The Fall of the American Republic: A Look Back from the Future

Editors' Note: They say that daily journalism is the first draft of history.  As America faces the most critical election since 1860, we thought we'd get a real historical perspective, since the first drafts we are reading every day are frankly pretty sh***y.  Therefore, we had to peer into the future and read what real historians wrote with the benefit of hindsight.  Today we offer an excerpt from the standard reference work, The Decline and Fall of the American Democracy 1968-2024 by the esteemed Professor of Western History at Harvard University of Korea, Prof.  Dong Geura-Mi, published by The Consortium of American University Presses in Exile in 2065.

Chapter 24

Those who were young in the autumn of 2024 will tell you that it was a golden time.  The weather, except for two serious hurricanes caused by climate change and its denial by the Republican Party, was warm and sunny from coast to coast.  Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration, the American economy was humming, with real income growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.  In many cities, gasoline (the primary source of automotive energy then) fell below $3.00 a gallon.

On those fall weekends, hundreds of thousands flocked to America's gigantic pro-college football stadiums to thrill to the spectacle of young men crippling themselves for the entertainment of millions.  In baseball, the World Series featured the marquee match-up of the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

If you lived in one of the 43 U.S. states whose votes did not count for the Presidential election because they were not closely divided under the peculiar rules of the American Electoral College, you might have been able to ignore the election.  Almost one-third of Americans did, failing once again to vote, as turnout reached about 68%.

Feb. 2025: Immigrants are rounded up and detained

The actual electoral count failed to lead to a clear victor.  The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, won the popular vote by over 3,000,000 over Republican Donald Trump.  But it availed her not.  In a shock, she lost the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina by a mere 20,000 votes each.

The first complete count in Georgia gave Harris a 12,000 vote lead.  However, the Republican Governor and Legislature of Georgia moved quickly to purge voter rolls of those they claimed might not have been U.S. citizens.  In some counties, Republican election boards and operatives selectively challenged mail-in ballots on the grounds of alleged mismatches between the signatures on the ballot and on the registration cards.  As a result, Republicans invalidated some 40,000 ballots and called into question the reliability of the vote count.

Claiming that it was impossible to declare a winner based on the popular vote, the Georgia Legislature certified its own slate of Trump electors to the Congress.

The furor was tremendous.  For all of November and December, lawyers maneuvered to challenge electors in Georgia and other states.  However, the Democrats had failed to capture the House by one vote and lost their Senate majority.

June 2025: SG Giuliani urges
the Court to ban abortion medication

As was the case in 2000, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court decided that Trump had won a majority of the electors and even if he had not, he would nonetheless win a House vote, which under the Constitution was decided by a majority of the states.  Therefore, in a 6-3 vote, Chief Justice Roberts declared that in the interests of “finality,” Trump had won a second term.

Trump's allies on the Republican right had prepared well.  Even as Trump gave an angry speech to a sullen crowd on Inauguration Day, his aides promulgated a series of executive orders and commands.

By the end of day on January 20, Trump had called out the Army and National Guard units to begin rounding up the 400,000 undocumented immigrants with unexecuted removal orders.  He stripped civil service protections from millions of federal workers.  He reinstituted his immigration bans.  

Most shocking to the benumbed populace, he announced a ban on the sale and distribution of abortion medication under the Comstock Act, and used the National Guard to raid health care facilities and impound stocks of the drugs.

The reaction was immediate.  Close to a million descended on Washington to protest the attacks on abortion rights.  But Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Stephen Miller had mobilized thousands of heavily armed troops and paramilitary forces and told them to use whatever force was needed to keep the streets clear.  The show of force intimidated the marchers, who remained peaceful.

It was a harbinger of much worse to come.  Acting Attorney General Jeff Clark ordered all U.S. Attorneys and staff-level lawyers to prioritize prosecutions of abortion pill providers and those giving sanctuary to noncitizens without immigration status.  When hundreds of Justice Department lawyers refused, they were summarily fired and replaced by new hires working directly for Acting Deputy Attorney General Alina Habba.

Soon the number of noncitizens subject to deportation grew by the millions, as Trump revoked all TPS and DACA designations, taking away legal status from those who had lived in the United States for years, and in many cases decades.

