Nothing about former President Donald Trump's indictment and arrest on racketeering charges in Georgia was inevitable, wrote conservative commentator Charlie Sykes for The Bulwark's "Morning Shots" on Friday — and nor is it the result of political machinations against him.
Rather, he argued, everything that led to this point is a direct result of Trump's own choices.
"It was always going to end this way, wasn’t it?" wrote Sykes, a frequent critic of the former president and the party that elected him. "If you elect a serial liar and conman, a narcissist, bully, wannabe mobster, with the vocabulary of an emotionally insecure 9-year-old, you can’t really be shocked at how it turned out, can you?"
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Trump is in this situation, Sykes continued, because "this is what he chose." Had Trump wanted to, Sykes wrote, he could have "accepted defeat and allowed the peaceful transfer of power ... like every other president in American history."
But instead he decided to fight, organize a coup, call the Georgia Secretary of State demanding he "find" enough votes to throw out Joe Biden's win, and illegally try to interfere with the counting of votes — which led him to being arrested in Georgia, and posing for the now-infamous mugshot, Sykes said.
But Republicans also had a choice of their own, Sykes continued. They could have walked away from Trump at any point, could have joined in the effort to impeach and remove him — but not only are they still backing him, six out of the eight Republicans at the primary debate on Wednesday said they could support Trump as the nominee again even if he is convicted. And no one is forcing them to stay on this path.
Trump may have inevitably led himself into legal jeopardy, concluded Sykes. However, "there was nothing inevitable about a political party — and tens of millions of its supporters — looking at this man, and saying, This is fine."
