US Politics

When the history-making indictment was read out against him in a New York City courtroom on Tuesday, former president and current contender for the Republican nomination in 2024 Donald Trump gained a new title: criminal defendant.Americans saw a quiet and tense Trump walk into the courtroom under the guard of both the Secret Service and the local police force – whose officers stood behind him during his appearance before a judge, as they do with any other defendant. There, he learned he was facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments and “catch and kill” attempts to suppress negative news coverage about his extramarital affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.As unprecedented as that was, it has become clear in the hours after his appearance that the fundamental political calculus has not changed for Trump. He remains the most popular man in the GOP, and the break his enemies have long sought between him and the rest of the Republican party seems as distant as ever.“For those who think this will harm President Trump’s chances at running for the White House in 2024, I have news for you: it won’t,” Kevin Hern, who leads the Republican Study Committee, the influential conservative body that’s the largest ideological caucus in Congress, said following Trump’s court appearance on Tuesday.“The same people who were outraged over the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s prosecution for obvious crimes are now celebrating yet another witch-hunt against the former president and political opponent of the current president. This type of hypocrisy is disgusting, and it underscores what millions of Americans see as a blatant double standard in our justice system, causing many to lose faith in those institutions.”The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may have scored a symbolic victory by being the first to indict Trump, but the trajectory of his prosecution – or other efforts to hold Trump to account – is far from clear. The next hearing in Bragg’s case will be well into the 2024 election season on 4 December, and the months to come will be consumed by pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who will probably try to get the case dismissed and argue that Bragg waited too long to file his charges, said former assistant US attorney Kevin O’Brien.Bragg may soon be joined in his pursuit of Trump by prosecutors elsewhere. Special counsel Jack Smith is considering whether to bring federal charges over Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, the wider Republican effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and the classified materials discovered by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, is separately investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn Biden’s win in that state, another potential source of legal peril.If any of those inquiries result in charges, courtroom defendant’s tables could become as familiar to Trump as podiums and packed arenas, even as he presses on with his attempt to return to the White House.“There may never be an indictment in Atlanta, there may never be an indictment coming out of the justice department, we just don’t know,” O’Brien said. “You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. But it’s possible that Trump could be facing two or three new sets of charges in the very near term. Which is, again, an incredible situation.”By all indications, many Republican voters still see Trump as their man, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released following the indictment last week, that showed him far and away the most popular among current or potential GOP candidates.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter returning from New York to his Florida home, Trump on Tuesday evening gave an irate address at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he vented his spleen and declared, among other things, that “our country is going to hell”.On Wednesday, he made a demand that was sure to sit poorly with his Republican allies. In a post from his Truth Social account, he called for defunding the police, the sort of thing most often heard from progressives demanding criminal justice reform in the United States.“REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES,” Trump wrote. “THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY AND ARE VICIOUSLY USING THIS ABUSE OF POWER TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE ELECTIONS!” More

On Tuesday, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records for alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential election. Joan E Greve speaks to the New York editor for Politico, Julia Marsh, amid a busy week for Manhattan

