WE HAVE TO HAVE THIS FIGHT WITH TRUMP AT THE BALLOT BOX

I've said for years that Donald Trump will never spend a night in jail, and it looks as if I'm right about that.

The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his business practices abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid a monthlong pause in their presentation of evidence to a grand jury, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The stunning development comes not long after the high-stakes inquiry appeared to be gaining momentum, and throws its future into serious doubt.

... The Manhattan investigation, which proceeded in fits and starts for years, was the most developed of the three criminal inquiries into Mr. Trump.

Marcy Wheeler has expressed doubt about the Manhattan investigation. She tweeted this in November:

Those who said the Trump Org investigation would stop with Weisselberg's refusal to cooperate look, at least partly, prescient. https://t.co/dF9SxOGP60

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 24, 2021

And this today:

Complex criminal investigations are ALWAYS going to rely on the cooperation you can get. And Trump is really good, as it turns out, and buying loyalty. At least thus far.

[Corrected SDNY for NYC]

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2022

Trump sees himself as a mob boss, and Allen Weisselberg, his chief financial officer, is carefully observing the code of omertà. That seems to be paying off splendidly for Trump.

But Trump's time as a key figure in our politics was never going to end in a courtroom. In the best-case scenario, Trump would be tried, convicted, and sent to prison before 2024 (and it's theoretically possible that that could still happen somewhere) -- but he'd become a political prisoner to millions of Americans. He'd be like the jailed January 6 rioters, but a vastly more prominent martyr. Every Republican campaign with any hope of success would promise to free him from prison and punish those who put him there. Ron DeSantis or some other opportunist would probably sail into the White House on a wave of pro-Trump rage.

And this is assuming that it's even possible to try Trump in a court of law without violence. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama sought to try Guantanamo prisoners in Manhattan. Local leaders -- led by Mike Bloomberg, who was then the mayor -- howled in outrage. They didn't believe it was possible to keep the city safe if Al Qaeda terrorists were on trial. That's how I feel about a trial of Donald Trump.

I've resigned myself to the fact that Trump will evade justice until he dies -- most CEOs in America do, as have all Republican presidents since Nixon. The only people who've ever truly held Trump accountable were voters in 2020.

Half the public will never accept that merely putting Trump on trial can be justified as anything other than an act of jackbooted totalitarianiasm. So far, though, they more or less accept the notion that he can't become president again without running first. Some of them don't believe that, of course -- they want him installed now -- and nearly all of them believe that any election he loses must have been rigged. But the only way we'll ever truly be rid of him, short of death, is by beating him at the polls again, if we can manage it.