Trump Should Be Jailed For Disobeying The Gag Order

 The following is part of a post by Dan Rather:

It’s time. The presumptive Republican nominee for president needs to be sent to jail. For the 10th time during his Manhattan election interference trial, Donald Trump has been found in contempt of court. But, as was the case last week, he was only fined … $1000 for his latest transgression. That is a grand total of $10,000 in fines — not even a rounding error in Trumpworld.

There is no precedent here. No former president before Trump has ever stood trial, much less a former president who is running for reelection. The judge is limited in what he can do, but financial punishment clearly isn’t working, and Trump is treating our justice system like a joke.

Enough.

No American is above the law, but Donald Trump is defying the judge and is all but begging to be locked up. Perhaps Judge Juan Merchan should accommodate him. If you or I were flouting the judge’s instructions by routinely violating his gag order, we would have been incarcerated long ago.

That’s exactly what Trump wants, and everyone knows it. He wants to use his incarceration to drum up more support. But it might be a miscalculation. If he assumes that word of his confinement would send legions into the streets, he’d better hope the numbers are better than those of the Trump fanatics outside the courthouse. Some days there haven’t been enough MAGA supporters to field a basketball team. . . .

 

Would locking up Trump for a night or two change him? Probably not. But for the rest of us, it would confirm a tenet of our democracy and that the words carved into the Supreme Court building, “Equal Justice Under Law,” actually mean something.