The Supreme Court's reversal of the right to gay marriage in 2025 and upholding of state bans on medical gender transitioning ushered in a new era of oppression of LGBTQ individuals, many of whom left the United States for Canada or Europe.

Trump's imposition of 100% tariffs on imports from China and 20% tariffs on all other imports caused economic chaos. As the cost of those tariffs was passed on to consumers, inflation spiked to 8%.  The retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and the EU led to disastrous falls in farm income and higher unemployment in export-driven industries.

Trump moved with similar dispatch in foreign policy.  With Michael Flynn returning as his National Security Adviser, he immediately terminated US aid to Ukraine and withdrew the United States from NATO.  Although the European NATO members tried to make up the shortfall, Ukraine was forced to accept a humiliating peace which led to its full absorption by Russia in 2030.  

Nov. 2026: unarmed and defenseless, Ukraine sues for peace

Impulsively, Trump agreed to fly to Moscow to celebrate with Putin the Ukraine cease fire deal.  No details emerged from their meeting, but shortly thereafter Putin transferred his exhausted but victorious troops to new positions bordering the Baltic States.  The results of the Baltic War of 2033-37 are outside the scope of this volume, but it is not too much to say that the map of Europe was remade for generations.

In the Middle East, Trump approved the Israeli plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank, but backed down when Saudi Arabia threatened to boycott US businesses and awarded Trump a lucrative contract to build a luxury golf resort on the Red Sea.

But the American home front was seething.  The families and friends of immigrants began to resist the National Guard roundups of newly-undocumented noncitizens. In some places, they armed themselves with assault weapons and faced down the Guardsmen.  Some of the troops backed down, but others, principally from the Texas and Florida National Guard, shot and killed armed and unarmed resisters alike.

As out of state federal forces invaded so-called blue states such as California and Massachusetts, their governments tried to resist and frustrate the roundups of immigrants and abortion providers.  Generally they were unsuccessful, especially after the Supreme Court upheld Trump's use of the Insurrection, Alien Enemies, and Comstock Acts.

Trump's massive and near-fatal 2026 stroke was regarded by his opponents as a chance for a fresh start.  They were wrong.  New President JD Vance, installed under the 25th Amendment, and his Chief of Staff Elon Musk continued the clampdown and even extended it.  Vance won re-election in 2028 and held the Senate after easing the pain of inflation with $10,000 checks bearing his picture, and the pattern was set.

Over time, the new Republican regime consolidated its power.  Justices Alito and Thomas were replaced by Aileen Cannon and James Ho, keeping a reactionary Republican majority in firm control of the Supreme Court.  In the 2030's the Court remade the administrative state by holding that independent agencies like the SEC and the NLRB violated the concept of a “unitary executive.” 

The toll these antidemocratic changes took on once powerful American institutions was immense.  Independent media outlets like The Washington Post and the liberal-leaning MSNBC network were closed down by their frightened proprietors, while others, like CNN and The New York Times, limited their criticism of government policies under the rubric of “occupying a neutral ground.”

March 2027: Florida college students seemingly
not bothered by loss of academic freedom

American universities were hard-hit by new regulations tying government aid, including federal student aid and loans, to compliance with vague guidelines intended to assure representation of conservative views.  Between those laws and others limiting medical and biological research in accordance with hard-right Catholic metaphysics, many simply found themselves unable to function. 

The richer schools opened satellite campuses in cities like Berlin, London, Tokyo, or Seoul, where academics out of favor with the American regime could teach and write without fear of persecution.  Some in deep red states actually picked up and moved to less oppressive states, like Houston's Rice University, which built a new campus in Los Alamos, New Mexico and sold its impressive Texas facilities to the newly-formed Musk University.

The economic stagnation and restrictions on liberty made living in the United States stultifying.  Before she left America to reside permanently in France in 2040, diarist Malia Obama recalled how even her parents were no longer optimistic about the future of their country....

Just a reminder that the last day to vote is Tuesday, November 5. It could be your last one ever.

Advice from Masters of the Universe: Let's make Harvard the next Steward Health Care!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell

With the future of American democracy hanging by a thread (a few thousand voters in maybe seven states), let's turn to something really important: Harvard!

