We say “rule of law.” We don’t say it really, we don’t really literally mean it, no we don’t believe it either…but we’re not in the tank for Donald Trump
By 
Tom Goldstein is the latest member of the elite legal world to work toward the Donald:
Then there are the state charges, over which President Trump will have no control. A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.
“Take the rule of law seriously but not literally. Well not seriously either. Grace, see if Lisa Blatt is free for martinis at the Capital Grille.”
I suppose on some level refutation at this point is superfluous but I’m glad Jay did it anyway:
Goldstein does not defend Trump’s real-world conduct at issue in any of these cases. They are, in no particular order, aimed at his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia; his payment of illegal hush money to kill an unflattering news story about an extramarital affair; his mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion; and his complicity in the January 6 insurrection, an anniversary that Trump will soon celebrate by watching many of the same lawmakers who almost died at his supporters’ hands take the formal steps necessary to make him President of the United States.
Instead, Goldstein argues that operation of the democratic process has rendered these prosecutions illegitimate. “The Constitution trusts the judgment of the American people to decide whether the cases against Mr. Trump, as he has argued, were political and calculated to stop him from being elected,” he writes. “The people had plenty of opportunities to hear both sides, and they have spoken.” Goldstein’s claim here is that under the Constitution, the 2024 election basically was a trial, and Trump’s victory is a definitive “not guilty” verdict—a verdict that applies not only to the three cases that have yet to go to trial, but also to the one in which jurors already found Trump guilty, too.
The purported constitutional equivalence between criminal trial outcomes and presidential election results will come as a surprise to anyone with a passing familiarity with criminal trials or presidential elections. Prosecutions, for example, take place in the controlled environment of a courtroom; presidential elections, by contrast, take place in a barely-regulated political landscape in which reactionary billionaires are free to buy as many votes as they can afford. Prosecutions are decided by randomly-selected juries of a fixed number of one’s peers; presidential elections are decided by whatever coalition decides to show up to the polls that day. Prosecutions are about determining the culpability of a specific person for a specific act in a specific jurisdiction. Presidential elections are, in effect, very expensive national popularity contests, in which an individual voter’s perception of a nominee’s alleged criminality may have everything, something, or nothing to do with how they ultimately choose to cast a ballot.
Blame for the disgraceful failure of the American constitutional order in the wake of 1/6 starts with Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, and the Supreme Court Trump Six. But they have had and will have plenty of accessories before, during, and after the fact.