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

If you actually believe the ringing words of the founding document of this country, that all men are created equal, then we must all be equal before the law, neither above it nor below it – neither immune to prosecution nor without the law’s protections.And yet, some have always been below the law since the Declaration of Independence was written. That document speaks of men in ways that exclude women, who in that era were largely controlled by fathers and husbands, and the Black people who were enslaved for another 87 years, and the Native Americans who faced genocide and dispossession into the 20th and, arguably, the 21st centuries.And of course some have been above it, whether by buying their way out of jail with expensive lawyers, by manipulating those who should enforce the law, by actually being those who are supposed to enforce it, or by being granted, as police and various governmental figures have been, various versions of immunity from the law.The idea that a president should be immune from not just lawsuits while in office but consequences for crimes even afterward seems like a stepping stone to authoritarianism, but it has many defenders.I asked constitutional law professor Tobias Barrington Wolff what he thought about that, and he replied: “Presidents, current and former, do enjoy absolute immunity from personal liability for acts taken within the scope of their official duties. But much of the conduct in this case pre-dated this man’s time in office and none of it had anything to do with the duties of the office. Courts give wide latitude to absolute immunity for presidents, but there are clear limits. The supreme court has rejected absolute immunity for a judge who abused his office to commit sexual assault in his chambers, to offer one not-wholly-irrelevant point of reference. A private citizen who falsifies business records to defraud the electorate, cover up a tawdry affair and perhaps also violate campaign finance laws and cheat on his taxes is not a close call.” But the right has denounced it with fury.“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project. “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” At its best this country has striven to become a more perfect union, to move toward equality and justice for all, and often as Jones notes the most oppressed have led those expansions in equality and protection. Black Lives Matter seeking to make police accountable when they commit murder is one example.At its worst, elites have pursued the opposite goals, whether it’s the Confederacy seeking to perpetrate slavery or attacks on voting rights from Jim Crow to the present or the 2022 supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, depriving women of the right to the bodily self-determination crucial to our equality, or the new war against trans rights. Or the current right’s opposition to accountability for Trump and others and tacit support for the violent attack on the capitol of January 6, part of an attempt to steal an election.Democrats are fond of the phrase “no one is above the law”, which seems to have its origin in something a Republican president said. Teddy Roosevelt in 1903 declared, “No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”But a modern-day conservative at the Washington Post argued that the phrase “could be used to justify any prosecution, no matter how poorly predicated, selective or malicious”, by which logic everyone should be above the law. Of course it’s from a conservative writer, and the conservatives at their most wily are trying to find roundabout ways to say that the 45th president is above the law, as this piece does. The most blunt are essentially arguing that every prosecution is just a vendetta in tribal skirmishing and they’re here to fight for their tribe. They are after all the same people who kept shouting “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton’s sloppy security practices, then excused far more egregious ones in the Trump administration (let alone Trump blabbing away about highly classified secrets to the Kremlin’s foreign minister in 2017).It’s a reminder that some of us are loyal to principles and some of us are loyal to teams. Inequality is itself about choosing the team through arrangements in which the same principles don’t prevail for all, and while you can argue that’s who the Republicans have always been, they’ve been more shamelessly so since they got tangled up with Trump. The Republican party excused, denied and justified his lawlessness from the time of his 2016 campaign into the present, and Trump himself has been perhaps the most prominent and flagrant lawbreaker in American history.His crimes were so many and various that they obscured each other – who remembers the emoluments lawsuits addressing how he was illegitimately profiting from the presidency, crowded out as they were by the sexual assault allegations, the alleged crimes committed while attempting to steal an election and later the alleged theft of classified documents, along with the various criminal charges against the Trump businesses?And of course he’s been using social media and speech to menace those prosecuting him, which is the kind of stuff for which normal people go to jail. In the same season as the payoff and coverup for which he was just arrested, the leaked Access Hollywood tape briefly rocked the 2016 election. In it Trump made a blunt case for inequality, declaring that he liked to “grab” women “by the pussy” and “when you’re a star they let you do it”. That is, your status entitles you to disregard the rights and wishes of others.If you’re loyal to principles, you have to be unwavering, whether the victim or offender is high-status or low, whether your enemies are in the right, or your friends are in the wrong. But as Frank Wilhoit famously put it: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”They see the law as a weapon, to be held by the in-group, pointed at the out-group, which is to say they are tribalists passionately committed to inequality. They find the idea of the out-group pointing the law at the in-group outrageous and upsetting. Thus their meltdown over an alleged criminal being charged with and arrested for his alleged crimes.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More

Much has been made of the unprecedented nature of the April 4, 2023 arraignment on criminal charges of former President Donald Trump following an indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. But a closer look at American history shows that the indictment of a former president was not unforeseen.

What the Constitution says about prosecuting a president

The Constitution’s authors contemplated the arrest of a current or former president. At several points since the nation’s founding, our leaders have been called before the bar of justice.

Article 1, Section 3, of the Constitution says that when a federal government official is impeached and removed from office, they “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

In his defense of this constitutional provision, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton noted that, unlike the British king, for whom “there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected,” a president once removed from office would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Trump has been impeached twice, but not removed from office.

