'Few people grasp the severity' of Trump’s legal peril and will be shocked if he's finally charged: columnist

With news that the New York Attorney General's Office is now criminally investigating the Trump Organization, New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait argues that prosecutors need to start preparing Americans for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be charged criminally.

Chait writes that while many people believe Trump will yet again skate as he did after former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, he thinks that Trump has lost many of the advantages he had that kept him from being charged with obstruction of justice.

"I've found that even among news-savvy liberals I speak with, few people grasp the severity of Trump's legal exposure," writes Chait. "His likely criminal record has been discussed much less frequently, and often in fairly long, dense reported investigative stories."

Should Trump really face criminal charges, however, Chait believes it would deliver a shock to tens of millions of Americans who still back the president -- and even many people who don't.

"A criminal prosecution of a former president, especially one who is still functioning as his party's leader, would be an unsettling and potentially traumatic development," argues Chait. "I wrote last year about the dilemma it would present: The upside of imposing accountability for his decades of operating outside the law without consequence would be offset by the dangerous perception that he was just facing political retaliation."

The challenge for prosecutors, Chait concludes, is telling Americans that Trump "isn't facing criminal accountability because he lost, but because it should have happened years ago."