“The president is indicted! Long live the president!” Borrowing from timeless shouted forms of news historically exhaled as medieval reports of a dead royal, we offer this one as our celebratory contribution to the news of these most recent days, that the Justice Department’s special prosecutor Jack Smith has finally lowered the boom on the nation’s most notorious crook, former President Donald Trump. Huzzah!

This has been so long in coming, beyond the obvious findings of so many investigations that this man Trump is one of, if not the, worst case of a head of state’s wanton disregard for democracy and the rule of law in American history. As one of the four counts of the indictment against him makes clear, his many crimes are not just against the “system,” or alleged actions against him, but against every single American person, and by extension, against every single living human being, or more broadly, sentient being, including household pets and pests, alike.

Dozens of editorials and commentaries by our editor, Nicholas F. Benton, sought to expose this grifter, this sociopathic con man, liar, and thug to the public since he first rode that escalator in the summer of 2015 to put his name forward as a presidential candidate. As Benton has also reported, this man was chosen by the hardline KGB-Putin faction in Russia as its chosen instrument to wage domestic war against the U.S. and its Constitutional form of government back in 1987.

One need only contemplate where this nation would be today had Trump been reelected, or been reinstated for a second term, in 2021. The reason all the stops were pulled out to achieve that result, despite seven million fewer popular votes in the November 2020 election, had to do with what was at stake not for him alone, but for his international faction in that race.

Not only would Ukraine have long been in the hands of Putin by now, with little or no resistance, but Russia would be poised to walk all over Europe, set to finish the job that Hitler failed to do in the 1940s, including the taking, militarily or otherwise, of NATO as a whole. This would have been achieved in tandem with Trump’s more aggressive dismantling of the institutions of democracy in the U.S., leaving the West helpless against the march of totalitarianism across the globe.

None of these outcomes are exaggerations, as much as some may try to argue (the same discredited voices who insisted that Trump would go quietly and not press for a coup after the 2020 election). No, just as the 2020 election resulted in a worst-case scenario, so would have a different outcome to that election.

It is only by embracing this unpleasant reality that the American people can be expected to step up, once again, to forcefully reject the Trump agenda, even if he’s (hopefully) behind bars before long. Few still think that will happen, but, again, not us.