Thoughts on dumping 'bad' politicians legally rather than 'democratically'

Is it a good thing that liberal Democratic opponents of conservative Republican politicians work to get them convicted of crimes (that they are very possibly guilty of) rather than unelected 'democratically'? (Trump, George Santos). This goes back at least to Nixon.

Nixon went after personally Democrats who were against the war in Vietnam (George McGovern, who had won the Democratic nomination, and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had exposed publicly ugly truths about our government's prosecution of the war by publishing the Pentagon Papers in the NY Times and the Washington Post). Then, the burglers caught, the Democrats fought back by going after Nixon. But not for the war, for his own personal misconduct, considered a scandal and widely associated with paranoia and thus 'mental illness'. This tactic has been commonly used.

There is even a liberal narrative according to which the enemies in the great military conflicts of the 1940s and 50s, Hitler and Stalin, were both paranoid and mentally ill or worse. The Holocaust was caused by the scandalous criminal tendencies of an irresponsible, bad man. Not, as in fact, by aspects of German and European capitalist modernity, including colonialism.

Perhaps Trump should be taken out in any way possible. But the reliance upon legal procedures rather than political ones proper is troubling. It is little remarked as a problem. It's also true of course in the way that left and right both appeal to the Supreme Court. The higher courts are in fact the only institutions in our representative and constitutional balance-of-power 'democracy' that is strictly 'rational' in its deliberations. The media-driven popular discourses centered around elections are, at least comparatively, a semblance of rational proceedings, as is also true of our Congress and other legislative bodies much of the time. Politicians in Congress and state legislatures are more likely to grandstand, publicly and with each other, as well as make deals like business people (Trump himself comes from this background) and placate corporate and other lobbyists who are also donors -- than they are to make carefully reasoned arguments. And American society understands meaningful social conflict to take place more on the model of the lawsuit with courtroom lawyers facing off in a true antagonistic process, than the model of, say, a philosophy seminar. Our democracy is not at all non-existent, though it might be thought deformed. But much of the conflicts that are pursued in it wind up being pursued by other means. Liberal Democrats have been as concerned to do this as their conservative Republican candidates, if not more so. With the media dominating the thinking of most people, 'democratic' processes proper may even seem more appealing to the populist right. Missing, as always, from the public sphere, mostly, are those criticisms that would get at something that is largely true across the board. Government by pure administration, something that, in the form of 'the administrative state', is something of a cliché enemy force on the right, though it has also been criticized by the intellectual left, Marxist or Heideggerian, is furthered by processes in which political actors try to get what they are sure they rightly want, 'by any means necessary', as Malcolm X famously said 'revolution' should proceed. That is a veritable formula for the complex of bureaucracy and technology that is operative (and literally so, valuing what is 'operative' or effective, what 'works' as means to achieve a given end) in today's capitalism (and was equally so in 'socialist' alternatives that proved both less effective in producing wealth and equally or more authoritarian). If we are lucky, Trump will both be prosecuted and lose the next election, though it is understandable that his supporters will not care what he is guilty of. That is a very interesting fact about our politics today. It ought to be better understood. And by us voters.