DO TELL: Jack Goldsmith: The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries…. Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work….”

The message of the Trump prosecution is Thou Shall Not Challenge The Establishment. If you do, the rules and conventions go out the window and they do whatever dirty things they can to you. And the usual promoters of “decency,” “civility,” and “rule of law” will back them out of class interest and tribal loyalty.

Does this mean that our government — and media/academic establishment, but I repeat myself — is deeply, perhaps hopelessly corrupt and fundamentally illegitimate? Yeah, probably.

And if only there had been some sort of warning about the downsides of this sort of lawfare.