Donald Trump and the Trial of the Century

[ad_1]

The framework of the 2024 election is now clear: Its democracy versus autocracy straight. It is the stakes not the horse race that should dominate media coverage and the strategy of the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, there has been a move among some Democrats to reuse the successful 2018 playbook that helped them retake the House that year: Stay focused on other issues (in 2018, it was health care) and let anti-Trump forces fend for themselves. This is fighting not the last war but the war of three cycles ago. In the last war2022, democracy was a powerful brand-building issue for Democrats.

So, while I understand why Joe Biden has not commented on the Trump prosecutions, no other Democrat should follow suit. They should raise the alarm and shake Trump (metaphorically) for the duration.

Yes, it makes sense to run an A, B, C, D campaignabortion, Bidenomics, climate, and democracy. But the last of these must come first. That way, the basic structure of racedemocrats versus autocrats remains firmly in place.

By the way, if you don’t believe that a re-elected Trump will, literally, end our system as we know it, you haven’t been paying attention.

We are going to dismantle the deep state, Trump said at a rally in Michigan last month. Let’s get the warmongers out of our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will drive out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. And we will throw out the sick political class that hates our country.

If it’s more Trump demagoguery, the kind we’ve gotten used to in the eight years since he came down the escalator, we shouldn’t worry. But no. This is the campaign trail version of a framework to end our nearly 250-year-old experiment in self-government.

If you missed this lead story from The New York Times on July 17th, please take the time to read it: Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power by 2025 (no subscription required). It will scare the crap out of you. The piece recounts detailed plans underway to dramatically expand the president’s authority so that Trump can wield near-dictatorial powers.

One thing that almost all would-be dictators have in common is that they announce what they will do if they gain power. The Fhrer certainly did, as Trump well knows. Ivana, Trump’s late first wife, told her lawyer in the 1980s that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, by his bed. In those first speeches and in Mein Kampf, Hitler laid it out in language almost identical to Trump’s.

As bad as Trump’s language was when he was president, it was shocking in March when he told supporters in Waco, Texas, I am your revenge. That location was chosen for his announcement speech as part of his plan to destroy and discredit the FBI (which did not cover itself in glory with its attack on the Branch Davidian compound there in 1993) so that he could rebuild it into his personal police force and instrument of vengeance.

Or remember how in 2019, Trump declared: I have Article 2 [the part of the Constitution that establishes the presidency]where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.

And if someone tries to stop him? He will destroy, he said, the Constitution.

The Times story explains Trump’s plans to strip the Department of Justice of its independence. This is not news. We all understand, of course, that if re-elected, he will immediately pardon the January 6 insurrections and himself. But he also plans to completely politicize the Federal Reserve (awesome for the economy!) and bring all independent regulatory agencies under his thumb. And he’ll sign an executive order on his first day implementing Schedule Fa civil service politicization that will fill the government with incompetent Trump hacks hired for their loyalty, not competence.

What’s really scary is that this power grab will be attempted under whichever Republican president is elected for the foreseeable future. The GOP today represents autocracy. For years, conservative lawyers have pushed what they call a unitary executive theory of presidential power that says the Constitution gives presidents power over a vast federal bureaucracy, which, if you include military personnel, includes about 4.3 million people. In a well-known dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, it does not mean some of the executive power, but all the executive power. The Scalias view now has at least four votes on the Supreme Court.

What it’s trying to do is identify pockets of freedom and seize them, Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, told the Times. Vought, the founder of the Center for Renewing America, is laying out a blueprint for how to make the entire federal government bend to Trumps will.

Pause for a second on the word seize. That’s what dictators do. They are usurping power. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, explained to MSNBC.com:

Those plans are consistent with a 21st-century playbook for authoritarians: Tell the public how you’re going to set up an authoritarian state before you get into office. Frame your intended expansion of executive powers as simply a streamlining of government. Don’t forget to repeatedly praise dictators as brilliant and leading people so that there are no surprises when you act in a similar way. [This is what Trump has consistently done with Chinas Xi Jinping, Russias Vladimir Putin, Hungarys Viktor Orban, and several other authoritarian leaders]And whet your followers’ appetite for breaking existing norms by advertising how you clean up [liberal critics].

Trump will use this roadmap until the election. The good news is that at least three large rocks are in the way now. A few civil lawsuits won’t slow Trump down; he does not have to appear in court during the trials, and the cases even if they lead to great financial damage often make him more popular with his base. But over the next year, he will face three terrifying criminal trials. In all of these, the odds favor belief.

On March 25, Trump is scheduled to go to trial in the case of Stormy Daniels. He faces charges in New York State that are less serious than the two federal cases, but with his reprehensible sexual and financial behavior on full display disqualifying for any other candidate, he is likely to lose support from independent voters, even if he is acquitted.

On May 20, the Mar-a-Lago classified documents trial is set to open in rural Florida under Trump-friendly Judge Aileen Cannon, who on July 21 resisted Trump’s pressure to delay the trial until after the election. Trumps attorneys may convince Judge Cannon that the volume of documents and complexity of handling classified information warrants delaying the trial until after the election. But if they fail to do so, the evidence is so damning that the defendant is likely to be in trouble even in the midst of Trump country. In federal trials, juries almost always put their politics aside and decide on the evidence. It’s a good bet that at least a couple of them will tell reporters after the verdict that they voted twice for Trump but he was still convicted. And Trump’s lavish praise of Judge Cannon will deal a blow to his witch hunt charges.

Finally, there is the Big Showthe January 6th trial. Because of the absence of classified documents and a speedy trial by federal judges in Washington, DC, it could take place before the Mar-a-Lago trial. Regardless of the details of the upcoming indictment, this case goes to the heart of our system of peaceful transition of power and the rule of law. The Stormy Daniels case is unprecedented; we have Monica Lewinsky and many campaign finance prosecutions. Before Trump stole classified documents, former national security adviser Sandy Berger and retired General David Petraeus did so. But no president in American history has tried to hold on to power after being defeated.

That is why it will be the trial not only of the century but of any century greater than the Trial of Socrates, when the Athenian democracy did not hang in the balance in the same way.

I hate to mention Trump and Socrates in the same breath, so let me offer three more possible Orange Menace comparisons:

Lucius Sergius Catilinabetter known as Catiline was a first-century BCE scoundrel who had sex with vestal virgins and attempted a bloody coup against the Roman Republic. Benito Mussolini, whose proud strut on the platform expected Trumps, was a fascist innovator who had a lot of support before World War II, not only in Italy but in the United States. John Gotti became an anti-hero in his Brooklyn neighborhood, where he sponsored festivals and fireworks before entering folklore. Americans love to see the bad boy get away even for a while.

All three were eventually brought to justice. Even if Trump somehow gets away again, pursuing him will be worth it in principle. We are, after all, a nation founded on a principled rule of law and, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, on a proposition of equality and liberty. It is well known in 15 months whether a nation so conceived and so committed can last.

Jonathan Alter, a contributing editor of Washington Monthly, is a former senior editor and columnist at Newsweek, a filmmaker, journalist, political analyst, and the publisher of Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter, where this piece originally appeared. His most recent book is His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life.

Related

[ad_2]