As a scholar with expertise in legal history and criminal law, I believe the punishment our Founding Fathers envisioned for high officeholders removed from office would also apply to those who left office in other ways.

Tench Coxe, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress from 1788–89, echoed Hamilton. He explained that while the Constitution’s speech and debate clause permanently immunized members of Congress from liability for anything they might do or say as part of their official duties, the president “is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives; for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

In Coxe’s view, even a sitting president could be arrested, tried and punished for violating the law. And, though Coxe didn’t say it explicitly, I’d argue that it follows that if a president can be charged with a crime while in office, once out of office, he could be held responsible like anyone else.

The indictment of Aaron Burr

Hamilton’s and Coxe’s positions were put to an early test soon after the Constitution was ratified. The test came when jurors in New Jersey indicted Vice President Aaron Burr for killing Hamilton in a duel in that state.

An artist’s depiction of the Burr–Hamilton duel on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded, and Burr was indicted for his death.
Ivan-96/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

The indictment charged that “Aaron Burr late of the Township of Bergen in the County of Bergen esquire not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil … feloniously willfully and of his malice aforethought did make an assault upon Alexander Hamilton … [who] of the said Mortal wounds died.”

While Burr’s powerful friends subsequently interceded and persuaded state officials to drop the charges, their success had nothing to do with any immunity that Burr enjoyed as an executive officer of the United States.

Indeed, Burr’s legal troubles were not over. In February 1807, after his term as vice president ended, he was arrested and charged with treason for plotting to create a new and independent nation separate from the U.S. This time, he stood trial and was acquitted.

The Strange case of Ulysses S. Grant

Fast forward to 1872, when the incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant, was arrested in Washington, D.C., for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage.

The arresting officer told Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

As The New York Post recently recounted the story, Grant “was ordered to put up 20 bucks as collateral.” But he never stood trial.

20th and 21st century precedents

A little over a century later, Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew had a more serious brush with the law when he was accused by the Department of Justice of a pattern of political corruption starting when he was a county executive in Maryland and continuing through his tenure as vice president.

On Oct. 10, 1973, Agnew agreed to a plea bargain. He resigned his office and pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the federal government dropping charges of political corruption. He was fined US$10,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation.

Spiro Agnew leaves a Baltimore federal courthouse on Oct. 10, 1973, after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges and resigning as vice president.
Bettmann via Getty Images

Richard Nixon, the president with whom Agnew served, narrowly escaped being indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary and its cover-up. In 2018, the National Archives released documents, labeled the Watergate Road Map, that showed just how close Nixon had come to being charged.

The documents reveal that “a grand jury planned to charge Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation.” But an indictment was never handed down because, by that time, Hamilton’s and Coxe’s views had been displaced by a belief that a sitting president should not be indicted.

Nixon was later saved from criminal charges after he left office when his successor, President Gerald Ford, granted him a full and complete pardon.

Another occasion on which a president came close to being charged with a crime
occurred in January 2001, when, as an article in The Atlantic notes, independent prosecutor Robert Ray considered indicting former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Ultimately, Ray decided that if Clinton publicly admitted to “having been misleading and evasive under oath … he didn’t need to see him indicted.”

And in February 2021, after President Trump had left office, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that the former president, who had escaped being removed from office twice after being impeached, would still be legally “liable for everything he did while he was in office … We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

What history teaches about Trump’s indictment

This brings us to the present moment.

For any prosecutor, including Alvin Bragg, the indictment and arrest of a former president is a genuinely momentous act. As Henry Ruth, one of the prosecutors who was involved in the Nixon case, explained in 1974, “Signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-president is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.”

For the rest of us, this nation’s history is a reminder that ours is not the first generation of Americans who have been called to deal with alleged wrongdoing by our leaders and former leaders. More

On April 4, Americans lived through a new experience: a former president of the United States officially charged with a criminal offence. Donald Trump has achieved many firsts across his media and subsequent political career – but it’s unlikely this was a first he was aiming for.

