AS expected, Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, was indicted by a grand jury in the State of Georgia for trying to overturn the election results of 2020 so he could remain in office.
The Georgia indictment is under a state RICO law usually reserved for criminal enterprises like the Mafia. The law contains a minimum sentence of five years, and anyone who seeks to obtain a pardon will need to first serve out the sentence (at least five years) and then petition for a pardon!
Georgia, with 16 electoral votes, was one of those states where Trump and his legal advisers tried their most darn best to change the results, so he could win the electoral votes and beat Joe Biden for the presidency. It must be remembered that in the US, a presidential candidate wins the presidency if he wins a majority of the electoral college votes that are apportioned to states on the basis of their population. This, in turn, means that states with the largest populations are critical but when the race is close every state becomes critical. And this is why Georgia (and Arizona) was a state targeted by Trump and his operatives in a post-counting effort to revise the tallies and make it appear they were won not by Biden but by Trump.
For most states it’s a winner-take-all rule: win the popular vote with even just a one-vote margin and you get all the electoral college votes. Biden won Georgia by 11,799 votes, 0.23% of the total votes cast. And that’s why Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger (a Republican) in January 2021, two months after the elections, asking the latter to help him look for 11,780 votes.
‘So yes, Trump the racketeer may easily win the Republican party’s nod, but he may find
the general election a totally different ballgame altogether.’
Biden won the presidency by winning 306 electoral votes (and 81.2 million popular votes) against Trump’s 232 (with 74.2 million popular votes).
The Georgia indictment is just the latest in a string of indictments issued by grand juries against the former president. Just a few weeks before, Trump was also indicted for his role in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol and tried to prevent the canvassing of votes and the proclamation of Joe Biden as the election winner. Both the attack on the Capitol and the interference in the Georgia tally are unprecedented in US election history.
That an outgoing President directed them makes the charges even more monumental.
But that Trump remains the hands-down favorite to win the nomination of the Republican Party for the 2024 US Presidential elections is depressing.
The party of Abraham Lincoln doesn’t mind that their frontrunner tried to overturn their democratic system. They don’t seem to care that he has been indicted many times over. And they seem more than happy to embrace him as their future – even though political developments since the 2020 elections seem to point to the fact that a considerable segment of Americans exists who are neither Democrat nor Republican and who are able to reject many Republican efforts that are more politically extreme (or at least politically inspired) than objective and fair.
So yes, Trump the racketeer may easily win the Republican party’s nod, but he may find the general election a totally different ballgame altogether.
I am keeping my fingers crossed.
