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      On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy

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      Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesArmed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Part Thriller, Part Whodunit: The Trump Indictment Is a Must-Read

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      The federal indictment issued this week against Donald Trump for his efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election has a literary quality to it. It reads like a movie script.A lot of what’s in it is information we already knew, but it’s worth noting that the document is simultaneously comprehensive and streamlined, with a clear protagonist, Trump, as a brooding, plotting, maleficent force sowing chaos and destruction.It makes this unprecedented moment in American history digestible and re-establishes the tension that we should all acknowledge about the magnitude of what took place after the last election: Trump engaged in one of the most sweeping and consequential voter suppression efforts in the country’s history.The indictment is the harrowing, true-life story of how a former president pushed our democracy perilously close to the edge and remains a threat to push it over.Avid consumers of news and those of us in the news business can grow cold to this kind of development. We track revelations in real time. We read the stories and the books as they’re written. We watch television interviews and listen to podcasts. For us, the indictment may feel anticlimactic, just a bit farther down judicial and political lines laid like parallel train tracks.But in the milieu of what I call our “urgent incrementalism,” with our appetite for granularity and comprehensiveness, we newshounds sometimes lose the perspective of the everyday citizen.Most people don’t follow each iteration of a story, not because they’re uninterested but because they’re distracted. Their lives are happening. They’re trying to grab coffee for the commute, worrying about the rent getting paid, trying to remember if they signed the permission slip and nervously eying the fuel gauge as the indicator creeps toward E.For that reason, the absorbable — and quite absorbing — summary that the indictment represents is crucial. Among other virtues, it isn’t written in dense legalese. It’s a drama that takes readers into Trump’s thinking. It allows them to see not only what lies Trump is accused of telling, but also how he viewed the things he said at the time he said them.People often talk about Trump lying for self-aggrandizement and about his thirst for others’ lies meant to flatter him. All true, but that category of lies is on the frivolous end of the spectrum.The indictment charges him with another category of lying: of trying to compel the actions of others. It highlights Trump’s elite-level penchant for deceit.It makes a convincing case that Trump wasn’t misled by minions feeding his vanity, but was instead calculating, telling lies that he believed would pressure those minions to act in his interest. He seemed to constantly be scanning the room, searching for which confidants were offering the most useful fabrications, for those willing to commit to his election-denying craziness, for the kamikazes of false narratives.Trump used the deception that he and his supporters were under lawless attack to justify a by-any-means-necessary counterattack. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump directed his supporters to descend on the Capitol, imploring Republicans to “get tougher” and cast aside the strictures of convention, saying: “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”That day, Trump would repeatedly, falsely, claim that fraud had led to his defeat.The indictment also illustrates how Trump linked other people’s fortunes to his own, creating a dependency, a symbiosis, in which there is peril in severance. Defending Trump becomes a form of self-defense for those who support him.There’s a biological phenomenon known as parasitism, a relationship in which a parasite benefits while its host is harmed. This is the relationship that many Republicans — both politicians and voters — find themselves in with Trump. But they have courted their own infection.Trump is the clear villain of this story, but for his adherents, villainy is subjective.In Donald Miller’s book, “Hero on a Mission,” he posits that in stories, heroes and villains have a similar background: They both start as victims. What separates them, he suggests, is how they process their pain.Trump is the hero of Trump World because he mirrors and amplifies his devotees’ collective psyche. He processes pain — often of his own invention — by inflicting it. He craves vengeance. He courts cruelty. He flouts the rules.In the indictment, it is some of the secondary characters — the state officials, campaign staff members and White House lawyers who pushed back against Trump’s plotting — who emerge as the antiheroes, providing much of the evidence arrayed against Trump.According to the indictment, as one campaign adviser emailed in 2020 about the dubious efforts of Trump’s “elite” legal team: “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this,” conspiracy theories “beamed down from the mother ship.”The indictment isn’t a pleasant read, but it’s surprisingly readable. It isn’t entertainment, but it’s a must-read document detailing one of the gravest threats the country has ever faced from a president. It most likely won’t change minds or significantly alter political trajectories.But it does make a clear and compelling case, and that is a service to the country in its own right.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Messages Point to Identity of Co-Conspirator 6 in Trump Indictment