Not that you could tell from his demeanour. Although news reports from journalists in the courtroom noted he appeared “sombre”, on his own turf Trump pulled few punches. On his social media platform TruthSocial, shortly before he left Trump Tower to head to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, Trump blasted the judge in charge of the hearing, Justice Juan Merchan, as “highly partisan” and whose family are “well-known Trump haters”. He repeated these accusations during his speech from his Mar-A-Lago home in Florida a few hours later.

Denying he did anything illegal, Trump also repeated now-familiar claims that his prosecution is politically motivated, asserting that this process is an “insult” to the US. He claimed: “The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”

The charges

The official reading of the charges against Trump in court revealed few surprises. In effect, he has been charged with falsifying business records. The charges allege that having reimbursed his lawyer for payments to two women (unnamed, but widely believed to be former adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal) to ensure their silence about allegations of extra-marital relations, Trump then claimed those payments as legal expenses in his accounts.

The payments themselves were not illegal, but recording them as something else in the business records is. Trump is charged with 34 counts, each relating to a particular instance of financial accounting for these payments.

Perhaps the most surprising element after days of speculation was that Trump was charged with felonies – the more serious level of crime – rather than the lower-level misdemeanours that had been expected. The argument here is that the falsification of business records occurred to cover up another crime.

The district attorney bringing the case, Alvin L. Bragg, appeared to keep options open regarding exactly what that other crime might be. Violations of state and federal election laws are one possible claim, but may be difficult to prove. A second possible avenue appears to be that these financial records were intended to mislead state tax authorities. Bragg may well seek to establish both at trial, giving a jury options for conviction.

New York district attorney Alvin Bragg has received death threats following his decision to pursue the investigation against the former president.
EPA-EFE/Justin Lane

The charges may seem relatively insignificant for anyone expecting something in keeping with Trump’s larger-than-life personality and the vehemence of his criticisms of those involved in the process. And he certainly faces other, more serious legal investigations around both his role in the January 6 2021 riots on Capitol Hill and potential election tampering regarding the closely fought Georgia election. Both could lead to future criminal charges.

But, as Bragg noted in his post-hearing statements, prosecuting business crime is a large part of what the New York district attorney’s office does – and white-collar crime is still criminal behaviour. Each felony count carries a maximum sentence of four years, meaning if convicted on all counts, Trump could face up to 136 years of prison time, although it is more likely that he would face a hefty fine.

The process

Little moves quickly in the US justice system. The next step is for the prosecution to file what is known as “discovery”, or the evidence they will use at trial. This will be followed by a similar filing by Trump’s defence team. According to New York law, these must be filed by May 9 and June 8 respectively.

The defence then has until August 8 to raise any claims or queries. This might include a motion to dismiss the case entirely, if they feel there is insufficient evidence on which to proceed. The prosecution has the option to respond and Judge Merchan will have until early December to rule.

Judge Juan Merchan, who will preside over the trial of the former president, has already been involved in the prosecution of the Trump Organisation over tax matters.
Jane Rosenberg/Reuters

While the Trump team’s motions might well garner attention, the most significant date is December when both sides – and the rest of the country – will find out whether the case will go to trial or not. The timing is significant as it comes just before the first voting in the primary elections for the 2024 presidential campaign.

If the case is discharged, it may prove to be a major boost to his chances of electoral success. Alternatively, the spectacle of a presidential candidate fighting to prove his innocence in a criminal case while simultaneously campaigning for the nation’s highest office is hardly likely to undermine the outsider’s perception of a broken American political system.

What of Trump’s presidential bid?

Trump’s indictment and official charging have brought him national media attention at a level he hasn’t really received since he left office in January 2021. But the presidential election is 18 months away and a lot can happen between now and then.

Recent events have invigorated Trump’s base, but we already knew that there are a core group of voters who continue to support Trump and believe he was unfairly denied the election in 2020. And, despite claims of a boost in the polls, poll-tracking website FiveThirtyEight indicates that Trump’s approval ratings are around 39% – not a low for him, but not an historic high either (Joe Biden’s approval ratings stand not much higher at 43%).

