The nation and sanity cannot bear another "Trump acquitted" headline, the third. One shouldn't even be risked.
It would raise to astronomical magnitude the conservative-movement worship of this destructive demagogue whom New York Times columnist Bret Stephens calls Benito Milhous Caligula.
It would clinch Donald Trump's already near-inevitable Republican presidential nomination.
It would make fools of desperate Democrats, inept liberals and ham-handed prosecutors and judges in certain jurisdictions. It would lay newly bare the increasing failure to function of America itself.
The only way to stop Trump, Asa Hutchinson said rightly the other day, is to beat him in an election. And the only way to beat him in an election is to do so by the numbers in the Republican primary, which Trump perhaps could win from jail.
If Trump wins the Republican primary to become the Republican nominee, American voters can't stop him. Only the electors can. And the Electoral College favors him unless the swing voters of Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan stay so worked up against him that they turn out in their well-placed decisive droves of 2020.
Their motivation must encompass not only disdain for Trump, which is ever-regenerating, but acceptance of an alternative. Joe Biden provided that then, but now voters are in their third year of opportunities for lost enthusiasm. Stay-at-home voters might as well go vote for Benito.
Even if you beat Trump in a general election, he cries fraud and the great bulk of angry and resentful Republicans who watched Democrats try to criminalize rather than defeat him will believe him or choose to go with his madness out of partisan disdain for his persecutors.
Only Republicans beating him fair-and-square in a primary can banish him absent a lay-down criminal charge of vivid clarity, significance and outrage.
So, if you are going to persuade your pliable grand jury to return an indictment of Trump, it had better be an affront clear and egregious enough to demonstrate to objectivity-capable Republicans that this man is plainly a criminal unworthy of the modern American presidency he already has so diminished.
Everything is political. And prosecutorial discretion is a real and legitimate thing.
I write this before Trump's plea and arraignment and likely subsequent release of the particulars of the indictment in New York. The prosecutor in Manhattan surely has a crime and a sound case. But, alas, at this juncture, we are not privy to the compelling wrongdoing required by this sensitive situation, which is the presentation of an issue of business financial criminality wrapped in political damage for the country.
Republicans are saying Bill Clinton's case was worse. Until the Manhattan case shows otherwise, they're right.
Clinton was president when he had sexual relations in the Oval Office with a young woman in his employ. Then he lied about it. Trump wasn't president yet, and his dalliance was with a full-grown career veteran of sexual engagement, not his employee, and certainly not an intern.
Perjury is a more serious crime than misuse of business expenses, even on 34 counts of them in a hush-money conspiracy, especially for a man who routinely claims business expenses of much greater amounts on his annual tax forms.
For the good of the country, never mind my or your fervent hope; the Manhattan prosecutor had best have lots more.
"Wantin' ain't gettin'," my poor-but-proud daddy always said when as a youngster I expressed a desire for a consumer product he couldn't afford. That goes triple today in the titillation felt by so many at the prospect of making a convicted criminal of a man with such a powerful aura of one.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.