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      An email sent by Boris Epshteyn, an adviser to the Trump campaign, matches the description of an email that the indictment attributed to one of six unnamed co-conspirators.The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump in connection with his efforts to retain power after his 2020 election loss left a number of unanswered questions, among them: Who is Co-Conspirator 6?The indictment asserted that six people aided Mr. Trump’s schemes to remain in office. It did not name any of them, but most were reasonably easy to identify through details contained in the indictment, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and lawyer for Mr. Trump (Co-Conspirator 1), and John Eastman, the lawyer behind the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could block or delay certification of Mr. Trump’s loss on Jan. 6 (Co-Conspirator 2).Co-Conspirator 6 was more of a mystery. Identified by the indictment as “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding,” the person could have been a number of figures in Mr. Trump’s orbit.But a close look at the indictment and a review of messages among people working with Mr. Trump’s team provides a strong clue. An email from December 2020 from Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser to the Trump campaign in 2020, to Mr. Giuliani matches a description in the indictment of an interaction between Co-Conspirator 6 and Mr. Giuliani, whose lawyer has confirmed that he is Co-Conspirator 1.The email, sent on Dec. 7, 2020, and reviewed by The New York Times, was from Mr. Epshteyn to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, and had the subject line, “Attorneys for Electors Memo.” It says, “Dear Mayor, as discussed, below are the attorneys I would recommend for the memo on choosing electors,” and it goes on to identify lawyers in seven states.Paragraph 57 of the indictment says that Co-Conspirator 1, Mr. Giuliani, “spoke with Co-Conspirator 6 regarding attorneys who could assist in the fraudulent elector effort in the targeted states” and received an email from Co-Conspirator 6 “identifying attorneys in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”Those are the seven states in the email that Mr. Epshteyn sent to Mr. Giuliani and that was reviewed by The Times. The existence of the email from Mr. Epshteyn does not eliminate the possibility that someone else sent Mr. Giuliani a similar note.Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Mr. Epshteyn, declined to comment, as did Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel Jack Smith. Mr. Blanche also represents Mr. Trump in the two federal indictments against him.The indictment also says Co-Conspirator 6 participated in a conference call organized by Mr. Trump’s campaign with pro-Trump electors in Pennsylvania, a state won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. When the electors expressed concern about going along with the plan, Co-Conspirator 1, Mr. Giuliani, “falsely assured them that their certificates would be used only if” Mr. Trump succeeded in fighting the election in court, according to the indictment.The actions described in the indictment are consistent with previous reporting by The Times about Mr. Epshteyn’s actions. During the push to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Epshteyn worked with people inside and outside the Trump campaign as he helped to organize slates of so-called fake electors. Mr. Epshteyn is currently a top adviser to Mr. Trump, helping to coordinate various lawyers in the cases in which he is involved.Glenn Thrush More

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      Why Jack Smith Had to Bring This Indictment Against Trump

