Reaction
Just as it is in sports, the first blow doesn't always draw the whistle and the flag, it is the retaliation the referee sees.
It is easy to look at Donald Trump and say he broke American politics.
It's the Alinsky way - pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
That they did, and are still doing, largely because it works.
But Trump didn't break anything.
Trump doesn't have a DOJ suing everybody within earshot of a rally or speech. He doesn't have judges sentencing people who trespassed or "paraded" to more time than people convicted of assault. Trump isn't cancelling people and ruining their careers because they supported Hillary or Biden. He isn't filing civil suits against Biden or his family and states aren't changing laws so Obama can be sued the way New York did to allow the E. Jean Carroll suit. No Republican special prosecutors or County DA's are stomping on the Constitution as they lead partisan grand juries by the nose to create charges out of whole cloth.
The REACTION to Trump broke politics.
If you strip away the completely insane reactions to him - including the complete and constant "two year old in the toy store" temper tantrum from the left - his presidency is pretty standard stuff. Not a lot different from Clinton, Bush or Obama. Trump was never a militant conservative, but we live in a time when any policy not explicitly statist is defined as "destroying democracy", ergo Trump = Hitler.
Obama's reign vested in the Democrat Party a vision they would rule forever. Obama was insulated from criticism and untouchable, racism was the defense for everything. Hillary was supposed to be next, Her Foulness would be protected by charges of sexism.
Obama was one first, a black president, Hillary was to be the second first, the female glass ceiling breaker.
Trump and his support wrecked all that, truncating the Democrat push for the World Series of Politics and exposing them as neither black nor female, just garden variety statist Democrats with a superiority complex.
Trump must be made to pay for his heresy.
As I have said, they won't stop because they can't stop. Their identities, their motivation, and their unrelenting Inspector Javert quest make up their reason for existing.
The Democrat Party has become the modern version of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and they spend their time inventing new tortures designed to make their opposition confess and the more people resist, the more they turn the crank on the rack.
This will not end well because it can’t.
The Spanish Inquisition was only ended when the power of those who had perverted the teachings of Catholic Church to gain power, riches, and influence was broken. Something like that is required to break the power of those behind the same motivations within the Democrat Party.
They are so utterly scared spitless by Trump that they seem willing to do ANYTHING to stop his likely candidacy, including barratry to bend the laws like pretzels to trap him. Who knows? Perhaps even suspension of the elections upon the plea of some contrived “national emergency?” Assassination? What else?
Sir Thomas Moore asked his fellows at court rhetorically “Would you break all the laws in order to catch the Devil?” When they answered “Aye!” he responded, “Then by which laws could you then try him?”
Today’s “progressives” do not have half the wits of Thomas Moore’s contemporaries and fail to see that their crafting of tactics of questionable legality removes not only Trump from the protections of the rule of law but removes themselves from them as well. For when the temptation comes to turn against rivals within their own ranks, or for them to be turned upon, the have created the precedents for their own undoing.
"Something like that is required to break the power of those behind the same motivations within the Democrat Party."
The big question is, from *where* will the "something like that" come. It certainly won't be the GOP which altogether has as much spine as an overcooked noodle. We, the people, have to rescind their authority, authority that they have pilfered to take them so far beyond the bounds of the Constitution as to leave it in shreds. The problem is, the GOP is, at least tacitly, just as guilty. It has to be us. Which brings us to an even more pointed question: how do we do it? Would the people vote these evildoers out even if they were able? And are they able, or have elections become as corrupt as those in power, and the system incapable of expressing the will of the people?
I think we all need to prepare ourselves for the rack.