"Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup."

The prose of Maureen Dowd, in "The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief" (NYT). 

I saw the headline first and thought "Our Liar in Chief" might be a reference to the current President, but what are the chances?

I wondered whether convincing a jury that Trump attempted a coup is what we ought to call "a herculean task." Why did Hercules perform his tasks? Was he some sort of prosecutor, accusing somebody else? No, he stood guilty of murdering his wife and children and needed to atone.

Also, his tasks were much harder than persuading some human beings to view a set of facts as falling within a particular formulation of words.

If a prosecutor's task really looked as difficult as any of the 10 Hercules had to perform, the prosecutor shouldn't be charging, since prosecutorial ethics demand a belief that it's more likely than not that an unbiased jury will find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

We shouldn't look to prosecutors for tricky superhuman feats, and if you catch yourself doing that, you may atone by reading Robert H. Jackson's 1940 address "The Federal Prosecutor."

ADDED: Dowd quotes something Ron DeSantis said the other day, something that struck me as entirely apt (and Ron DeSantis is emphatically not in the business of helping out Trump):

"The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true, and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims."

Is Dowd demonstrating that she's one of the media voices DeSantis was talking about, promoting the "coup" theory for partisan gain? How does she refute that accusation, that accusation about an accusation? She just calls DeSantis "delusional."