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      Donald Trump has now been indicted three times, accused of crimes occurring before, during and after his presidency. The latest indictment alleges facts from all quarters to prove his criminality: from the vice president to the White House counsel and the heads of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence, as well as many others. All are Republican loyalists.But the indictment does more: It skillfully avoids breathing air into a Trump claim of selective prosecution. To not have brought this case against Mr. Trump would have been an act of selective nonprosecution. The Justice Department has already charged and obtained convictions for myriad foot soldiers related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including charging well over 300 people for obstructing the congressional proceedings. In this indictment, the special counsel Jack Smith wisely brings that same charge, but now against the alleged leader of the effort to thwart the transfer of power.That charge of obstruction and conspiracy to defraud the United States in the administration of elections are entirely fitting for the conduct alleged in the indictment. In a civil case last year, the Federal District Court judge David Carter held that Mr. Trump and John Eastman likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy under both those statutes in their schemes to organize false electors and pressure the vice president. Mr. Smith has now said he can prove the same conduct beyond a reasonable doubt.Although the Jan. 6 select committee referred Mr. Trump for investigation for inciting an insurrection, Mr. Smith wisely demurred. The Justice Department has not charged that offense in any other case involving the attack on the Capitol, and insurrection has not been charged since the 19th century. Of course, no president has engaged in it since then — but since no one else has been charged with that crime relating to Jan. 6, it likely would have been an issue. And since the penalty for the insurrection offense is that the defendant would not be eligible to hold federal office, it would have fueled a claim of weaponizing the Justice Department to defeat a political rival.Mr. Trump and others like him will of course continue to assert that the Justice Department has been politically weaponized. That claim has it exactly backward.To not charge Mr. Trump for trying to criminally interfere with the transfer of power to a duly elected president would be to politicize the matter. It would mean external political considerations had infected the Justice Department’s decision-making and steered the institution away from its commitment to holding everyone equally accountable under the law.What those circling their wagons around Mr. Trump are in effect asking for is a two-tiered system, in which the people who were stirred by lies to interrupt the congressional certification are held to account but not the chief instigator. That injustice has not been lost on judges overseeing cases related to Jan. 6. In the 2021 sentencing of John Lolos — a 48-year-old man with no criminal record who traveled from Seattle to hear Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before being convinced to “storm” the Capitol — Judge Amit Mehta commented on the incongruity in the D.C. courtroom.“People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, fed falsehoods, and told that our election was stolen when it clearly was not,” the judge said. He went on to add that those “who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’s conduct” and the events of Jan. 6 have “in no meaningful sense” been held “to account for their actions and their words.”We are now on the doorstep of the sort of accountability that Judge Mehta found lacking.That is what also makes this indictment of the former president different. Where both the Manhattan hush money case and classified documents case have been, in some part, mired in discussions of whataboutism, the 2020 election interference indictment is where whataboutism goes to die.In this case, the Trump stratagem is unmasked. Given the record of robust prosecutions of Jan. 6 foot soldiers and Mr. Trump’s responsibility for their actions, he has had to resort to saying the Capitol attack was good, and he and his enablers have lauded convicted felons as heroes and “political prisoners.” Mr. Trump’s continued statements in favor of the Jan. 6 defendants can and likely will be used against him in any trial.As the narrative of the indictment lays out, Mr. Trump’s schemes — to sell the big lie and promote election fraud even when he privately conceded to advisers the claims were “unsupported” and “crazy” — are what contributed to the attack of Jan. 6. And it is a relief that the indictment includes Mr. Trump’s role and responsibility in that violence. Many Americans would not understand the Justice Department focusing only on bureaucratic and procedural efforts to affect the congressional certification.As Senator Mitch McConnell said at the close of Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”He added: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”What is also clear from the indictment is that Mr. Trump will most likely not be the last white-collar defendant charged for the set of crimes it sets out. Mr. Smith clearly, and properly, considers that the six co-conspirators — parts of the indictment describe actions by co-conspirators that correspond with those taken by, for example, Mr. Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — committed federal offenses that threatened the core of our democracy. The rule of law cannot tolerate those actors facing charges with the main protagonist going scot free.The main task ahead for Mr. Smith is getting his cases to trial before the general election. But the true test ahead will not be for Mr. Smith. It will be for us: Will Americans care about the rule of law enough to vote for it? The courtroom is a place where facts and law still matter, but the criminal cases against Mr. Trump will test whether the same can be said for the ballot box.Ryan Goodman, a law professor at the New York University School of Law, is a co-editor in chief of Just Security. Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law and a host of the podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A President Accused of Betraying His Country

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      Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Charges Against Trump for Conspiring to Overturn the Election

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      Stella Tan and Rachel Quester and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOn Tuesday afternoon, the special counsel Jack Smith filed criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over his wide-ranging attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The Times, talks us through the indictment and the evidence it lays out that Trump participated in an illegal conspiracy to remain in power.On today’s episodeLuke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The New York Times.The indictment accuses Donald Trump of three conspiracies and obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBackground readingThe New York Times’s live coverage of the indictment.Four takeaways from the indictment.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Luke Broadwater More

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      Why Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Trump Indictment Is So Smart

