The question always was inevitable – once we began pulling threads on Donald Trump’s spectacular corruption. We now understand that the only way Trump can avoid criminal prosecution for everything he’s done is to “win back” the presidency. Right this second, when we say “everything he’s done”, we mean his role in the January 6 insurrection (with all its many moving parts including fake electors) and in stealing our secrets. But Trump’s criminal behavior didn’t start with the 2020 election. It started back in 2016! And just as Trump’s attempt to steal election 2020 was entirely illegal, so, too was Trump’s successful theft of Election 2016.

For the record, just because you get away with stealing an election, it doesn’t make the theft legit. Theft is theft is theft. It’s against the law – and everything that flows from it is the product of criminal behavior.

In a democracy, we use elections to choose those people we want to represent us in the governing process. Elections give them the authority to govern us and govern for us. A free and fair election should, in theory, give an election’s winner that authority. But, what if an election isn’t free or fair? What if one candidate breaks the law – deliberately – in order to gain an advantage? Cheating to win doesn’t just steal the victory, it steals the authority to govern that comes with victory.

If you don’t legitimately win election, you don’t legitimately gain the authority to do anything. If Donald Trump cheated in any way to win the 2016 election – if his cheating in any way altered the election’s outcome – then we must reconsider whether Trump ever actually “won” election to begin with. And, if he didn’t legitimately win then he never had the actual authority to do anything he did.

Let’s simplify it a little. If Trump were but a car thief and, back in 2016, he stole our car (with the help of his pal Vladimir), we would never think of our car as (ever) legitimately being his. Even if Trump held the title in his hands, the fact is he didn’t gain it legally. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law but it doesn’t make it legit.

As we also know, Trump has not been alone in this illegitimate power grab. The Republican Party and its darkest money (Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow etc) set their sights on seizing the SCOTUS. They tasked Mitch McConnell with frustrating Barack Obama – denying him regular federal judgeships but also Antonin Scalia’s seat.

Let’s be clear. When McConnell denied Merrick Garland so much as a hearing, he denied We The People the judge we wanted (because we voted for Obama – and how he’d fill SCOTUS seats was one of the reasons!) The Republican Party didn’t steal the judiciary from the Democrats, they stole it from US!

Our news media does us no favors. They have, in fact, reported key details of Trump’s theft but refused to aggregate those details into a clear picture. Nothing prepared us (or our news media) for a character like Trump. We assume a certain level of “normalcy” in our politics and our political candidates. But, from the jump, nothing Trump did was normal.

In “Normal World”, Trump’s presidential ambitions would have died on the day his campaign started. “Mexicans are rapists”? While the news media did balk at that, they never put their foot down. When Trump changed the subject (to the next outrage), our news media let him. Wrong answer!

Instead of letting Trump change the subject, the news media should have done what journalist Mehdi Hassan does: “just say ‘no’.” Refuse to move on. Stop the interview dead right there and demand an answer or the interview’s over.

Our news media moved on. First to “pussy-grabbing”. But even that failed to hold their “both sides do it” spine in place. The moment they heard “But, her emails”, they were hooked like crack addicts.

Jack Smith is poised to begin pulling threads on Trump’s ugly-as-hell Christmas Sweater Of Corruption. The first pieces to fall apart will be his payoff to Stormy Daniels and the failed coup d’état. But those are hardly the only pieces that will fall apart once pulled.

Consider the extraordinary gymnastics Trump, Bill Barr and everyone connected did to distance Trump from Russia and collusion. Hmmmmmm… weird, right? Trump projected his complicity from the start! But then, the GOP knew all about it before they even nominated Trump.

On June 25, 2016, now Speaker Of The House Kevin McCarthy exited an intelligence briefing about Ukraine and entered a meeting of GOP leaders. McCarthy’s first words to his fellow GOP leaders (before “Hello” even) was: “There’s two people I think Putin pays – Rohrbacher and Trump – swear to God!”

Now, keep in mind: everyone knew Russia owned California Representative Dana Rohrbacher. Was it news that Russia also owned Trump – their about-to-be presidential nominee?

No one present disputed McCarthy or expressed shock. There was, instead, nervous laughter. That’s what prompted McCarthy to add “Swear to God!”. He wanted his co-conspirators to know he was serious.

Then Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan knew not only that McCarthy was serious, but that what he was saying posed a threat to the GOP. The Republicans didn’t want anyone outside that room to think Putin had compromised Trump – even if it might be true. Well, it was true and it’s still true.

Ryan – second in line to the presidency – stepped forward and insisted that they keep this terrible secret a secret. “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here” is how he put it.

A month later, the Republicans formally nominated Trump. The very next day, Trump got up on his hind legs and brayed “Russia, if you’re listening…!” The Republican leadership knew for a fact that Russia was indeed listening – to their intelligence asset.

Nothing about this is legal.

It gets worse. Who was Trump’s campaign manager? Paul Manafort! Who was Manafort appeasing in that job? Konstantin Kilimnik – oligarch, Putin pal and Russian Military Intelligence officer. Manafort went to prison (Trump pardoned him) for handing Kilimnik proprietary polling data for Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

We don’t know what happened with the Minnesota data but we know for a fact that Russian military defense took what Manafort (illegally) gave them and turned it into personalized ads that landed on the Facebook pages of Black voters in (you guessed it) Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The ads insisted that Hillary Clinton was a racist on the down low. The point: suppress these Black voters, convince them to stay home and not vote.

This, too, is illegal!

Trump “won” those three states by a combined 80,000 votes. Russia’s fingerprints are all over this “win”. That means it can’t be a legitimate win. Not if we want to call (or think of ourselves as) a healthy, functioning democracy.

America still lives in slavery’s shadow. Our original sin haunts us to this day. Not punishing Trump would perhaps equal that in destructive power and long term divisiveness. Hell, not punishing Richard Nixon also has proved destructive. It’s just a stone cold fact: corruption is democracy’s nemesis. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was corrupt in the extreme.

So, what do we do about it?

Do we just “accept” it and muddle along, hoping it will remain a bad memory and nothing more? That would be us whistling past a graveyard. Has ignoring slavery worked out for us? Neither will this.

If Trump never legitimately had our authority to govern us, he never had our authority to do anything – least of all choose SCOTUS judges.

It’s incumbent on us to tell cheaters their cheating won’t stand. That “cheating to win” is not simply “one way” to win. It’s no way.

We need to make cheating not only literally illegal but entirely unprofitable, too. Even getting a way with it must carry risks and penalties that make getting away with it not worth the risks.

The only way to dissuade bad actors is to punish them in ways they understand. Take away their freedom and their money. They’ll get it. In more ways than one.