What's been going on in 02138 since the torrent of violence turned Harvard Yard into a re-enactment of the Kishinev Pogrom, at least according to the accounts of very credible Likudniks shrieking over having to confront Palestinians and others who don't share their views about the invasion of Gaza?

One bright spot is you won't have to hold that yard sale to support the University.  Its endowment grew to $53,200,000,000, a reasonably tidy sum, representing a 9.6% increase over June 30, 2023, thanks to the geniuses at the Harvard Management Company.  Of course, if Harvard simply moved the stash into an institutional S&P 500 Index Fund, it could have earned 23% (4416 to 5460), but then they would be investing just like any old dentist and not like a Master of the Universe.

Speaking of those private equity and other finagling Masters of the Universe, how are they doing?  Former genius Eddie Lampert who turned not one but two legendary names in American retail (Sears and Kmart) into rubble had to close the last Kmart in America this week:

The last full-size Kmart in the mainland U.S. in Bridgehampton, New York will close its doors on Sunday. Kmart was once America's second-largest retailer, but a bankruptcy filing in 2002 along with the rise of online shopping doomed the chain. pic.twitter.com/YjMs0gVGl5

— CBS Saturday Morning (@cbssaturday) October 19, 2024

Don't wory about old Eddie though – he stripped every dime out of those franchises before they cratered! 

Of course, the private equity geniuses who pulled the same stunt on eight Massachusetts hospitals got off scott free as well.  The good citizens of Dorchester, Norwood, and Ayer were left without their beloved and needed hospitals, but there were some winners too, like those deserving lawyers:

Lawyers for Steward Health Care were awarded more than $36 million — or more than $420,000 per day in fees — for their work on the first three months of the company’s bankruptcy case.

New York-based law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges filed a request Tuesday for reimbursement of $36,255,939.14 for fees and expenses, which included rates for attorneys billing as much as $2,350 per hour. Other rates included $750 per hour for a law clerk, and up to $595 per hour for paralegals.

The rates “are no greater than the rates Weil charges for professional and paraprofessional services rendered in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy related matters,” the firm said in its filing. “Such fees are reasonable based on the customary compensation charged by comparably skilled practitioners in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy matters in a competitive national legal market.”

Well, that makes it OK! In fact it's a small price to pay for screwing over all those injured by Steward's malfeasance, if you ask – the lawyers!  (PS: the bankruptcy judge rubber-stamped the payday.)

Now the private equity geniuses who made Sears and Steward what they are today have turned their attention to another venerable institution desperately in need of their advice, Harvard:

Last year, a number of prominent donors lashed out at Harvard University for its handling of reactions on campus to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Some announced they would freeze donations until the university cracked down on student protesters, did more to combat antisemitism, and reduced its focus on diversity.

Plutocrats: Let's do to Harvard what we did to Sears and Steward!

Harvard has made some changes since then, but the donors are not done: Two of the most outspoken, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and former Facebook executive Sam Lessin, are ratcheting up their campaign to reshape the university, each arguing Harvard is home to too much activism, that the university is lacking viewpoint diversity, and its bureaucracy has become bloated.

Yes, that's certainly the problem with Harvard: too much diversity and too few rich white men giving orders to the peons.  

But lest you think that these billionaire finaglers were just hurling a few windy accusations, they actually prepared the most powerful persuasive and rigorous presentation known to Man: a deck of slides.

Now the issues facing Harvard are indeed difficult and complex.  Let's take one: protecting members of the Harvard community from anti-Semitism.  We can all agree that that's a good thing and that Harvard's longstanding anti-Semitic Jewish quota (abolished after World War II) was very bad.

But when you start to think about it (a nasty habit Harvard instills in a few students but apparently almost none of its senior faculty), it gets hard.  It leads to questions like: what is anti-Semitism?  who gets to define it?  Does it mean anything a Jewish person disagrees with?  Does it mean opposing the idea of Israel as a Jewish state?  

Not to mention: from whom is Harvard obligated to protect its students?  Anti-Semitic members of the Harvard community or any idiot on Mass. Ave.?  If both, does the goal of protecting the Harvard community from anti-Semitism justify locking down Harvard Yard and keeping out those who simply want to get from the Square to the Broadway Market?

Here's a few more: What about protecting Palestinian and Arab students from anti-Arab prejudice?  And what is that?  If advocating for Palestine from the River to the Sea is anti-Semitic, what about the Likud policy of Israel from the River to the Sea?  How is that OK?  

