Trump Can’t Bluster His Way to Court

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Shortly after announcing his indictment on Thursday, Donald Trump posted a video on Truth Social complaining about the prosecution. In four minutes, he repeatedly claimed that he had won his re-election, insisted on his innocence, called the Russia investigation a conspiracy by Hillary Clinton, and insisted that every investigation into his behavior is fraud and scam. His speeches over the weekend featured a torrent of misstatements.

In his arraignment yesterday, on the other hand, the former president said nothing. According to reporters, he sat quietly with his arms crossed while his lawyer entered his plea of ​​not guilty. More bombast was to come in a speech later that evening. But for a short time in court, the lies stopped.

Trump has built a political juggernaut out of shameless lying. Or maybe not lying. At this point, it’s almost a cliché to refer to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of nonsense, which Frankfurt describes as different from, and worse than, a lie, in that the fool doesn’t care whether what he says is true or not. . Trump is an absolute buffoon but the courtroom is a poor place for that kind of bluster. It is an environment designed for careful, systematic analysis of meaning and argument. In court, Trump is no longer at his home. In that sense, the Mar-a-Lago indictment represents the latest collision between the legal system and Trump’s insistence on defining the terms of his own reality.

Trump’s own accounts of what happened to the classified documents he allegedly brought to Mar-a-Lago are extraordinary. Often, he says he declared them before leaving office a claim with no evidence. Sometimes, he insists that his enemies are unjustly persecuting him despite their own record of escaping with sensitive materials. (There’s no evidence that they did this on purpose, especially since they refused to return them.) Recently, many of his posts on Truth Social about the case appeared in all capital letters, as if he were shouting at a computer screen.

The indictment, by contrast, is a quiet, controlled document. It walks through the case against Trump and his aide Walt Nauta with brusque efficiency: Trump took government papers that were not his; he lied and refused to return them when the government called; and in doing so, he put the country at risk. At times, the accusation poked at Trumps by using his own words. In an exchange conducted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump told a staffer that as president I can declassify a document, but now I’m not going to direct the denial as many times as Trump has said in He publicly declared the records in question during his time in office. Elsewhere, the indictment repeats paragraph after paragraph of comments Trump made during his campaign and presidency, stressing the importance of protecting classified information. The indictment is a refusal to give in to Trump’s desire to shape the world around whatever truth he feels most comfortable with at the time.

Trump, according to Smith, ignored the laws regarding the handling of classified materials because he did not want them to exist and when the government came, he repeatedly tried to rewrite the facts by hiding the additional documents and encouraging people around him, including his lawyers, to lie to government investigators. Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we’re not here? he said, according to his lawyers. Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?

Like Trumps lies about winning the 2020 election, these suggestions are an effort to change reality to his will. By refusing to relinquish control over the materials he can only legally access when president, he also maintains the fantasy that he still holds that office by right.

The government, however, was not impressed. The indictment states: At 12:00 noon on January 20, 2021, TRUMP ceased to be president.

For all those Trump loves to press charges against those he claims have wronged him, the courtroom represents a space perhaps uniquely suited to Trumpian lies. Lawyers cannot lie before a judge or make statements that have no basis in law or fact. They need to set out the reasoning behind their claims, rather than simply asserting that something is right because they say it is. As the philosopher Jeremy Waldron has argued, law represents a way of thinking that allows rival and competing claims to confront and engage with each other in an orderly process without decomposition. in an incoherent shouting match. It’s hard to think of anything less Trumpian.

In the Mar-a-Lago investigation, this aspect of the law has limited Trump’s ability to lie. Shortly after the FBI searched the Palm Beach, Florida, estate in August, Trump sued to prevent the Justice Department from accessing the seized materials. He uses a familiar tactic, buying himself more time by throwing up legal hurdles for his opponent to overcome. But in doing so, he also gave the government a platform to make its case against him. In a preview of the months-long indictment, the Justice Department responded with a long, damning account of how Trump and his team have repeatedly thwarted the government’s efforts to safeguard sensitive information. Trump, meanwhile, had to hold back in court from claiming he had disclosed the documents in question, as he and his legal team insisted on television and social media. He couldn’t make that argument in front of a judge, because it wasn’t true.

That was far from the only time the Trump team came to court unable to prove the former president’s wild claims. Over the course of efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 presidential election, lawyers representing the Trump campaign or allied groups have made arguments about supposed election irregularities on television and social media that are not prevented. While there are many arenas including print, television, and social media where protests, speculation, and speculation can be advanced, a judge writes, such expressions are not permitted or accepted in a court of law. law Many of the lawyers who chose to promote such speculation, including Trumps former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, are now facing ethics investigations.

Elsewhere in the legal system, litigants are using defamation law as a tool to bring down the Big Lie of the 2020 election fraud; Dominion Voting Systems, for example, got a big deal from Fox News. The truth is important. Lies have consequences, a Dominion lawyer said after the settlement was announced. Trump also faced this strategy, in the context of E. Jean Carrolls successful civil suit against him for sexual abuse and defamation after she denied her claim that she was assaulted in a department-store dressing room.

Thus United States v. Donald Trump would not be Trump’s first confrontation with what we might call the anti-bullshit qualities of the judicial system. It may not be the last either, as Smith continues to investigate Trump’s potential legal culpability for the Jan. 6 insurrection. At the state level, there are potential charges in Georgia for the former president’s impeachment efforts the 2020 election there, as well as the indictment of Trump by New York State for arranging hush money payments to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. It’s tempting to look at that list and see the possibility of a resounding victory over Trumps blather, a victory of accountability that insists facts matter and words mean what they say.

But Trump has a Houdini-like ability to extricate himself from legal and political traps. The special counsel had an early stroke of bad luck with the judge appointed to oversee the case, Aileen Cannon, who also oversaw Trump’s lawsuit to hamstring the Justice Department’s investigation last year. Cannon problematized that case so thoroughly, subverting normal legal principles in the service of a result in Trump’s favor, that conservative judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit were forced to step in and turn things back on. path. If Cannon handles the prosecution of Trump as he did in his earlier suit, the shell has an enormous amount of discretion to make life difficult for the special counsel prosecuting the case.

The story of Trump’s confrontation with the law is also the story of his confrontation with various rule-bound institutions: the Justice Department; two special advisers; judges in black robes; and, during both impeachment, the House and Senate. Still, the Cannons’ presence is a reminder that Trump has been able to change many of those same institutions during his tenure. He was one of several judges appointed by Trump in his successful effort to remake the federal bench. In this regard, there is an irony in how the courts and legislation have been celebrated by some progressives and Trump opponents as a fact that privileges space, even as Trump’s alliance with the conservative legal movement has pulled the federal judiciary to the right. and caused a growing crisis of public confidence in the courts.

Trump kept the indictment in his bid for re-election, asking for a chance to face retribution against those who wronged him. Cannons role in the courtroom suggests another way to understand the stakes of a second Trump presidency. Given another four years, he will be able to further transform institutions in his image and, in doing so, limit their ability and willingness to hold him accountable again.

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