I can’t help myself here, but I’m about to bring up lore for “Warhammer 40,000,” which is itself is nothing more than the backdrop for grown men to roll dice and play with action figures. In this fiction, humanity is a faction called the Imperium of Man, a galaxy spanning empire founded by an immortal demi-god, whose goes by moniker The Emperor of Mankind. Without getting lost in the weeds, what’s important is the fate that befalls this character.

When his finest generals and administrators are corrupted by eldritch entities, the emperor is mortally wounded in the final battle of a brutal civil war. In the most pyrrhic of victories after defeating his traitorous sons, the emperor is left as a living corpse on a golden throne of a crumbling galaxy-spanning kingdom slowly being consumed by the ruinous powers of Chaos.

The emperor comes to be worshiped with a religious zeal that is compelled from every single human by an imperial cult, despite his prior edict demanding secular atheism. In death, the only way for the emperor to survive was by allowing others to see a divinity in him that he long denied. To the horror of the Lovecraft rejects who corrupted his sons and soldiers, instead of their machinations destroying the emperor, they facilitated his ascension to a state of Godhood, empowering him in ways they did not anticipate.

Believe it or not, I’m not taking a jab at the husk known as Joe Biden Junior with this exercise, because the only president once and future who the comparison applies to is, of course, the recently indicted Donald J. Trump.

His fans online made this connection early in his campaign in 2015, mocking up dozens of gloriously absurd Photoshops fusing the then candidate with the art and iconography of one of the most ruthless and despotic characters in fiction. Trump supporters on the exiled Reddit community “r/The_Donald” may have begun calling Trump “God Emperor of the United States” from a place of glib irony to mock the fawning reverence of former President Barack Obama and two-time loser Hillary Clinton, but after his election and the unfurling of his administration, it grew more and more sincere.

Now, after nearly seven years of constant procedural harassment, unconstitutional surveillance, partisan investigation and ceaseless hostile news coverage, every Hillary voter is finally being given the moment they’ve desired ever since their queen stood them up on election night in 2016. Somehow, some local prosecutor in Manhattan has succeeded where every other Saint George failed in slaying the Trump Dragon. Except for the fact that what he’s apparently been indicted for some procedural crime that only exists if you hold two contradictory notions to be true.

The first being, that the artist known as Stormy Daniels didn’t commit a crime when she blackmailed then candidate Trump into buying her silence regarding their tryst, and the other is that Trump did commit a crime when he gave in to her demands because of the bucket the money may have come from. We’re talking about a man who millions of Americans are still convinced was a traitor or Manchurian candidate controlled by foreign nations or organizations. It’s a little pathetic that this is the thing that we’re shredding 250 years of precedent over.

If I’m honest, I had thought it would’ve been the two scoops of ice cream. We’re talking about procedural misdemeanors that great swathes of Congress critters are guilty of, and one that the feds already passed on twice. Yet somehow the charges are still being elevated into a hoard of Class E felonies, causing the political world to stand still.

I won’t speculate as to the worst that they have in mind for the Orange Man, but for all the talk of tolerance and claims that their opposition is driven by hate, the froth mouthed and deranged are driven not by altruism. Look no further than recent polling done by CNN, where a majority of respondents believed the charges were clearly politically motivated, but which included an uncomfortable amount who also believed this partisan action was a good thing.

For some reason they haven’t considered whether or not they’d appreciate the same treatment and standards applied to anyone but the Orange Man, but that’s the larger point. This action, no matter how limp and insipid it may prove to be in the light of day is a crossing of the Rubicon one only takes if they have no intention of ever returning to the standards that existed before. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has even declared that Trump will be given the chance to “prove his innocence,” proving either how little she knows about our justice system or how malicious she and those who agree with her have become.

This kind of injustice, which it is, don’t even waste your breath acting like it isn’t considering the skeletons bursting from every closet in the Beltway, will rend the foundations of our republic asunder. But as I’ve alluded to before in my column, securing Trump as the opponent to the Lich from Delaware is the only path to victory these people can conceive, which worked out fabulously for them the last time the complex teed him up against Hillary.

By all accounts, the indictment of the former president may only succeed in solidifying Trump’s standing in the 2024 election landscape, which, of course, could be exactly what the White House would love to see happen. Even viral geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan feels a Trump v. Biden rematch is a guaranteed Biden victory, so to some extent everyone in the complex thinks this is a good idea. Of course, the Complex may want to remember the sting of how quickly that same kind of arrogance and certitude went south on them in 2016.

Much like the God Emperor of Games Workshop’s grimdark future ensconced on the Golden Throne, the former president will only be transformed into something greater if this is allowed to continue. His formerly hollow cries of injustice will begin to ring true in the hearts and minds of Americans in ways his enemies will not be able to rationalize themselves. Thanks to their ideological possession and the single-minded hate pouring out of our institutions, a righteousness that many would not have afforded him will now be thrust into his hands, and taken up by supporters and unaligned alike.

The consequence is that we are unlikely to see any of the meager GOP players lining up presidential runs of their own, including our own Governor of Indeterminate Wealth (for some reason Doug is prickly about being called a billionaire) to mount anything meaningful against the vengeful base of a martyred Trump.

How will the Complex react if their actions boomerang back on them again? Because Trump won in 2016, the permanent class of our country delivered unto us a dystopian nation devoid of meaning, ambition, hope, and brotherly love. All of these values are replaced instead with grievances and intolerance; degenerating into an endless present where the party is always right if only because it has ground out all who dare disagree.

For everything one can hurl at the former president regarding his overheated campaign rhetoric, he never “locked her up” or any other political opponent up, stooping to the levels of banana republicanism being rationalized by those simply deranged by his presence. In fact, former Attorney General Bill Barr has written in his memoirs about how Trump himself put the kibosh on actually prosecuting Clinton, a restraint his critics still won’t acknowledge the man had and they clearly don’t.

So, spare me the sanctimonious pablum that Trump is getting comeuppance for something he never had any intention of following through on, and didn’t. If Donald Trump could recognize that such partisan hackery would only toxify and destroy every sense of justice our nation supposedly represents, why can’t his enemies?

We are reaping the consequences of the blind hatred that those in power hold for the former president and for every single American who voted for him. There’s been enough polling to indicate there’s a rot within our nation’s soul, and its root is found in the mindless deleterious actions of those seeking to upend democracy because they couldn’t live with the results of an election.

Everybody is supposed to get what they deserve in a just world. No one is “above the law,” is the constant refrain, especially from those who seem to be above it. Justice is exactly what the people pushing this evil are running from like their lives depend on it. More than likely it is because they probably do.