Trump’s ability to win in 2024 will depend on his ability to secure the votes not only of his base but of moderate Republicans and centrist swing voters, many of whom were convinced in 2016 that Trump represented the change the nation needed. Four years later, those voters reversed course and chose the moderate, non-confrontational Biden instead.

After the tumult of the pandemic and massive inflation, the nation’s appetite for a return of the political disruptor remains in doubt, irrespective of the status of his legal troubles. All we can be sure about is that Trump will not back down and will continue his campaign for the office he believes he deserves – which means we’ll all be hearing more from and about him in the coming months. More

Reporters were lined up outside overnight, hoping to get one of just a handful of press seats in the courtroom. Protesters arrived, too, both supporting and opposed to the former president, and the cops corralled them into separate pens. By mid-morning, the scene on Centre Street in lower Manhattan had become crowded, chaotic and carnivalesque. Anti-Trump liberal protestors chanted “Lock him up!”, mimicking Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan in a delighted display of sinking to your opponent’s level.Pro-Trump protestors donned aviator sunglasses and their trademark red hats, and led confused cries of, “USA! USA!” Someone had handed out whistles, transforming the scene into a discordant, echoing cacophony. There were cameras outside Trump Tower in Midtown to film when he got into his motorcade to go to the arraignment, and there were cameras there outside the courthouse, to watch him get out of the car and walk inside.Never one to miss an opportunity for attention, some of the Republican party’s most colorful figures appeared, too. George Santos, the disgraced Long Island congressman who was exposed shortly after his election of having fabricated his résumé and who is alleged to have supported himself with a series of weird frauds before entering political life, made an appearance. So did Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracist Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who tried to stage her own rally across the street from the courthouse. Eventually she left, drowned out by the jeers and noise. Afterwards, being interviewed by a reporter in the back of a car, Greene compared Donald Trump to Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ, who she noted were also arrested.So much of the scene at Donald Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday – at which the former president was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and conspiracy, pleading not guilty to all – seemed cynically calculated, a way for the various players and those present to try to siphon off some of the massive media attention that has been focused on the event for themselves.But figures like Santos and Greene, for their part, are not wrong in depicting themselves as Trump’s heirs: it was he who ushered unmasked fraud and open conspiracy theorizing into the national political process, he who dispensed with the pretexts of service and patriotism to embark on a politics of naked resentment and self interest, he who transformed American national politics into the carnival of cynicism and indignity that it is today. Trump is not the ringmaster that he once was – the man now charged in the state of New York is weak and damaged – but we’re all still watching his show.Will the criminal charges be good for Trump? Trump seems to think so, or at least that’s what he’s trying to project to the public. He raised a lot of money for his third presidential bid over the five days between his indictment and his arraignment: $7m, according to campaign officials. And as he was inside the courthouse being charged, his campaign sent out a fundraising email, asking supporters to purchase tee shirts featuring a fake mug shot of the former president, along with the words “NOT GUILTY.” They cost $47 a piece.And the indictment has placed Trump’s would-be rivals for the Republican nomination in an awkward position: they want to distance themselves from Trump, but they can’t afford to alienate his supporters, those die-hards who still make up a ruling majority of the Republican base. If anything, the indictment has made it seem more likely that Trump will secure the Republican nomination, for the same reasons it seemed likely back in 2016: while Republican elites and donors scramble to stop him, and rival candidates define themselves against his example, he’s still the sun around which the Republican party orbits, a force exponentially more powerful than the party itself.But that’s not to say that Trump is particularly strong. Over the days proceeding the arraignment, as news stations breathlessly broadcast footage of Trump’s plane taking off from Miami and as the circus proceeded outside the courthouse in Manhattan, liberals online and in the media began to feel a palpable sense of unease. All this attention on Trump felt a little too much to them like the beginnings of the primary season in the 2016 cycle – the election that he won.Should we even be paying attention to this? Have we learned nothing? But with Trump, even studied indifference to him still makes him the center of political attention, like when you tell someone not to think of a white elephant.And perhaps it’s a testament to the strange power that Trump has in the minds of liberals that so many of them think that his indictment on 34 felony charges could be good for his electoral prospects. Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. Some liberals seem to imagine that Trump could drop dead in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and still find a way to become president again.It’s true, too, that Trump is not the candidate he once was. In 2016, Trump had the advantage of novelty, of shock value; people kept their eyes on him because they didn’t know what he would do next.Now everyone knows what he will do next: his is a mind the nation has gotten to know through endless exposure, and few people are as consistent and reliable in their dishonesty and egotism. His boasting, his claims that it’s all unfair – they’re so predictable as to be boring. And Trump, it’s worth saying, has gotten myopic and creepy; at his rallies now he’s less funny and charismatic than he once was, referencing QAnon and various obscure political figures he feels have wronged him.He once had a knack for channeling and weaponizing white and male grievance, often disguised as class resentment, and for funneling hatred of the elites for his own purposes. But now he’s abandoned all pretext of reciprocating his followers’ loyalty: he speaks of them with open contempt. With the exception of a rabid few, they’re eventually going to abandon him, too, or at least wane enough in their enthusiasm that fewer and fewer of them are going to vote.The result was that watching Trump shuffle into the courthouse on Tuesday was a bit like watching a caged gorilla at the zoo: the strength has been taken from him, rendered useless and where once he was formidable and scary, now he just looks ridiculous, less an object of fear than of spectacle.Things could still change for Trump; they’ve changed for him before, and anyone who witnessed the 2016 race knows better than to discount him entirely. But he’s been getting weaker, not stronger, for a long time now. There’s a long way to go until the 2024 election, but you could make an argument that the season began on Tuesday, when Trump entered the courthouse. It’s not an auspicious start.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Former president Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments he made through his allies to hide extramarital affairs in the weeks before the 2016 election.As prosecutors in the New York courtroom reiterated, the issue wasn’t just that Trump directed these payments that put him at fault, but that the timing of them probably changed the course of his campaign and paved the way for Trump to interfere with election results for two cycles. And the criminal charges were only part of the picture when it comes to Trump’s election meddling, and the threats he has posed to US democracy.“[These are] very serious criminal allegations that matter to our democracy because of the effect that paying this hush money could have had suppressing a scandal, saving the Trump campaign, altering the outcome of the 2016 election and setting up the election interference that we investigated in the first impeachment,” longtime election lawyer Norm Eisen said in a recent interview.“And that culminated in the attempted coup following the 2020 election and the violence of January 6.”This week’s indictment could be the first time that Trump – or any president in the country’s history – is held accountable for a criminal act. But this may not be the only time Trump faces courtroom allegations this year.Though the first indictment of a former president comes in a trial about falsifying business records, there is also the Fulton county litigation over Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and the multiple cases involving his role in instigating a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.“People have to be held accountable for their actions and when a former president of the United States has allegedly committed a criminal act and is found guilty, he has to be held accountable,” said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a non-partisan organization that works to protect democracy.And while some have lamented that the first case to reach an indictment is not the most significant one pending against Trump’s election denial tactics, Wertheimer said it was still a strong case.“Even though this case does not appear as directly related to our democracy as the Mar-a-Lago documents case, the Georgia case about attempting to steal a presidential election, or the largest case about the alleged attempt by former president Trump to overturn the presidential election and the role he allegedly played in inciting the January 6 insurrection, if you look at the fundamentals of our democracy, this case is similar in importance to those other cases,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA guilty verdict against Trump could also show that nobody in the US, including a former president, is above the law, a fundamental component of a functioning democracy. In many other countries – including many ranked among the most democratic – ex-heads of government or state have been prosecuted, but never before has it happened in the US.In the past 15 years alone, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac of France, Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy have all been prosecuted for corruption and found guilty, according to the New York Times.A majority of Americans – 60% – approve of the indictment against Donald Trump according to a recent CNN poll, although respondents were split on whether they believe it benefits democracy. A majority also believe that politics played a role in the indictment, a fact that could threaten democracy by making people believe that the legal system can be influenced by partisan actions.“At the heart of our democracy is the fact that nobody is above the law,” Wertheimer said. “Everyone in our society has to comply with the rules. That’s just the fundamental principle of the rule of law.” More

