There are two ways to read the stack of indictments and impeachments the 45th president of the United States has amassed so far. They can be regarded, accurately, as America’s case against Donald Trump. Indictment is a legal action whereas impeachment is a political act, but when taken together the texts provide a singular and consistent case. They capture the progression of transgression evident in Trump’s political campaigns, his presidency and its aftermath, with each escape from accountability yielding a bolder and more reckless iteration of Trump.
But the documents also reveal Trump’s case against the United States — dismissing America as a nation where politics serves as a defense against law and repudiating its people as easily and willingly misled, by ever escalating levels of deceit.
Trump’s first indictment, for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal payments to women with whom he had extramarital affairs, offers an early and straightforward example of his deception. Concerned that the revelations would hurt his presidential campaign — or make him lose to Hillary Clinton by even more than expected or just antagonize Melania — he “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication,” per the statement of facts compiled by the district attorney of New York County. Whether or not that effort also involved violations of electoral or tax law, it succeeded in hiding “damaging information from the voting public.” In short, the indictment contends, Trump obscured the truth.
Once in office, Trump’s power to deceive grew and his fear of exposure diminished. His attempted strong-arming of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in 2019 — dangling security assistance and a possible White House visit in exchange for “a favor” — was in keeping with his actions during the 2016 race, just more daring. He was still trying to improve his electoral prospects. But instead of using his own money to suppress negative stories, Trump was now withholding congressionally appropriated funds from Ukraine in order to generate negative stories about his potential 2020 general-election opponent, Joe Biden, and to feed the notion that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The first article of impeachment in the Ukraine affair asserts that Trump “engaged in this scheme” — there’s that word again — “for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.”
Another scheme, a bigger lie. This time, Trump didn’t just hide the truth; he sought to distort it. And even when “faced with the public revelation of his actions,” the articles of impeachment note, the president continued to “openly and corruptly” urge Ukraine to open investigations that would help Trump politically. Such shamelessness is possible only from a president confident that enough voters will share it.
The recent indictment by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., covers a multitude of alleged crimes — like issuing false statements and filing false documents, forgery, conspiracy to defraud the state, solicitation of the violation of an oath by a public officer — but it comes down to a single corrupt purpose: Once Trump lost the 2020 election, the outgoing president sought to reverse or at least delegitimize the outcome.
We experience Trump’s impeachments and indictments only in the order in which they came out, a sequence that does not neatly track the chronology or intensity of his misdeeds. Trump progressed from hiding reality with the hush-money payments (indictment No. 1), to remaking reality with the attempted shakedown of Ukraine (impeachment No. 1), to ignoring reality with his insistence that he had won re-election and that other officials should affirm that belief (indictment Nos. 3 and 4). The next step was obvious — to change reality by force. So came Jan. 6 (addressed in impeachment No. 2 as well as indictments Nos. 3 and 4, for those keeping score at home).
Trump’s mendacity about the 2020 election was legal; as Jack Smith, the latest special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to investigate him, put it, “the Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud.” His alleged actions and conspiracies in furtherance of those lies — pushing officials to ignore the popular vote in their states, disenfranchising voters, encouraging fake slates of electors — were not, according to the indictment. And once the attempts to claim a counterfactual victory were rejected in the courts, in the states and by his own vice president, the call for violence was all that was left. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump declared on Jan. 6.
That line was quoted in Trump’s second impeachment, in support of its lone article, incitement of insurrection. It was one of three utterances by the president included in the document. The other two were, “We won this election, and we won it by a landslide” (also from Jan. 6) and then a single word, “find,” from Trump’s request to the secretary of state of Georgia to manufacture more votes for him, just enough to win. Those quotes also show the Trumpian progression: The lie, the scheme to support it and the brutishness to enforce it.
Trump’s indictment for retaining and concealing classified information after leaving office — and for obstructing the investigations into the matter — nicely captures the former president’s attitude toward truth and law. According to the document, when he consulted his lawyers about how to respond to a grand jury subpoena for any classified material in his possession, Trump asked, “What happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” (As if you can just ghost a federal grand jury.) He also wondered aloud, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
Isn’t it better just to lie? For Trump, the answer is almost always yes.
In early 2018, the political activist Amy Siskind published “The List: A Week-By-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year.” Faithful to its title, the book numbered various misdeeds of the early Trump presidency — each norm and institution degraded, every truth or conflict of interest ignored — totaling thousands of offenses, large and small. The work was especially useful in a refresher-course sort of way; as I wrote then, “it is remarkable how much we can forget, in the shock of the moment, about the previous shock of the moment.”
I thought about “The List” once again while reading and rereading the Trump indictments and impeachments. The descriptions of the former president’s alleged actions in these documents — even just a sampling of the verbs — offer their own refresher on the past seven years:
Abused. Compromised. Persisted in openly and corruptly urging and soliciting. Served to cover up. Threatened the integrity. Betrayed his trust. Repeatedly and fraudulently falsified. Disguised. Endeavored to obstruct. Did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate. Pursued unlawful means. Used knowingly false claims. Publicly maligned. Refused to accept. Hid and concealed. Constituted a criminal organization. Falsely accused. And, of course, spread lies.
One of the Trump era’s recurring questions (a bit quaint now) has been whether Trump lies knowingly or truly believes the untruths he professes. These documents leave little doubt that Trump was told, repeatedly, that his lies were just that, and by officials close to him. David French summarized the latest indictment against Trump in The Times this way: “The Georgia case is about lies. It’s about lying, it’s about conspiring to lie, and it’s about attempting to coax others to lie.”
Much the same could be said of the other Trump indictments and of his impeachments, too. They’re all about his lies and about the country’s willingness to countenance them.
There are individuals in these documents like Rusty Bowers, a former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who, when Trump urged him to appoint new presidential electors from the state, responded: “I voted for you. I worked for you. I campaigned for you. I just won’t do anything illegal for you.” But there are many who believe and enable Trump’s lies, whether out of conviction, allegiance or expedience. His overwhelming lead in the early polling for the next Republican nomination and his current tie with Biden in a possible 2024 rematch exist despite — or, at times, because of — those lies.
Trump’s impeachments in 2019 and 2021 did not yield convictions in his Senate trials, and now, after the indictments of 2023, new trials await. Yet even criminal convictions would not ease the political challenge that Trumpism poses. They may even exacerbate it.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, in his individual statement appended to the 1974 report by the Senate committee on Watergate, warned that “law alone will not suffice to prevent future Watergates.” Ervin wrote that “the only sure antidote” is to elect leaders who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them. Their election is not in the hands of prosecutors or lawmakers, but of voters. Our choices, as Smith might put it, are also outcome-determinative.
It is fitting that legal as well as political remedies have been brought to bear on Trump. His transgressions span both worlds and play out in the haze between them. Trump seems to hope that politics can save him from law. That belief is his indictment of both.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
