Every tyrannical regime needs to make an example to keep people from getting the wrong idea.
This is exactly why we have a criminal justice system, which right wingers used to pretend to care about.
This is the typical MAGA up is down left is right thinking we have seen, where when someone commits the crime it’s not the criminal that was in the wrong but the people who prosecuted them.
Trump has now been indicted by 4 separate grand juries in 4 separate jurisdictions. His defense is that each of them is out to get him and the MAGA cult just follows him down the path of conspiracy absurdity. Notice the remarkable absence of defenses from him or his sycophants arguing he is innocent.
When republicans voted to acquit Donald Trump for his plot to steal the election culminating with him inciting a mob to attack the US Capitol they said the remedy for this was not through the political process but to hold him accountable through the law. Now that he’s being held accountable through the law they are saying it should be decided through the political process, the very same one he tried to steal.
To say the intellectual dishonesty on the right knows no bounds is giving them way too much credit because it assumes honesty and a commitment to logical consistency is still a supposed a virtue. It’s not, the dishonesty is the point. It’s like when Vladimir Putin has one of his antagonists killed and the official cause of death is that they fell out of a window. It’s no longer about pretending your guy is virtuous, it’s about power being impressed upon the other side by being so insultingly dishonest that the other side is forced to reckon with the fact that your side isn’t constrained by the things we all used to be.