Opinion: The United States against Donald Trump: Trump cannot win. That is why he is dangerous

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Former US president Donald Trump speaks at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, on June 13. Andrew Harnik/The Associated Press

As with Donald Trump, the failure of imagination is ours. The usual line in the commentary is to exclaim at how extraordinary it is, how unprecedented, that a former president should be charged with a crime or rather a federal crime, Mr. Trump has been accused of falsifying business records to hide criminal activity in the state of New York, and has just as well been found guilty of sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

But that’s not really the story. There have been previous presidents who cheated, even though no one was charged. And almost all the behavior of Mr. Trump is unprecedented and unthinkable, not just the crimes.

To focus on his indictment is to miss the bigger story, which is his reaction to it. Consider: With the full power and might of the US justice system against him, Mr. Trump is not to meet a plea, or even, despite a perfunctory not guilty, to fight the charges. It was to bring down the entire US justice system around him.

This is not the reaction of a normal person. This is not the reaction of a mob boss. This is a Batman villain’s reaction. This is the reaction not of a criminal but of a revolutionary nihilist, someone who is not only interested in breaking the law but dismantling it. Mr. can’t win. Trump has his case on the evidence, but I’m not sure his behavior would be any different if he remembered his contention that not only was the 2020 election rigged, but also the 2016 election: which he won.

And so, having convinced his millions of followers that the American elections are a con, easily manipulated by the Deep State or magic voting machines or Italian satellites or what you better justify their own attempts to stole the last election, and the next Mr. Trump and his acolytes have now begun to work on destroying the rule of law.

Lawrence Martin: Trump’s charges are great for Democrats and America

The lines they learned to repeat in the Mar-a-Lago case are fundamentally the same as in the New York case. It’s a witch hunt. Democrats used the justice system. The prosecutor is biased, or corrupt, or both. Mr. Trump was singled out for punishment, while others who did the same or worse were not charged. There are even the same veiled threats to family members of prosecutors, the same coded appeals for Jan. 6-style violence.

But then, it’s not as if they have any better arguments. Arguing that a president, especially a former president, can only declassify documents on his mind; the premise that the law applies only to government documents that are classified, and not to those, regardless of their classification, the disclosure of which would harm the national interest; the claim that the Presidential Records Act allows former presidents to claim government documents, secret or otherwise, as their personal property, and not, as the law actually states, the opposite: it’s all bullshit.

The rest is whataboutery. What about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails? What about Joe Bidens notes? What about Mike Pences who is a Republican, mind you, but still. Even if they are remotely comparable, they will not diminish the weight of what Mr. Trump. But in fact they are completely different. In any of the cases mentioned is the violation of the security of anything similar to the seriousness of what was seen at Mar-a-Lago: documents related to nuclear weapons, for the sky, and the state of the US and allied preparations in military; documents left strewn about, or stored in bathrooms and bedrooms and on ballroom stages, at a resort frequented by thousands of international visitors each year; documents which on at least two occasions he showed to several visitors.

And in every other case the documents were returned, upon request in some cases even before they were requested. In contrast, Mr. Trump has refused to return the documents he mishandled for months, defying not only repeated requests by the national archivist but grand jury subpoenas. He hid them from investigators, lied about how many he had, asked his lawyers to lie too, even lied to his lawyers. Any of these charges, at least one count of stealing documents, storing them insecurely, disclosing their contents and obstructing efforts to recover them are usually enough to send the accused in prison. Mr. Trump did it all, dozens of times, and bragged about it on tape.

So no, Trump’s strategy is not to win his case on the merits. Can’t even win a court case. His team may be trying, with their inflammatory references to banana republics and Third World dictatorships, to sway the jury in Mr. Trump. Or they could hope that Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee whose inventive effort to derail the Mar-a-Lago investigation earned her a memorable rebuke from an appeals court (to accept his decision, they wrote, would imply a radical restructuring of our caselaw. which would violate our founding principle of Nations), and who for some reason was allowed to hear the case now that it was brought up for trial, could have bailed to him again.

But the main focus of their strategy seems to be outside the court: to inflame popular opinion on the alleged injustice of his case. If people in power can imprison their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic, the eternally ridiculous Senator Josh Hawley Tweeted, as if Joe Biden were all and not the succession of independent judges, grand juries, special prosecutors and finally a jury of his colleagues who will decide the fate of Mr. Trump’s complete discrediting of the US justice system is, well, what exactly is the plan?

Is the idea that his supporters should descend en masse on the courtroom and free him from prison? Do his allies in Congress hope to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case, either by withholding funding or, as Senator JD Vance has suggested, refusing to approve nominations to government office? Is this, while Mr. Trump himself floated, that he should win the next presidential election from his prison, then pardon himself and launch an investigation into Joe Biden?

As in Jan. 6 plot, the question of what happens next doesn’t seem to have been given much thought. (Assuming they did their crazy scheme to substitute fake voters for the real thing, do you think that would settle the matter? rueful well played?) There appears to be no intention but to create as much confusion as possible , with any harm to national security or the rule of law: a broad cry, freeing the populist id from any lingering restraints that may still confine it.

The messy Trump saga has gone from unprecedented to dangerous

This is why Mr. is so dangerous. Trump. No plans. There is no purpose. All its ids. He was just that: a bloated, incontinent bag of every imaginable vice, belching forth at irregular intervals and covering everything within reach. If he had any of the normal human impulses for respect, or dignity, or even self-preservation he would be more easily identified, and thus understood. But as it is he is invincible. The source of his power is not his vast wealth, nor his mastery of social media, nor his enablers’ deep cynicism of the Republican leadership. It is his utter shamelessness, his refusal to be bound by any standard, convention or law, even the laws of logic.

You can see how this appeals to his supporters. What is the desire of Mr. Trumps to be free of all restraints but their own, on a grand scale? What is the indifference of Mr. Trumps the facts but their own preference for fantasy, to believe what they want to believe? But it also continues to disarm his critics. It is impossible to understand a void so deep: The temptation is always to think that he is an ignoramus, or a fraud, or a liar, or an authoritarian, or a 9-year-old child, or a serial sexual molester, or a kind of grand national arsonist, burning down every institution in sight, and unlike all these things and more.

Worse, he succeeds in corrupting them, as do his supporters, tormenting them with the multitude of his offenses, to the point where they find, in spite of themselves, that they are marking him according to his constant changing curve. Sure, the last thing he did was outrageous, but was it more outrageous than we’ve come to expect from him? Or if it does, does it exceed previous records by as much as expected? Perhaps his behavior continues to worsen, but is it really accelerating towards the abyss? Or just steady as he goes along?

So we come to the present road, with the most powerful country in the world, with all its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, shuddering at the thought of bringing him to justice as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that is the anomaly.

Watergate gave us the phrase it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. It’s not Mr Trump’s crime, either. He didn’t need to cover it up anymore.

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