Mark Dayton: Read public sentiment and worry

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It’s awful enough that Donald Trump was found guilty of illegally falsifying his financial records to hide payments to a former porn star, whose disclosure would have doomed his 2016 presidential election. But what is almost as bad is the despicable savaging of the American judicial system, now underway by obsequious Republican leaders.

There is evidently no limit to the extremes Trump’s sycophants must go to remain in his favor and embellish their own political careers at the expense of our nation. Words they’re using, like “sham,” “corrupt” and “unpatriotic,” should instead be applied to them.

Twelve of Trump’s fellow citizens believed the claims of Stormy Daniels that Trump had sex with her at the time his wife had just given birth to his fifth child. He and his campaign cronies knew its disclosure would likely be fatal to his presidential prospects, so they bribed his victim to keep the affair quiet, with the connivance of the publisher of the National Enquirer.

The evidence persuaded the jurors that he was guilty of 34 crimes. How anyone else could condone that criminal behavior, much less savage our legal system for its verdict, is incomprehensible. But it is the state of our country today.

One recent national poll showed that Trump’s conviction would make no difference to two-thirds of voters next November. Seventeen percent said it would make them less likely to vote for him. Fifteen percent said it would make them even more likely to support him.

I haven’t seen this deep a chasm in American society since the apex of the Vietnam War 50 years ago. Our country has experienced other wrenching divisions: over slavery, which led to the Civil War, and even during the American Revolution, in which reportedly about a third of citizens supported George Washington’s army, a third favored the British and a third were “unresolved.”

However, those violent ruptures occurred during wars; this divide is over one man. The hold he has over so many of my fellow citizens is frightening. And it’s hard to see how this episode will not end terribly badly: either with Trump’s re-ascendency to the presidency if he wins, or with the violence he is encouraging if he’s defeated.

I’m not astute enough to understand what about Trump causes this fanatical loyalty among his followers and drives them to ignore all evidence of his misbehaviors. However, I have read the histories of countries, like Germany, where evil leaders gained fanatical followings and used them to take over entire countries and their democratic systems of government. It would be foolish for us not to believe that it could happen here.