As I write today our nation is headed into the most significant and challenging presidential election cycle since the election of 1864 when the United States was still engulfed in the Civil War and the incumbent Abraham Lincoln faced former General George B. McClellan.

McClellan, running as a Democrat, challenging Lincoln’s re-election on an anti-war platform, pledging to pursue peace talks with the Confederacy but by Election Day the Union Army had victory in their sights and Lincoln was re-elected. However, McClellan did carry the State of New Jersey by five percentage points.

In 1878, McClellan got a delayed consolation prize when he was elected Governor of New Jersey.

Perhaps what makes our current moment even more of precarious is that this upcoming election is the first presidential race since the unprecedented January 6 violent attack on the U.S. Capitol when there was an attempt to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.

To say the very rule of law is on the ballot this November is no hyperbole.

For decades now, the American judicial system has had a hard time holding former President Trump accountable going back to his serial bankruptcies during his Atlantic City era that left all kinds of wreckage for small businesses he stiffed.

This is not a recent development or even one that starts with his effort to overturn the 2020 election or his illegal scheme to conceal hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, for which a New York State Court jury convicted him in May.

Back in 2002 the SEC issued a cease and desist order against Trump’s Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. for issuing a “fraudulent” press release that gave the public and investors the “false and misleading impression that his company had exceeded earning expectations through operational improvements, when in fact it had not.”

“Trump Hotels consented to the issuance of the Commission’s order without admitting or denying the Commission’s findings,” the SEC said in a press release. “The Commission also found that Trump Hotels, through the conduct of its chief executive officer, its chief financial officer and its treasurer, violated the antifraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act by knowingly or recklessly issuing a materially misleading press release.”

His lawyers negotiated a resolution with Trump, perhaps paying a fine, but with Trump not having to admit any wrongdoing. We need to see that this deference by our legal system to larger-than-life characters like Trump serial corporate offenders like Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, who transgress on an industrial scale merely pay fines and go on to prosper.

Indeed this inability of the power structure to hold accountable ‘great white men’ goes back to the earliest day of this wounded republic. While in 2016, Donald Trump bragged that his supporters so loved him, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and “wouldn’t lose any voters”.

Consider, there’s actually a precedent for a larger-than-life figure like Trump getting away with murder.

On this very day in 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, who for better or worse, laid the foundation for the political economy upon which our current form of market capitalism rests.

It was up on the Heights of Weehawken, a plateau below the Palisades that shoulder the mighty Hudson River that Hamilton caught the bullet in his stomach from his arch-rival Burr’s dueling pistol as part of a gruesome ritual that had left Hamilton’s 19-year-old son Philip dead three years earlier defending his father’s honor.

America’s gun death culture runs deep in our DNA.

According to the U.S. Senate website leading up to duel, Burr faced “with no chance of reelection as vice president”, ran for Governor of New York and blamed his defeat on Alexander Hamilton’s “private comment that he was a dangerous and devious man.”

That sparked the call for the duel.

“Although indicted for murder in New York and New Jersey, Burr never stood trial,” according to the U.S. Senate. “Instead, he returned to Washington in November 1804 for the new congressional session.”