Daily Grind - The necessary but insufficient Trump indictments
The criminal cases won't solve our broken politics
Keeping it relatively short and with few links this evening. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m working to develop a regular posting habit. Let’s keep this going.
Alright, I’ve now read two of the four indictments against Trump and a variety of his associates: the 98-page indictment from Fulton County, GA by District Attorney Fani Willis and the one brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in Washington D.C. Combine those with other two indictments - the one in Florida regarding Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and subsequent efforts to block handing the document back to the government, and the one brought in New York City over whether hush money payments to a porn star constitute a campaign finance violation.
All in all, I have to say, this is not as impressive as I would have hoped.
I go into evaluating these cases with a single goal in mind: Somehow getting the remaining Trump supporters (that is, most self-identified Republicans) to recognize how much of a threat Trump presents to our republic. As I have written before, I believe the attack of Jan. 6 - spurred on by weeks of disproven statements from Trump and others - likely represents the beginning of the end of our system of government. Perhaps we’ll yet pull out of this spiral. But right now, a sizeable portion of our electorate is in the grip of a cult of personality, in which a single person’s word is taken as truth, regardless of the counter-evidence presented or the people who speak out against him. That’s the kind of demagogue - and cultish behavior - that the once-revered-by-Republicans founding fathers worried about. And now it has become real in our time. (Let me just state - I’m not talking about policy. I’m talking about the state of our politics.)
So where do these cases leave us? I think the campaign finance case is complete nonsense and a waste of time. Campaign finance is already a fairly corrupt and often gray subject. This case adds nothing when so much is at stake.
Similarly, I don’t care much about the mishandling of documents or Trump’s fighting to hang on to them. Purely as an aside, who knows what his motivation was for fighting this so hard? It was likely petty, knowing the insecure man-child that he is. But with so many others having been found to mishandle documents in our elite leadership - Biden, Pence, H. Clinton - this case seems irrelevant to our larger political culture. (Unless you want to argue that “regular” government workers land in jail, while top leaders walk away. That’s obviously not good.)
That leaves the Jan. 6 case brought by Jack Smith and the Georgia RICO, etc. case brought by Fani Willis.
These two cases matter. They concern Jan. 6, its lead-up, and its aftermath. These cases will determine the future of the republic.
Unfortunately, the Smith case seems rather weak. It strikes me that he’s been forced to stretch a variety of laws to charge Trump with a crime. Incredibly, Trump and associates seem to have found a way to commit what amounts to a crime without breaking any black-and-white, clearly defined law. One law he’s being charged with violating didn’t exist until after the Civil War when lawmakers at the time had to figure out what to do with former Confederate traitors violating people’s rights. (Apparently, we need to go through some bad things to get appropriate laws, I guess.)
The Georgia case seems stronger - but only if it can be made to fit RICO. RICO asserts that a criminal conspiracy occurred in a variety of “small” ways (although these often can be terrible crimes), all adding up to one big offense. That’s why it’s used against the mob, which has a lot of practice with retaining plausible deniability for its larger racket of organized crime (the “R” in RICO) while committing a variety of crimes. I have to say, Trump and associates’ effort to use fake electors to disrupt and delay the Jan. 6 counting of state electors sure feels like something RICO should cover.
One worry I have in both of these cases is that they seem to depend quite a bit on proving that Trump and others knew what they were saying was false. That’s not easy to prove. We are often self-delusional creatures. But perhaps the law has some sort of test - a reasonable standard test, a “bullshit” test - that sets the standard for what people should have known.
Regardless, in all the cases, a jury will decide. And how that ends up isn’t clear at all.
So, that’s my take on the legal landscape. But as you can see from the subtitle of this post, sadly, I see all of this as all completely beside the point. These cases won’t fix our broken politics. And honestly, I don’t yet see a way out of that.