And finally: how does Harvard create an open structure for resolving these complex and thorny questions?

That's a lot to cover in a slide deck

But slides are a bad way to resolve complex issues

• Lack of space to articulate ideas
• Inability to develop complex argument
• Tendency toward vague or inaccurate language 
• Conducive to simplistic conclusions

But what do we know?  We're not billionaires. Let's take a look at Ackman's subtle and sophisticated deck of slides.

We get to slide four before the wheels start coming off:

No it isn't.  

Harvard College doesn't have a business.  It has a goal, stated in the slide.  Businesses are organized to make money.  Other types of collective activities, like colleges, governments, armies, many hospitals, and other unimportant odds and ends, are similarly intended to serve other ends besides coining pelf for billionaire finaglers.

It's not just a poor choice of words as slide five makes clear to even the meanest private-equity intelligence:

So Ackman is arguing that because Harvard College enrollment is essentially flat, it's failing as a business?  Does this make sense to you?  Is your marriage failing because you have the same number of spouses you had 10 years ago?  Should Harvard attempt to double its enrollment every 10 years?  What's the point?  We recall an old PBS show arguing (satirically) that we need to pay attention to public broadcasting because at the then-current rate of PBS stations doubling every ten years by 2050 there would be 32 million public broadcasting outlets.

If you doubled the number of students every ten years (a good growth rate for revenues of a for-profit business), there would be 24,000 undergrads today.  Where would they live?  Who would teach the little darlings?  Not the senior faculty of course, based on past and current experience?

Would Harvard be better or stronger with an explosion of new undergraduates?  Why?

There's more nonsense to follow.  Slide 8 as others have pointed out tracks the rise in Harvard's list priced tuition without bothering to mention that the actual price paid is far lower, and that one-quarter of the entering class pays a tuition bill of $0.00, thanks to that huge endowment.

From there the deck descends into the usual bushwa about how Harvard faculty lacks diversity (true) because on the sole criterion of diversity Ackman values, more identify as liberal than conservative.  What this has to do with the teaching ability of a Professor of Music, or Computer Science, or Biology is obvious only the Ackman and his fellow reactionaries.

Indeed, one would think that the key criterion for a professor of natural scienes is their belief in scientific fact and method.  Neither of which is supported by the Tangerine-Faced Rapist that Ackman supports.

Plus we get the usual whine:

Really?  Which ones?  We can't think of any.  Frankly, we think Harvard would be a far better place if its faculty shut its yap and turned its attention to its job: teaching stuff to people.  The likelihood of that happening is zero.

By the way, what do these faculty members want to say that they feel they can't?  And what do they see as the consequence for saying dumb s***?  If it's getting dragged for saying dumb s***, let us make a modest suggestion: stop saying dumb s***, like when then-Harvard President Larry Summers mansplained that the reason the ladies don't have more STEM teaching positions is because their girl brains can't handle equations. 

We're barely a third of the way through this dreck [Surely, deck – Ed.] and we haven't gotten to some of the dumbest stuff, so we'll have to stop here and pick this up another day.

Or, as Mrs. Bill Ackman likes to say, “I'll think about it tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day!”

Hot Off The Trail: The Senate is slipping away from the Democrats and you'll never guess why!

By Political Editor David Bloviator with reports from Texas Correspondent Jacy Farrow, Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk, and Montana Correspondent Chet Huntley

While Democrats are focused on the Presidential race, perhaps because the Republican candidate is a dangerous degenerate Russian-owned disloyal demented criminal, there's almost equally alarming news coming out of the various Senate races.

Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate.  Should this happen, even if Harris wins, we can expect total and adamant Republican opposition to everything she tries to accomplish, including legislation, judicial appointments, and even normal government operations like passing a budget, raising the debt ceiling, and confirming Executive officers.

Montana: where men are men and sheep are...

We know this will happen because it has been the Republican playbook since 1992, when Bill Clinton had the effrontery to win a Presidential election, after Republicans had held the job for 20 of the previous 24 years.  This led Republicans to view any Democratic President as a dangerous usurper who had to be thwarted at all costs.