Trump’s prosecution is a triumph. Not a shame. Not a tragedy. A triumph ⁠— one of the great events in American presidential history. The public and the pundits might disagree by the end of Trump’s trial in Manhattan ⁠— perhaps the first of a few ⁠— but the significance of what district attorney Alvin Bragg has managed to do will be wholly unsullied, in substance, by the outcome of his case.One of the major questions in American political and legal thought has been whether presidents may be allowed to commit crimes. As it stands, the position of the Justice Department is that they may ⁠— for half a century, it has held that a president cannot face criminal prosecution while in office. And while there’s not even a theoretical bar to prosecuting a president once they leave office, no one had ever tried it, leaving the question of whether criminal laws functionally apply to presidents at all, as a practical matter, a matter of speculation.Here Alvin Bragg has bravely taken a stand: a person may, in fact, be indicted for a crime even if they were once president— just as though they were an ordinary person to whom laws applied. This is tremendous news. No rifts have opened in the time-space continuum. Frogs, locusts, and lice have yet to descend upon Manhattan. For the time being, it appears that a prosecutor really may attempt to hold a president ⁠— or at least a former president ⁠— accountable for a suspected crime without reality collapsing in on itself. What’s more, Bragg’s indictment amounts to an insistence that a former president may be indicted even for a relatively low-level crime like falsifying documents ⁠— just like any other white collar criminal.To be sure, as many observers have already written, Bragg may have his work cut out for him. His case against Trump is a multi-part argument ⁠that hinges on the idea that Trump concealed hush money payments to abet violations of election law. It has troubled many that Bragg may lose this case. And this is true. Sometimes prosecutors lose cases.But it would be wrong to suppose on that basis, as some have, that prosecutors who believe presidents have committed crimes have a responsibility to behave like political strategists: to bear public opinion and the expectations of the press in mind by only bringing forth the simplest, most straightforward cases and pursuing only the largest, most eye-popping crimes while letting other offenses slide.They’ve no obligation to calibrate the content and timing of their cases to maximize the possibility of success in other wholly unrelated cases in other jurisdictions; the feelings of a defendant’s fans and supporters should be of no account whatsoever. This is what it means, to use a phrase Trump himself has long been fond of, to be a nation of laws. It is especially ridiculous, on the latter point, to suppose that there’s a prosecutorial approach Bragg or anyone else might have taken that would have quelled the rage of a political constituency that is now fully beyond reason and respect for the law. Predictably, Bragg has drawn both explicit threats and implicit comparisons to Pontius Pilate this holy week; Trump, per Marjorie Taylor Greene, now sits next to Christ himself among historical figures “persecuted by radical, corrupt governments.”On Thursday, Trump’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ⁠— St Peter? ⁠— reiterated that he would refuse to cooperate with an extradition request from New York in the event that Trump refused to surrender on his own. Things didn’t come to that, but the pundits aren’t wrong to predict that a lot of chaos and drama will come our way in the coming months. And that’s especially frightful to all those who’ve come to believe political polarization and the heightening of partisan tensions are the central problems of our time ⁠— a notion that’s spurred commentary suggesting America might be too divided to bear Trump’s prosecution. To wit, a report from The New York Times Thursday speculated that this and Trump’s other potential indictments might “shake the timbers of the republic” or “tear the country apart.”But what would it mean, actually, to “tear the country apart?” We’ve seen and survived civil war. We’ve seen cities razed and presidents killed. Social unrest, economic collapse ⁠— these are cornerstones of the American experience. A public health crisis has taken the lives of more than one million people in this country over the last three years. The reactions to Trump’s prosecution will remain loud and ludicrous. They may well turn violent ⁠— we can put nothing safely beyond a party that rallies easily to the defense of a man who attempted a coup and roused a mob into an attack on the Capitol.But there is something rather pathetic about the idea that a president’s trial might be among the greatest trials our nation has faced. Nothing that’s coming will break us. Our republic, for all its many faults, is made of stronger stuff than that. We will be tested, yes. But let’s take a moment, too, to recognize that Bragg has already passed a critical test on our behalf.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More