It’s becoming increasingly difficult to come up with something new or interesting to say about the various Trump indictments. The redoubtable Heather Cox Richardson leads with the Montana climate-change court case and moves on to Tommy Tuberville before settling in for a few paragraphs about the Georgia charges. As of this writing, Josh Marshall has said nothing. Marcy Wheeler has written what may be her shortest post ever.
But it has to be said that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has done the nation a service, and not in precisely the same way as Special Counsel Jack Smith. By indicting a total of 19 people, she can get into the entire sweep of the Trump-led conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, as Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland argue in The New York Times. Because the case will be heard in state court, the trial — if there is one — will probably be on television, and a Republican president won’t be able to pardon Trump if he’s convicted. All good.
There’s already quite a bit of speculation as to who among those charged will flip. My nominee for the most likely star witness is former chief of staff Mark Meadows. One person we can be almost certain will not flip is Rudy Giuliani, if only because Willis would not likely accept his cooperation. He should be a flippee, not a flipper. If you suffered, as I did, through the second “Borat” movie, then you know Giuliani was thisclose to having sex with a woman who he believed was underage. Giuliani is a disgraceful human being, second only to Donald Trump in loathsomeness among the various defendants.
So how will this end? On Threads this morning, the historian Michael Beschloss asked: “Serious question for you: Where will Trump be two years from now? (Not your hope but your best prediction.)”
My answer: “Faking illness in a hospital bed at MAL to avoid having to appear in court.”
Not very satisfying, maybe, but a likely outcome nevertheless.
There is no shortage of commentary about the indictment of Donald Trump on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. So I want to spend a few moments taking a look at Mike Pence. In reading the 45-page indictment last night I was struck, once again, at how decently and courageously Pence acted when faced with the greatest challenge of his public life.
I can’t understand why liberals and conservatives are so reluctant to give him any credit, blowing past his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and focusing instead on his previous eight four* years as an obsequious Trump toady and his status as a theocratic right-wing extremist. That’s fine. He deserves that criticism. But before and during the insurrection, Pence acted with moral courage, telling Trump repeatedly that he would follow the Constitution by certifying Joe Biden’s victory, and with physical courage, refusing to flinch after Trump whipped up an enraged mob that surely would have killed him if given the opportunity.
“You’re too honest,” Trump reportedly told Pence on Jan. 1 after learning that Pence would not reject or return to the states electoral votes that had been properly cast.
If you’re not inclined to give Pence his due, think about what would have happened if he’d gone along with Trump’s corrupt scheming and Trump had attempted to remain in office. As one administration official is quoted as saying, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” To which Co-Conspirator 4 (identified as Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark) is said to have replied, “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” And there you have it: Troops in the streets, gunning down members of the public in order to keep Trump in office.
We all owe Mike Pence a debt of gratitude.
• We are already hearing a lot of misguided commentary that special counsel Jack Smith will need to prove that Trump knew he was lying about the outcome of the election in order to show that Trump committed the crimes with which he has been charged. For instance, David French of The New York Times, an anti-Trump conservative and lawyer whose analysis I have come to rely on, nevertheless gets it wrong when he writes:
There’s little doubt that Trump conspired to interfere with or obstruct the transfer of power after the 2020 election. But to prevail in the case, the government has to prove that he possessed an intent to defraud or to make false statements. In other words, if you were to urge a government official to overturn election results based on a good faith belief that serious fraud had altered the results, you would not be violating the law. Instead, you’d be exercising your First Amendment rights.
I don’t think that’s right. Regardless of whether Trump believed he’d been a victim of voter fraud, it’s indisputable that he knew Biden had been declared the winner. Trump’s beliefs did not give him the right to put together slates of fake electors, which the indictment devastatingly describes as morphing from a semi-legitimate contingency plan into a flat-out attempt to dislodge the real electors. And it surely did not give him the right to foment a violent insurrection.
In any case, the indictment is full of evidence that Trump was told over and over, by his own officials, that he had lost the election, and that he continued to lie about it publicly. Even if French is right, I don’t think Trump’s state of mind should pose much of an obstacle.
• Did Rudy Giuliani, a.k.a. Co-Conspirator 1, sing like a canary or what?
• We need to understand what we’re living through. The president of the United States staged a violent insurrection with the aim of staging a coup in order to remain in office, and, if the polls are to be believed, about 43% of voters would still like to return him to that office. Tuesday was an important day for accountability, but this country remains on the brink of falling into right-wing authoritarianism. None of us know whether we’re going to get through this or not. God help us all.
As gratified as I am that Donald Trump is being held to account for his reprehensible behavior, I find that Friday’s developments have left me sad as well. There are three reasons for this.
First, the alleged crimes documented by special prosecutor Jack Smith are so much worse than we had been expecting. Nuclear secrets? Plans for invading an unnamed country, probably Iran? If Trump wasn’t actively sharing these documents with our enemies, he was nevertheless storing them with shocking disregard for who might go looking for them. We have to assume that Mar-a-Lago was crawling with spies.
Then there is his massive hubris and stupidity. All of the charges, without exception, stem from documents he held onto after he was given a chance to return them. One commentator — I forget who — referred to this as a “get out of jail” gift that he nevertheless spurned. Just incredible.
Second, there is the dispiriting fact that there is literally no bottom for Republican elected officials in defending Trump. The top two elected officials in the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, have both attacked law enforcement and stood by Trump, denouncing the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice and the FBI. So, too, has Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is so far the only plausible Trump rival for the 2024 presidential nomination. A pardon looms if a Republican — maybe even Trump — defeats President Biden.
Third, there is the reality (or Reality, if you prefer) that the crimes with which Trump has been charged would land any ordinary person in prison for a very long time if they were convicted — and yet the prospect of Trump’s ending up behind bars in the event of a guilty verdict seems unlikely in the extreme.
If Trump is convicted of what he’s been charged with, he should spend the rest of his life in federal custody. Does anyone really expect to see that? No, of course not. And thus our two-track system of justice — one for the rich and powerful, one for everyone else — will continue unchallenged.
