Not that I’m surprised. But after four years I still can’t find a good reason not to unleash a torrent of legal ruin on Donald Trump and his minions. The corruption, incompetence and grotesque offenses against common decency are all you need. But perhaps even more important than court judgments is the matter of historical reckoning. We are all worse off if Trumpism isn’t defeated in the public record.

Now, full disclosure, I was one of those foaming at the mouth for a trial or at least a Truth Commission on the hows and whys of the Iraq war fiasco. Silly me, I thought several trillion in tax money and 4500 dead Americans would be enough to kick start a cathartic investigation. But instead we got the usual, collegial “healing” and “moving on” and all that happy horse plop.

In contrast to Republicans who openly trade in rage-inducing fantasies and accusation, the average Democrat lives in fear of poking a bear they don’t know for absolute certain they can wrestle to its death. The thing is though it isn’t just Democrats who live in terror of an insane, irrational uprising by TrumpNation. Republican FBI director Jim Comey’s worst errors of his term — his Hillary comments in July and October of ’16 — were largely rooted in his fear of virulent anti-Clinton agents in his New York field office. Likewise, we know now from Andrew Weissmann’s book from inside the Mueller investigation that Mueller himself feared inciting and getting dragged into a right-wing maelstrom were he to push a too broad, too deep and too aggressive investigation of Trump’s personal financial entanglements.

Point being, after the ugly lunacy of these past four years someone has to man up to the fear of the pitchfork crowd and produce a complete and honest record of what we’ve been living through. Prosecution of Trump’s finances are very likely to provide answers to what the pandering and kowtowing Putin was all about.

There has to be some kind of inoculation from Trumpism, or it will come back stronger than ever.

So yes, there are inherent risks in any conflict, even a premeditated one. But Joe Biden’s administration has a couple things going for it that mitigate some of the likely blowback. One is the pandemic and the other is Trump himself.

Biden will be well-advised that he should say very little if anything about prosecutions of Trump … and his kids … and all their ludicrous, sketchy business associates. All he ever has to say is, “My maiun job right now is dealing with this pandemic. We have an independent judiciary and these are matters for the Justice Department.”

Behind the scenes, Biden’s AG can tacitly encourage and assist all the various offices in New York to do their thing. (There are good tactical reasons to skip the federal prosecution parts.) Publicly though, Biden should and no doubt will focus all his attention and energy on distributing the COVID vaccines and re-setting the economy.

Trump’s farcical campaign to challenge the election in court, (where I believe he is now 1-37, a worse winning perecentage than the ’62 Mets), is all about creating a positive cash-flow martyr myth, a new level of exploitation of his deplorable cult. And it’s reasonable to expect that nascent Trumpist media organizations will energetically prostitute themselves in hopes of capturing the millions for whom FoxNews isn’t reckless enough.

But Trump is not a Bush or a Dick Cheney. He has no base of institutional loyalty in the Republican party. Much the opposite, in fact.

By that I mean establishment Republicans will be only too happy to see him both removed from the scene and as diminished by prosecutions as possible. If you’re Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton or Nicky Haley or even South Dakota’s homicidally sociopathic Governor, Kristi Noem, the less Trump in the air the better it is for them. Trump out of the White House is one thing. Far better for their noxious ambitions though is having his terrifying “grandeur” sullied and his influence corroded by steady revelations of … oh, let’s see here, what have we got? … bank fraud, insurance fraud, campaign finance fraud, money laundering, sexual assault and on and on including a complete look at his implausible “billionaire” status.

Let me ask you this. Can you think of even one reason why Mitch McConnell would not want to be rid of Trump? How much happier would he be working with a party leader who has an attention span longer than that of a mayfly? Point being, while the whole craven Republican crowd will huff and puff and fume to Rush Limbaugh about those dastardly Democrats and their heinous persecution of a beloved statesman, to the last self-serving treacherous one of them they’ll be delighted if Trump is reduced to the infamy and ridicule he richly deserves and they no longer have to bend their knee to a moron.

I know what you’re thinking. “Damn, they’re a swell crowd. Real friends. I’m glad COVID prevents me from having them over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

If there’s a bottom line to why Trump has to be prosecuted it’s because avoiding it out of fear of a culture war brawl only ensures that the anti-factual, anti-intellectual, anti-science grievance syndromes of modern “conservatives” continue to strengthen and flourish. Without prosecution there is no hope of abatement.

Trump is a lazy idiot. A fool. But Republicans have a deep bench of “competent Trumps” — Hawley or Cotton or Tucker Carlson, or worse — calculating how they can exploit that crowd and do authoritarian Trumpism right.

Not to get all lofty and grand and everything, but for the health of democracy in the US of A Democrats have to do everything in their power to saw the legs out from under the preposterous mythologies of Trumpism and the right-wing carnival of bullshit that it embodies.

“Moving on” from Trump only means moving into something worse.