This behavior, however bad for democracy, had three beneficial effects for Republicans: (1) it prevented any forward progress in America, (2) it cemented reactionary Republican control over a bent Supreme Court, and (3) because it stopped government from solving problems, it allowed Republicans to argue that Democrats (and government itself) couldn't get anything done.

Today there are 51 nominally Democratic votes in the Senate, although this includes two useless clowns: Krysten Sinema in Arizona and Maserati Joe Manchin in West Virginia.  The good news is that their constituents lost interest in their pained-centrist performances and send them packing.

The bad news: Manchin's Senate seat is likely to be filled by a corrupt hypocritical self-proclaimed Republican “billionaire” Jim Justice, who promises to do nothing that would help hard-pressed West Virginia white voters, and has been rewarded with their staunch support.

That takes Democrats down to 50.  They are defending Democratic seats in swing or red states, including Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

Montana, a heavily white Republican gun-toting Marlboro-smoking state, makes Democrats especially nervous:

The former senators also consider the political emphasis on divisive social issues — exacerbated by the explosion of social media and the success of Republicans at exploiting the culture wars — as a major driver of the turn toward the G.O.P.

Divisive social issues? What's covered by that euphemism?

OK girls, line up for genitalia check

Let's look at the ads the Republicans are running in Montana. One accuses Sen. Tester of supposedly discriminating against white farmers because he voted for remedial aid to Black farmers harmed by a century of racist allocation of government aid to farmers.   Despite this terrible discrimination, the white farmers of Montana pocketed a mere a $450,000,000 in government subsidies last year.  (Um, why do they get a f***in' dime of taxpayer money?)

Another huge issue confronting the beleaguered sheep-f**kers of Montana: the dreaded specter of, well, let The New York Times explain it:

In Ohio since the start of September, every ad about Senator Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC has touched on transgender topics, such as accusing him of “allowing transgender biological males in girls’ sports.” Mr. Brown is one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

In Montana, five ads have deployed similar lines about transgender women in sports and bathrooms as Republicans press the case that Senator Jon Tester, another endangered Democrat up for re-election, is too liberal for the heavily Republican state. 

Yep, in a country that lost 1,100,000 lives thanks to the Tangerine-Faced Felon's pandemic lies, that has been devastated by hurricanes fueled by global warming, and where women bleed out in hospital parking lots because doctors are terrified by abortion bans, the greatest actual threat is – a trans woman who wants to play field hockey.

The story is the same in Texas, where Cancun Ted Cruz, facing a real challenge this year after doing exactly zilch for Texas over the past 12 years, unless you consider trying to overturn the 2020 election a win for Longhorns:

Nobel laureates poisoning our blood

For weeks now, Texans watching television, including during prime time football games, have seen ads from the re-election campaign of Senator Ted Cruz declaring: “Boys in girls sports, that’s not right.”

The Cruz campaign, like others supporting Republican candidates across the nation, has been pouring resources into attack ads that focus on transgender participation in youth sports.  

It's remarkable that the panic over trans kids playing sports doesn't come from the athletes themselves, who don't seem to have a problem.  It comes from hideous white men trying to milk ignorance and bigotry.  

But Republican attack ads aren't just focusing on vital issues like unearned white resentment and trans girls who want to play soccer. 

There's also the invasion of the dog eaters.

Republicans have dropped $25,000,000 into ads in Ohio falsely accusing incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown of voting to permit undocumented immigrants to obtain government benefits.  There's no truth to it, according to well-known radical left mouthpiece Channel 13 Action News in Toledo.

In sum, with democracy hanging by a thread, Republicans are seeking control of the Senate by pandering to white voters' worst instincts: racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

The polling evidence suggests the appeals are effective: Tester is under water and many of the other embattled Democrats like Brown are barely holding their own.

Further, the media's endless fascination with the horse race obscures what the fans in the grandstand are cheering for: white supremacy, trans phobia, and hatred of immigrants vital to our nation's economic growth. Whitewashing hatred and bigotry as “culture wars” or “social issues” isn't helping either.

Perhaps our reporters and pundits should spend less time wondering who's ahead in Mineral County, Nevada and more time considering the question: what kind of a country would hand over control of the Senate on the basis of angry lies appealing to the electorate's bigotry?

The answer is: yours.

