Should Trump Be Prosecuted in Georgia?
By Robert Katz Should Trump be prosecuted for his post-election effort to thwart the transfer of power to his democratically elected opponent? Some say no. Locking up the opposition is how autocracies run, not democracies, and the incentive of the losing party to graciously accept defeat is weakened when defeat means not just losing an election but going to jail. On the other hand, the prosecution of an outlier who brazenly committed crimes in order to perpetuate his hold on power should stand as an exception to the rule. The precedent of permitting an ex-president to remain unaccountable for offenses that violate our most basic democratic principle is far worse, in my view, than the precedent of prosecuting a former president. If Trump committed crimes in the course of his effort to engineer a reversal of Biden’s electoral victory, he should be prosecuted for them. (And to be clear, this is a not a partisan matter: if a Democratic President were to commit similar crimes to hang