the media to see them as possible statesmen and sober realists when they are, in fact, just the same old screaming bags of ambulatory meat that couldn't govern this country if they tried. They have figured out how to make our system of government ring like a cash register that is permanently ejecting cash money into the air. They are also stupid enough to think they'll never get caught. That's the flip side of our experiment with four years of Trump.
It was all a vast criminal enterprise. There was nothing more to it than that.
This so-called "long run" is what I agree with. American politics is a long haul, a view into the past that allows us to see how people and character will develop over time. You can look at Joe Biden and see a man who failed to win the presidency twice or you could look at someone who had to go through fire to be ready to win it at the most critical juncture of American history. Biden's belief in always trying to get better "in the long run" is why people are now being vaccinated and treated rather than dying abandoned in their homes. It's why we have some hope instead of four more years of watching criminals run out the door with money drifting through the air behind them.
It is nothing to see a Democrat forced to resign or tried and convicted. No one screams about conspiracies and gets the media to see it their way. When the Republicans begin to appear before judges and when the indictments start, you'll see a version of reality that will harden in the media--this is revenge, not justice. This is the criminalization of political ideology. It's flat wrong, of course, but we're going to need to build more jails before this is all over.