The case for letting the arraignment go down without paying much attention at all.

We sometimes forget that one of Donald Trump’s first official big lies in office was about the size of the crowds at his inauguration. At the time, it seemed like such a strange way to vault into a new era—it was amazing to see the president lie so blatantly, about something so fact-checkable, but there we were. He was lying, and we were stuck reporting on the fact of the lies. Lies about the size of crowds at Trump events have been a staple of his public life ever since, including at last week’s rally in Waco, Texas. It’s awfully tempting to think he will just keep going places and saying false things while the number of people who turn up to listen dwindles down to a few remaining attorneys and Sean Hannity, but even if that’s what’s happening, you’d better believe that Donald Trump will always tell us that he is speaking before the world’s most impressive crowd, and that they are crouched like tigers, ready to do his bidding at a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile, although New York City police remain on heightened alert this week in advance of the former President’s arraignment Tuesday and whatever other nuttery he has planned for after, the early indication is that he hasn’t the power to summon Jan. 6 sized-crowds to his side anymore. While he has done yeoman’s work raising funds in the days since his indictment was announced ($4 million in the first $24 hours), it’s not clear whether that translates to actual minions in the street, poised to light a match for him yet again. As Aymann Ismail reported Monday, it’s awfully hard to predict the actions of uncoordinated angry extremists, but experts don’t see a lot of the markers of a coordinated insurrection campaign, despite TV threats-slash-demands that they occur. Perhaps that’s why the president has already decided he’ll return to Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night in order to deliver an address from there—a streamed address doesn’t have to reveal the crowd size, after all. And at Mar-a-Lago, the sets still suggest he’s a king.

It’s almost as if—much like the ex-president himself—even the most emboldened supporters of Donald Trump now exist mostly in the frothy ether between Twitter and Truth Social, between Reddit and Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s busted memory chip. Asked to travel through corporeal time, in their actual bodies, to the streets of New York, where they might end up being deemed legally responsible for their actions, most of the zeal falls away. We can thank the January 6 Committee, and the prosecution of over 1,000 insurrectionists for the possibility that bodily, monetary, and liberty-based accountability may have been enough, this time, to deter another band of Trump enthusiasts from unloosing the violent protest he has repeatedly demanded of them in recent days.

So perhaps in the upcoming days, the rest of us would do well to consider that it’s finally time to heed the advice of the experts who have warned us for years that the best thing to do with America’s Donald Trump problem is largely sideline it. At any rate, it’s worth reminding ourselves that indictments of political leaders happen every day; Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted multiple times, and nobody thinks anything of it. Instead of showing up to rubberneck the arraignment Tuesday, people should perhaps tend to more exigent problems of democracy, like resoling their pumps and checking the air pressure on their tires. In other words, what if America held a Trump indictment and arraignment and nobody showed up to fuss about it? That could be proof of something truly awesome. Indeed, it would highlight the awkward reality that Trump’s first indictment is hardly a shocking event; the fact that he thrived in a country with a justice system for many decades without having been indicted until April of 2023 is the real outlier.

What is called for here, really, is the Ferberizing of the former president. If you’ve never tried to teach a wailing infant to sleep through the night, Ferber’s suggested steps are fairly straightforward: you put the baby in its crib; you say goodnight kindly; you leave it to cry itself out; you let it cry a bit longer each day before going in to reassure it. And presto! 7 days later you are no longer trapped in a hostage situation with someone who has no teeth and can fit its own foot in its mouth. We could all due with less obligation to babysit Donald Trump in our lives. With time, he will stop crying, I swear.

Further, as several observers have astutely pointed out, in addition to this week being a sacred week for indictments, it’s actually a holy week in many faiths and a chance for the faithful to decide whether they want to look to the heavens or to the Manhattan DA’s office for purpose and meaning. If we can agree that letting the former president cry it out while we all get on with our lives is the real play here, then what better time to make a molehill out of a molehill, than his appearance in New York City.

Finally, were we to finally agree to Ferberize the former president, we might be able to stop the mindless horserace coverage about whether the prospect of criminal accountability is good for his electoral chances or bad for it, which we are certainly doing already, even before knowing the true seriousness of the crimes for which he is being indicted. Because the first rule of Ferber Club? Who cares. (Really, nobody cares about your Ferber process. They are all the same.) We’re still just barely over the halfway point of the current presidency—indeed, Trump’s early announcement that he is running for president again might be mostly for self-protective purposes anyway.

At any rate, 60 percent of Americans approve of the indictment, and according to new polling, his favorability and unfavorability numbers haven’t actually changed much since it happened. In other words, America at large seems increasingly apt to let the former president cry it out, for longer and longer intervals, more and more frequently, regardless of how loud the few sad lingering members of his crowd shout about fairness (mostly on the internet).

None of this means the danger has passed, incidentally. If anything, the fact that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence and the folks who would be best served by finally pushing the former president under the metaphorical bus are still using this moment to foster mistrust of the justice system signals that even if we leave Trump to flail and wail, there are others ready and willing to occupy the bassinet he has vacated. That should be the real focus of our attention, but instead we are still training our cameras on the former president’s motorcade as he departs his Florida home for his New York one on the eve of his indictment.

Still, the lesson of this week must be that the thing we never believed possible is coming true: They could throw an insurrection and it’s finally too costly, too risky, and too boring to show up. That’s reason enough to finally try to walk away from watching. It was never that large a crowd in the first instance—and watching a small crowd grow smaller isn’t news.