Donald Trump was indicted for the fourth time last week, this time for allegedly interfering in Georgia elections. It is the first state indictment for the former president.
Naturally, I saw a lot of people on the left celebrating this online, and one word kept coming up over and over again: karma. This was karmic retribution for Trump trying to overthrow the government to stay in power.
Bollocks. What is happening to Trump is not some kind of divine punishment or universal justice asserting itself. It is the hard and dangerous work of regular humans doing it at significant personal risk. Calling it karma is a dereliction of our duty to make the world a better place.
When President Biden was sworn in, I saw so many friends on the left wonder why Trump was not immediately clapped in chains and thrown in an oubliette. None of them wanted to hear that the process of making him account for crimes would take years. Our system, flawed as it may be, is designed to go slow and careful when it comes to criminally punishing a political opponent. Being too loosey-goosey with that sort of thing is how military coups and dictatorships happen.
The various investigations have been methodical and conservative. Each one has taken hundreds of person-hours and involves crossing all the Ts and dotting all the lower-case Is. At every stage, the people doing the work have been faced with a terrifying prospect. What if the person who they are pursuing returns to the White House? That is still a very real possibility. Nothing in the constitution says a convicted felon serving time can’t be president.
This goes double for the particular man under indictment. Part of the charges in the Georgia case relate to Trump and his team targeting a poll worker with accusations of fraud. This led to their terrifying harassment by supporters and a plot that reads like the beginning of a kidnapping.
Even knowing that, the Georgia grand jury returned an indictment against Trump. Then, as predictable as the dawn following the night, they were doxxed by Trump’s supporters. Those jurors will receive harassing phone calls and targeted molestation for the foreseeable future. They already saw it happen to someone in the evidence, and they went ahead on their idea of justice anyway.
That is bravery beyond what the average person is often called to do. While it’s certainly possible that those jurors were buoyed by their faith in their gods, in the end they’re the ones who had to do the vote. Bringing consequences to Trump and his cronies fell on their shoulders, not those of a cosmic avatar of balance.
We are all time travelers changing the future with everything we do. Just as we look back at tipping points in history and wish that folks had done more, so are future generations looking back at us now and wishing the same thing. The greatest line in the entire musical of Hamilton is “we’re in the shit now, somebody’s got to shovel it.”
Karma doesn’t grab a spade and dig in. We do that. What comeuppance Trump is receiving for his alleged crimes is simple, human effort. It deserves credit.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