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      This is the indictment that those who were horrified by the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have been waiting for. The catalog of misdeeds that Donald Trump is accused of is extensive, some reflected in other prosecutions over classified documents and hush-money payments or in civil lawsuits.But this case — a sitting U.S. president’s assault on democracy — is by far the most consequential. And from the looks of this indictment, the prosecution’s case is going to be thorough and relentless.The charging decisions in the indictment reflect smart lawyering by the special counsel Jack Smith and his team. The beauty of this indictment is that it provides three legal frameworks that prosecutors can use to tell the same fulsome story.It will allow prosecutors to put on a compelling case that will hold Mr. Trump fully accountable for the multipronged effort to overturn the election. At the same time, it avoids legal and political pitfalls that could have delayed or derailed the prosecution.The lead charge, conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 371, is a go-to charge for federal prosecutors. Count 1 charges a conspiracy to defraud the United States by obstructing and defeating the lawful counting of votes and certification of the election. Conspiracy is the perfect vehicle for describing a complex criminal scheme and identifying all the actors and everything they did.The conspiracy charge, which makes up most of the indictment, encompasses the tentacles of the scheme to overturn the election results. Pressuring state officials to overturn their elections, recruiting slates of fake electors from seven states, trying to corrupt the Justice Department to further the scheme, pressuring Mike Pence to throw out lawful votes and directing the mob to the Capitol on Jan. 6 — all are included as part of a single overarching conspiracy to defraud the United States.A conspiracy requires two or more people who agree to participate. This indictment lists but does not yet charge or formally identify six Trump co-conspirators. Mr. Smith clearly has enough evidence to charge those unindicted co-conspirators but has chosen not to — for now. This, too, is a smart tactical decision.Proceeding against Mr. Trump alone streamlines the case and gives Mr. Smith the best chance for a trial to be held and concluded before the 2024 presidential election. It’s possible some of the unindicted co-conspirators will cut a deal and testify for the prosecution. If not, there is plenty of time to charge them later.Counts 2 and 3 are conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of a proceeding, under 18 U.S.C. Section 1512. Prosecutors have successfully used this statute to charge hundreds of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, with disrupting the joint congressional proceeding to certify the election results.But when it comes to Mr. Trump and the senior people around him, this obstruction charge is much broader than the assault on the Capitol. The conspiracy to obstruct justice again encompasses all the different methods he and his allies used to seek to overturn the election results by thwarting the proceeding to certify the election. In addition, his dispatching supporters to the Capitol and then taking no steps to stop them for three hours potentially makes him liable for aiding and abetting that obstruction — even though he did not set foot in the Capitol himself. And aiding and abetting is part of the theory of the obstruction charge in Count 3.Count 4 is a civil rights violation under 18 U.S.C. Section 241. That statute makes it a crime to “injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” any people in their exercise and enjoyment of rights guaranteed by the Constitution or laws. Based on the same evidence, this charge alleges that Mr. Trump and others conspired to injure one or more people by depriving them of their right to have their votes counted.For each of these charges, all aspects of the effort to overturn the election, including those that took place well before Jan. 6, may be introduced as part of a single multifaceted scheme and part of one story that proves all the charges.Prosecutors love having alternative legal theories underlying a single presentation of evidence. It’s a belt-and-suspenders approach: If a legal issue arises that weakens or eliminates one charge, the others remain, and the case can continue. And within the scheme are yet more backstops: If the evidence for one aspect of the scheme falters, the remaining aspects are still more than sufficient to prove the charge.Mr. Smith has also avoided some potential land mines that could be lurking in other charges.One charge that was not included in the indictment falls under 18 U.S.C. Section 2383, which makes it a crime to incite, assist or engage in a rebellion or insurrection against the United States or to give aid and comfort to such an insurrection. This charge was part of the referral from the Jan. 6 committee.It would have faced some potentially tricky First Amendment issues, to the extent it would have relied on Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 to allege that he incited the riot. I believe those issues could be overcome, but the free speech battles over that charge would have been time-consuming and distracting because the speech could be easily characterized as a political rally.Seditious conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. Section 2384 is also absent. A number of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been convicted of violating that law, which prohibits conspiracies to overthrow the government. But violating the statute requires the use of force. Conviction presumably would require proof that Mr. Trump intended the Capitol riot to take place and that it was not just a political protest that got out of hand. That proof may be there, but the issue could easily become a major distraction.There will be those who say any case that does not charge Mr. Trump with insurrection or sedition is a whitewash that fails to hold him properly accountable. I think those critics are wrong. These charges will allow prosecutors to present the sweeping, multistate scheme to overturn the election, with all its different aspects, to the jury and the public. They are serious felony charges that carry hefty penalties.Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case.This indictment presents detailed and overwhelming allegations. It reflects sound legal and tactical decisions that should allow the government to move quickly and put on a powerful case. The most significant prosecution of Mr. Trump is off to a strong start.Randall D. Eliason is a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He writes the Sidebars blog.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More