A rchive Date
[ 16-06-2023 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[https://slate.com/news - and - politics/2023/06/trump - indictment - reveals - two - americas.html
What Will Come From This Indictment
Is the rule of law finally coming in for the win, or has it made itself irrelevant?
BY DAHLIA LITHWICK JUNE 13, 2023 3:12 PM
In the two places we call America, there are now two coups simultaneously unrolling at a breakneck pace, and also possibly grinding to a slow but steady halt. For those who maintain that Donald Trump is an innocent man, subject to an unjust witch hunt at the hands of deep state actors who covered up Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden’s criminal conduct, it’s go time. As Rep. Andy Biggs put it on Twitter the night Trump was indicted: “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” How real are these threats? Jeff Sharlet laid it out thusly in the Atlantic:
Do they believe what they’re saying? Do they mean their violent implications? Does it matter? Their civil war is imaginary, but there really are men with guns, more now than I’ve seen in 20 years of reporting on the right.
Whether they plan to act on it or not, in the view of the most steadfast, violent Trump supporters, the “coup” actually began with James Comey, with Robert Mueller, with Adam Schiff. It now steams forward under the lawless powers of the prosecutors currently pursuing Trump - Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Jack Smith. These villains are “weaponizing” - to use the preferred nomenclature - the power of law enforcement and the justice system to persecute Donald Trump. For them, all bets are off. The promise of violence shimmers in the air.
On the other hand sit those who believe that the slow-rolling coup is perhaps finally coming to an end, thanks to the justice system finally, grindingly, belatedly, kicking into high gear.
For the America that contends that the “walls are closing in” - or finally might be - the indictment of Donald Trump and the forthcoming trial signal that the rampant lawlessness of the Trump years and the stochastic terror of Jan. 6, 2021, are finally being checked with the appropriate degrees of legal and judicial and law enforcement authority. For those who feel that Donald Trump has been an uncharged criminal defendant for years (decades?), the fact that he’s been roaming around the country running for reelection this past weekend is in fact the problem.
That he’s still issuing veiled threats against his opponents borders on unbelievable, as does the idea that he might still become president. In this story, the long national nightmare is finally wrapping up, thanks to the tender if belated mercies of criminal statutes, sentencing guidelines, grand jurors, and knowable facts.
Which means that we’ve officially reached peak Schrödinger’s coup. Democracy is either alive or dead inside that box, and everyone is too afraid to look inside and say which it is.
And this in turn puts us all in the unenviable position of having to reckon with two conflicting truths: Yes, the legal walls are closing in. And as they do so, for some the power of these legal walls is crumbling before our eyes.
It’s blinding: The more criminal trouble Trump finds himself in, the more his political capital rises. The law may in fact be powerless in the face of that simple truth. I used to fret that politics would always, always outrun the law; that a Trump lie, or threat, or boast would make it twice around the world while the justice system was still just putting its socks on. But increasingly, I think we’re not even running the same course, or playing on the same field, or moving toward the same ends. The more the “rule of law” triumphs, the stronger the forces that hate the rule of law actually become.
And that, of course, is the endgame for the Trump team. “What I have been hearing from Republicans that I’ve spoken to is frustration, a growing frustration,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told Fox News Sunday. “The trust in our Justice Department has been eroded, as well. These are core institutions in a democracy that must have the people’s trust. When you see things like this that have political overtones, it’s very frustrating for people.”
His remarks are honestly tame compared to those of many of his fellow Republicans who are in Congress. They have made the unprecedented decision to attack the law itself.
In other words, the more unimpeachable the facts laid out in the indictment are, the more apt Trump defenders are to spew lawless nonsense in his defense. This indictment, arraignment, trial, and even possibly conviction will not persuade the Trumpiest of Trumpsters to nod their heads soberly and agree that the facts speak for themselves. Even when a disgraced Bill Barr brings himself to say as much, he immediately renders himself irrelevant as a legal expert in their minds.
It is Lindsey Graham telling George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that “most Republicans believe we live in a country where Hillary Clinton did very similar things and nothing happened to her” who ends up doing the “real” Trumpist legal work here. He’s offering up the possibility that what’s happening to democracy is whatever you want to believe is happening. If you think it is slowly being poisoned by atomic gases inside the box because the former president is getting his comeuppance (finally), well, the senator is here to give voice to and amplify that belief.
Put aside, for the moment, the will - she/won’t - she drama of a possible Aileen Cannon recusal. The totality of the legal debate here is not about whether or not Donald Trump was in possession of classified documents that imperiled national security, or whether or not he conspired to hide those documents, or whether or not he and others conspired to lie about it. That is all demonstrably true.
We are, to the extent there is a “legal” fight taking place, bickering over whether the president can declassify documents with his mind alone and whether the Presidential Records Act gives a former president the right to do whatever he wants with anything, ever, even when it threatens national security. We are now almost exclusively fighting over whether if you are Donald J. Trump, you are allowed to walk around with highly classified documents, to show them to biographers without security clearance, to hide them and to lie about it, because when you are Donald J. Trump, what you feel like doing at any given moment gets to be the very definition of the rule of law. To the extent there is a “legal” debate occurring at all, it’s about whether, per Richard Nixon, when the former/ex/“real” president does it, it’s legal.
Going into each of these next steps - the court appearances and possible arraignments, the near - certain further indictments - there will be heavily armed people who are increasingly certain that they are the very last bulwarks against an unjust effort to overturn democracy that has been orchestrated by Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, the deep state, and the feds.
There will also be many of us watching the opening stages of a long-overdue process of judicial and legal accountability for clear violations of criminal laws and sighing with relief. We will, to be sure, be watching the same movie and concluding that “the system” of American justice and law enforcement is either irretrievably shattered or more robust than we were led to believe. It’s choose - your - own - ending democracy for the pundit class, in which law is an end in itself for one side and a means to a political outcome on the other.
As was the case in Charlottesville in 2017, or at the Capitol in 2021, the legal experiment is being distorted. It will end in either a fair trial with a reasoned outcome or in more acts of stochastic terror and vigilantism. That one party is rooting for the former while the other is determinedly not disavowing the latter tells us a good deal about how we got here.
The system is either broken, or it’s working as intended. Whether the thing in the box is gasping for air or shaking off a rough patch, the enduring worry is that the state of American democracy now exists almost entirely in the mind of the beholder.
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