What I find surreal about the recent Trump indictment is that everyone knows Trump did what he is accused of doing, with the exception of some delusional conservatives. The January 6th congressional hearings illustrated in further detail what many of us already knew. Most conservatives and Trump supporters (and those are still two massively overlapping sets) also recognize what actually happened, including the false slates of electors, the attempt to intimidate Pence, and the successful incitement to violence, they just don’t think it was the wrong thing to do and therefore they shouldn’t be held accountable (hell, 160 years after the Civil War, there are people who still can’t admit the War to Keep Enslaving Black People was wrong).

So we will spend the next months wondering if our considerably dysfunctional judicial system, headed by a corrupt Supreme Court, will able to convict Trump of the obvious. Unfortunately, in the U.S. justice system, it’s quite possible that something could really go off the rails, either in a technical or fundamental sense (e.g., jury nullification), and Trump walks.

That wouldn’t mean he isn’t guilty–like I mentioned above, we all saw what Trump did while he did it, and then a Congressional committee recapitulated what he did. In any ‘non-legal’ sense, it is obvious he attempted to prevent the legal and legitimate transition of power. But the distrust in the legal system is so pervasive, most of us don’t even recognize that, in any functional system, the outcome to the trial would be a foregone conclusion, lacking any true drama about the outcome.

In other words, in a country where there is a de facto two-tiered justice system, with one tier for the hoi polloi and one tier for the wealthy, it is unclear if even what is an obvious case of guilt (in the common usage) can result in a successful conviction.

So now we have to wait and see just how fucked up our justice system might or might not be.