In any good mystery novel or short story, there is an item that will later reveal itself to the reader as a clue they should have seen all along. A tidbit hiding in plain sight that, in retrospect, is the key to solving the case. It could be a surreptitious whisper by one of the suspects, the style of shoes they wore, or an inconsistency about their whereabouts during the crime. (For instance, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” do you wonder why there is a bell cord in the victim’s room that isn’t attached to any bell? By the end of the story, Sherlock Holmes makes it all clear.)
One wouldn’t call Donald Trump a mystery, but when divining whether the former president knew he was intentionally creating a conspiracy to overturn a U.S. election, the evidence has always been there, plain as day.
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