When Nixon fucked around he stepped down. In doing so, he said to the American people "what I did was wrong and I recognize that."
Trump won't admit wrongdoing. He's been indicted on fucking 90 counts. Until he is actually punished, his followers will only see that they can try to do the same.
Society needs to renounce him, fully, or were fucked.
Same could have been said if we had actually nailed Ronnie Raygun to the wall for Iran/Contra. Instead, we let him coast. And that was even worse than Watergate.
Republicans have been skating for years and years for their crimes.
Might’ve happened had there been a precedent for it. Same with all the war crimes for Cheney/Bush.
Instead they’re counting their money and fingerprinting.
Ford pardoned Nixon, so there wasn't much that could be done to punish Nixon after that. They couldn't even go after him at the state level since the Watergate scandal happened in DC. Pardoning Nixon was a major part of why Ford didn't get reelected, although there were several other major reasons for that.
I think part of the problem is that jailing him would just make him more powerful to his supporters. I honestly think Trump wants to be jailed for this shit.
But would his supporters see it that way? They're so innoculated against reality that they accept his narrative uncritically. They won't see it as consequences, because they don't see him as guilty.
I also don't think the effects on his supporters' beliefs should matter much to prosecution for his crimes. I can't imagine there's any way for that to have an effect that nudges them towards reality
I feel like you're arguing against a very different position that I hold/expressed? I don't think they'll do all that much differently than they were already going to. Trying to appease his supporters by tempering the justice for his crimes won't work, and will probably do more harm.
It would deplatform him and that's the best way to kill the movement for anyone but the most radical.
We can see that in Canada with the far right party that medias had the legal obligation to cover during the last campaign (because of high enough vote intentions based on surveys), after the campaign (and after not winning a single seat) their social medias lost 80% of its audience based on the number of likes and shares. The followers just stopped caring because they weren't all over the news anymore.
Get Trump off the news and off social media and his chance of winning the primary will become zero.
Why do we care about the karens who are still supoorting this guy? They'll cry about him being in jail and then get distracted by the next bit of ragebait. We have to stop treading on eggshells around these people.