With 2023 upon us, I’d be remiss if I didn’t look into my crystal ball and give you my biggest prediction for the impending new year. Now, given all that’s gone down in 2023,

I do not think Donald Trump will face any significant consequences for his criming. Yeah, I know Attorney General Merrick Garland has been touting this whole, “no one is above the law” thing, and has recruited an elite special counsel to handle the Trump investigations. 

Yet this whole time the Trumps have been allowed to continue to be lawless. I don’t think anything’s going to change next year. 

And that’s not because I’m jaded. And I know we know I am. But it’s because I’m realistic about the society in which we live. The United States was founded upon a wealthy white male supremacy. Now that cis Christian, wealthy, white male supremacy if we’re going to be exact, but that is undeniable. 

The Founding Fathers envisioned white male landowners to have power in our society, and they created this purported democracy set to serve that very framework. 

So despite all of the advancements that we’ve made as a nation since 1776, the original vision still resounds to this very day. We see it everywhere, in every day. And all of the firsts that we’re still having in 2022, like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, also Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, we also see the Founding Fathers’ vision. 

When we look at today’s racial and gender wealth gap, the net worth of white families is nearly eight times as great as it is for the average black family. Also women, what we’re making still on average 83% on the dollar. We see it in evaluating how justice is rendered and so on. And yeah, there’s a lot of cis-het white wealthy men who are prosecuted and punished for their offenses. That’s undeniable. But still we see from the stats, studies and research that the average punishment is lighter, and that the penalties are lesser than what others face. The numbers don’t lie, and neither does the reality. 

To hold Donald Trump accountable for his lawlessness, what that would do is threaten the very foundation upon which our society was built. And that is why the powers that be will find a way to avoid taking him down. Now, that’s not to say that Trump won’t be shut down in terms of his many companies being subjected to fines, convictions and all else. 

I’m confident that the civil prosecutions will persist, especially given the recent 17-count fraud conviction in New York state court against the Trump Organization. 

People are fed up with the Trumps flaunting their grift in our faces, from what Trump exploiting his position as president to make $1.4 million off of Secret Service detail, to hoarding and 

hiding highly secret government documents that he may or may not have sold the foreign powers, to Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner somehow banking $2 billion off a deal with the Saudis. 

We the People, especially the nearly 66 million who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, are exhausted. 

Likewise, the GOP will do what’s necessary to keep the former president from splitting the republican vote with his 2024 presidential bid. They’ve already anointed their new golden boy in Ron DeSantis. And most of the right does not want Trump back in office. They will prevent that from happening, I assure you. 

Still society’s gatekeepers, like Attorney General Garland, they simply are not prepared to treat Trump like they would an every day, marginalized person engaged in criminal enterprise. We know this by virtue of the fact that the evidence is insurmountable, yet 45 is yet to be perp walked. What else is protecting him other than his wealthy, white maleness? 

Now I could be wrong. 

I would love to see Donald Trump and his family face actual consequences for their rampant corruption and climbing. I would love to see the rules actually apply to everyone equally, holding Trump accountable would be huge. It would signal to We the People that the laws actually, in fact do apply to everyone. And it also implied our society that we’re inching closer to eclipsing the overt bias the Founding Fathers built into our system. But I don’t think that’s going to happen on any meaningful level anytime soon. Because we have a status quo to keep in 2022 and beyond.