People reach for precedents to show the enormity of the insult by Donald Trump to the American political system evidenced by his latest two indictments. Aaron Burr had tried in the first decade of the nineteenth century to start a rebellion in the west that might have balkanized the North American continent but he was acquitted and he was only a vice president. Charles I was convicted by Parliament of treason and executed, he having trafficked with foreign powers to reestablish his power, but he had been a legitimate monarch otherwise and so a change from one political order to another rather than the enforcement of the constitutional order, which is what the indictments of Trump proclaim. The question is why is there need to find past analogies to give the present indictments as so serious, so historic, rather than plainly being so on  their face? I am reminded when Eichman was tried in Jerusalem, the prosecutor, gideon hauser, went out of his way to portray Eichman as a miltonic satan, an epitome of evil intent, so as to grasp the magnitude of his crimes, rather than viewing Eichman, as Arendt thought, a man of minor attributes who could endeavor horrible levels of evil just by getting the trains run on time. A petty person whose evil was enormous. Why the exaggeration to make it supremely significant? While Hauser was taken with ultimate moral forces, the answer, I think, we exaggerate other great cataclysms is because historical events  become shrouded with their enormity while the present seems inevitably plebeian, and I want to demonstrate that.