One of the important things to know about Trump's character is how much he was influenced by lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn was infamous both as Joe McCarthy's counsel and as a mob lawyer. Trump's entire narrow world view is transactional rather than principled. Principles, in fact, are for suckers. Law do not exist as expressions of communal norms and values, but as things to be skirted whenever they get in your way.
As a result, Trump has engaged in a long career of petty and not so petty business and tax crimes. It's tough to prosecute rich people for complicated fraud and tax crimes, so he's skirted the law for a long time.
His rise to political prominence has put him in the public crosshairs, because politicians are in the public crosshairs. That's the way we as a society restrain our elected officials, and it's properly known as the rule of law. Trump cannot conceive of something like that, so when he is prosecuted and found guilty of crimes, his natural impulse is to say that his opponents are criminals.
Where Trump and Trumpism have repeatedly foundered has been when needing to meet any sort of burden of proof. Whether it was trying to deny the result of the 2020 election or defending himself against libel, fraud charges, or felony campaign finance crimes, Trump loses when he faces the legal system and a jury of his peers. His only protection is a judiciary that that has slow walked the charges against him or made it difficult to prosecute a president for any crimes of corruption.
The humiliation and real peril of being a convicted felon have increased his appetite for lawlessness. He wants to prosecute his enemies without really caring whether they actually committed crimes. If he was convicted, why not convict Harris of something - charges to be determined at a later date.
His campaign speeches have become increasingly unhinged and untethered to reality, so we get suggestions like this weekend when he argued that we should have a "Purge" style day of violence, where his brown shirt thugs in law enforcement can assault anyone Trump doesn't like.
Of all the threats that Trump poses to American democracy, two stand out as being potentially damaging even after he exits the stage. The first is that elections are corrupted by...something. The second is that the adversarial court system with jury trials is somehow rigged by...I dunny, George Soros or something.
If Harris wins and Trump goes to prison or even dies, and we then enter the 2028 election with the legitimacy of our elections and courts undermined by the continuation of the Trumpist Right, then we will remain in a very perilous place even without that fatuous gasbag on the cable news.
ADDED: What Trump benefits from is the bothsides element that allow him to spout actual fascist rhetoric and be able to hide behind the legacy of the Republican Party and America's two party system.
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