Jack Smith's brief explains why this is not a normal election

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

According to today's New York Times, the Presidential election is a thrilling down-to-the-wire horse race between Whirlaway and Man O' War:

 

According to Special Counsel Jack Smith's pre-trial brief filed in the District Court in Washington, it's something else.  It's a decision on whether to re-install a violent insurrectionist as President and allow him to complete his work of destroying constitutional democracy in the United States.

As Emily Litella would say, “Oh. That's different, then.”

To review the bidding, Smith filed his brief to explain to Judge Chutkan why, despite the best efforts of the bent Republican Supreme Court to exonerate the Tangerine-Faced Felon in the absence of a legal mandate to do so, the conduct charged in the indictment does not constitute immune official acts of a President, whatever that may mean.

Looks official to me: John Roberts '76

First Smith outlines the aspects of the Tangerine-Faced Felon's criminal conduct that cannot be considered to be the official acts of the President (We'll get to other aspects later).  After his frivolous lawsuits challenging election results in seven different states were all laughed out of court, Smith Br. at 14, the TFF and his co-conspirator mouthpieces, including the pathetic Rudy Giuliani and the laughable John Eastman, concocted two new schemes.

The first was to bully state officials into changing the results and not appointing electors who represented the victor (Joe Biden, in case you've forgotten).  Smith Br. at 16ff.  As part of this scheme lunatics like Sydney Powell repeatedly libeled voting machine companies by claiming their machines were defective or hacked.  These are the lies that eventually cost Rupert Murdoch $787 million.  

When that failed, the TFF crime gang tried to appoint fake electors in seven different states, send the resulting fake certifications to the Congress, Smith Br. at 49ff, where shameless integrity-free allies like the pride of Harvard Law School, Cancun Ted Cruz, would object to the certifications and claim falsely there was a controversy requiring further delay.

The crime depended on browbeating an apparently spineless Mike Pence into refusing to accept the state's electoral certifications, which was something he had no power to do.   The TFF must have been shocked when, after years of cringeworthy toadying to every corrupt evil scheme the TFF hatched, Pence said no.

In desperation, as outlined in Smith's filing, the TFF launched an attack on the Capitol to force Congress to abandon the election certification, Smith Br. at 74ff.  When the TFF was told that an armed mob had forced Pence and his Secret Service detail to retreat into a secure space and their lives were in danger, the TFF responded “So what?” Smith Br. at 142.

But even the 185 page account of the TFF's elected-related accounts had to leave out some of the worst of it.  For example, you won't find evidence that the TFF had attempted to corruptly influence the Justice Department to intervene to prevent counting and certification of the vote, by up to and including removing every senior Justice Department officer except the one co-conspirator ready to do his bidding.  Jan 6. Committee Report at 413.

Although this effort to pervert the course of justice was among the most serious criminal acts by the TFF, Smith could no longer pursue it, because according to the six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices (including three appointed by the very same TFF)  a President who obstructs justice by ordering federal law enforcement to intervene without legal warrant in an election has committed no crime.

Or, as Justice Sotomayor put it in dissent:

When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Which also explains why the efforts of the TFF and his corrupt enablers at the Defense Department is likewise missing.  Although this led to a remarkable order issue on January 4 preventing the deployment of the DC National Guard to protect the Congress, none of can be charged in an indictment because according to the bent Republican Justices, the President commits no crime when he orders the military to stage or support a coup. 

By the way, here's the infamous Defense Department memo.

 

So Jack Smith has heroically presented the criminal case against the TFF as best he could. Keep in mind however that even if Judge Chutkan finds that the conduct alleged is not in fact immune, her ruling will be reviewed by the Republican Party's judicial arm, the Supreme Court.  Since it is no longer possible to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases based on their legal merits, what will happen is anyone's guess, or to be more precise, whatever Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow decide they want.

The point is that Jack Smith can't save us and can't save the Republic.  If the TFF wins the election, Smith is out, and possibly facing prosecution himself.  If the TFF loses, but Democrats fail to hold the Senate and take the House, the effective control over the nation will be exercised not by the duly elected political branches but by an unelected Republican oligarchy doing business as the Supreme Court.

It's just another reminder of the stakes we face in this election, or at least in the seven states that will decide it.

But of course to our media, it's just another exciting horse-race.  Better enjoy your mint julep while you can.