By the time you’re seven years old, you know how it’s going to go.
A crime is being committed. The crack team is on the case. Cel animation artifacts line the next door to open in an endless funhouse chase. Pretty Mary Sunlight, she’s alright with me. Through a series of semi-smart deductions and bumbling failures, Mystery Incorporated bags the baddie and pulls off their ghoul mask to reveal some schmuck (frequently a real estate developer). Notably, you almost never see them go to jail.
Living through Donald Trump’s second term is a bit like catching an afternoon block of Hanna-Barbera. Each day we’re shown a more cartoonish and evil crime. The perpetrators are as brazen as their guilt is obvious. Democrats and institutionalists hem and haw. Republicans deflect and deny until the smoking gun is produced. Everybody moves on and we start back at one. Cue the bats.
The Jeffrey Epstein ruckus has felt different, if only because the GOP has been forced to acknowledge it. Driven mad by the (gh-gh-gh-)ghost of the late sex trafficker, Trump has lost a bit of his unflappable nature. He hasn’t been able to move on to the next scheme. For a dissembler and con man like Trump, stopping must feel like death, something that never made it into the crime-ridden but groovy worlds of Scooby-Doo, Jabberjaw or Speed Buggy.
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That’s just our suspension of disbelief, though. In the same way we buy a skull-faced astronaut haunting an airfield, we have to believe there are consequences for actions in a country with laws. We live in a world where the Paradise and Panama Papers are publicly available. We live in a country where hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol attempting to steal an election by force were all pardoned. The highest arbiter of what is just and lawful gave the president a free pass to do crimes. The real estate scams continue and are handsomely rewarded. The sheriffs look the other way.
Outside of ICE agents, the majority of people participating in this administration’s rampant lawlessness are unmasked. The only solution left is to break the repetition of politics as usual and level actual consequences for the people who abet Trump’s crimes. We’re ready, we’re willing and we can’t go back to the van until we see the villains behind bars.
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