We Messed Up ‘Too Big to Fail.’ Now we’re ‘Too Affright to Indict.’

Trump Must be Indicted — Democracy Hangs in the Balance

A.J. Bryant
6 min readMay 24, 2023
Photo by ATO TOURS on Unsplash

From what I see, the similarities are eery. Both cases required near-term trouble to ward off long-term catastrophes.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is gathering evidence and deciding whether to charge the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. There are many reasons why this issue is fraught.

In 2023, if the DoJ prosecutes Trump, it would split the country and cause mass bloodshed. Additionally, it would set a precedent that the Republican Party would indict Biden or a future Democratic president. Of course, there’s no guarantee that indicting him would lead to a conviction. But we have to at least try.

In 2007, as the US economy was collapsing and the horrors of the subprime loan crises were clear, the argument was similar.

We couldn’t let the big banks fail, because millions of people would lose all their money. Banks were so interconnected that the entire financial system would be ruined if we let a bank ‘fail.’

So what did the US do? We gave the banks enormous sums of money. We also gave airlines and other massive industries a boatload of free money. The consequence? Main Street was…

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A.J. Bryant

Adopted from Kerala. I write about adoption, my intercultural marriage, contemporary India and more. Prawns are my love language.