Indictment Would Help Trump, but We Need To Follow Through | Opinion

The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Amani Wells-Onyioha during a Newsweek debate about the possibility of Donald Trump facing indictment. You can listen to the podcast here:

I feel like this is going to help Donald Trump only because there's been so many times where he's supposed to be arrested and charged and so many things have been thrown at him and it hasn't stuck. And I don't even think it's because it couldn't stick, but it's because people like to stir things up with Trump and then just let it bubble at the surface, and then just leave it there and let it sink. So, at this point, arrest them or charge him, do what it is that you're planning to do. But every time that you stir something up and don't go all the way on it, it adds to his perpetual victim narrative that allows him to slide right into their role and use it to his advantage. So I do believe that they should have arrested him years ago if they were going to, or at this point it's pretty critical that they do it now or it will seem like they're picking on him, even though some of these things are real. He has committed frauds with his university and all of these other things that we've seen Trump be faced with.

This is where Republicans shot themselves in the foot because over the past decade, since we've been dealing with Trump in the political space, we found out a million terrible things about this man. Some of them are just morally gray, or iffy, or bad. Other things are quite literally illegal. So we've had a very long time to prosecute him on something. We've had a very long time to press charges, have those charges stick and pursue it to the highest extent of the law. And we've just not done that. And I don't really know why that is. It's a lot of unseriousness going on around the issues. You want to raise awareness, but at the same time, if you don't follow through then it makes people not take it as serious and it becomes more of a theatrical thing than somebody who's actually trying to pursue justice. It does no good to keep bringing these things up if we're not going to see it all the way through. If you're still going to let him run for office, if you're still going to let him potentially become president again, what's really the point if we're not going to give him any real consequences for anything?

Amani Wells-Onyioha is a political organizer and Director of Operations at Sole Strategies.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.