Did Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis make the smart play when she handed down indictments against Donald Trump and 18 others? Is her anti-corruption case as strong as the federal case supervised by special counsel Jack Smith? Does Willis’ move hurt or help Democrats politically?

Since I’m neither a lawyer nor a legal commentator, I don’t have answers — or even guesses — for any of those questions. But I do know this: Willis did the right thing for the citizens who live and work in Fulton County, where she is duty-bound to uphold the law. For those of us inclined toward empirical data and rational thinking, there is no doubt that former President Donald Trump attempted a coup when he lost his 2020 bid for reelection. He broke so many laws, savaging the Constitution in the process, that it’s hard to focus on the enormity of his crimes. They are unprecedented in U.S. history.

But keeping the spotlight on the institutional wreckage fails to note the havoc Trump and his allies wreaked on the lives of individuals, citizens who faithfully went about performing their legal duties only to be threatened, harassed and intimidated. In bringing her case against Trump and his claque of power-mad minions — all of whom, I am happy to report, were named in the indictment — Willis is trying to get justice not only for America writ large but also for those local citizens whose lives were turned upside down simply because they did their jobs.

Among them are two Black women who served as election workers, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Jewel Freeman. For their service to their county and their country, they were slandered, abused and harassed by legions of MAGA idiots. That all happened because Trump and his lap dogs, especially Rudy Giuliani, chose to spread vicious lies about them.

Moss, who was a full-time Fulton County election worker, asked her mother to help out with the job of counting ballots at one Atlanta polling place, the State Farm Arena, for the 2020 election. Having lived for years in Atlanta, I can tell you that Black women are the backbone of local polling stations, there to help citizens with a fundamental duty — casting a vote. And they don’t make very much money for doing it. Instead, they are motivated by a sense of civic responsibility — a trait Trump could never comprehend.

As election day grew late and boxes of ballots were still uncounted, supervisors asked workers, including Moss and Freeman, to stay and keep counting. At one point in the evening, surveillance footage captures the mother and daughter reaching into a bag that had been stored under a table to get more ballots.

That video became part of MAGA’s so-called evidence of voter fraud. It made the rounds in the right-wing mediascape, with Giuliani claiming at a Georgia State Senate hearing that Moss and Freeman were “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.”

The egregious lies are just part of the story; the flagrant racism is another. There were white election workers in the arena, too, but Trump’s cronies targeted two Black women, with Giuliani stretching for a drug-addict analogy.

Because of the threats they endured, both women were terrified. Freeman went into hiding for a while, and Moss has said she was afraid to leave the house.

Moss and Freeman have reached a settlement in a lawsuit against the right-wing news outlet One America News, and Giuliani has belatedly admitted that he lied about their handling of ballots. That’s not enough.

Trump and a host of his cronies committed crimes against their country and against a host of its dedicated public servants. If democracy is to persevere — if hardworking folks like Freeman and Moss are to continue serving — those crimes should be prosecuted. Willis knows that is her job.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.