More stories

  • in

    Trump had always been above the law, until it turned on him | Rebecca Solnit

    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

  • in

    How the day of Trump's indictment unfolded – video report

    In what was seen by many as a sombre day for the US and its judicial system, Donald Trump became the first US president to be indicted on criminal charges on Tuesday. He was briefly arrested as he surrendered and attended his arraignment in a Manhattan court, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records.
    The Guardian summarises a historic day of media frenzy as news crews followed Trump’s every step – from Trump Tower back to his Mar-a-Lago residence More

  • in

    Trump isn’t the ringmaster he once was. But we’re still watching his show | Moira Donegan

    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

  • in

    Trump’s indictment is about more than hush money – it’s a question of democracy

    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

  • in

    Donald Trump’s prosecution is a triumph | Osita Nwanevu

    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