This Week’s Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

I have to admit, this was a week that would have been unimaginable in my youth, and that seemed inevitable in the present day. A former president* of the United States was in the news because, one way or another, he was in three different courtrooms. In one, his criminal trial for paying off a porn star to keep mum on their assignation in the interest of his campaign. In another, a judge was poised to detonate a multi-megaton explosive under his entire corporate enterprise. And in the third, he was present behind every question posed by the people seeking to destroy the prosecutor who is preparing to put him and a platoon of his hired ratfckers for attempting to monkeywrench the presidential election in the state of Georgia.

That is a rich, full week, a tasty chewy cluster of fck for American democracy.

But what has been exposed over the past eight years is the malignant effect of the magnification of the American presidency. Ever since Congress briefly exercised its oversight power over Richard Nixon in 1974, the evidence indicates that the Watergate episode scared the daylights out of the other institutions of democracy, including the press, so much so that those institutions…