The People v. Donald Trump
Despite his unrelenting attempts to avoid prosecution, the former president’s first criminal trial opens this week in Manhattan. Like it or not, this is justice.
Barring some last-minute ploy he hasn’t yet pulled, former President Donald J. Trump will have his day in court starting Monday, and so will the People of New York.
And if America still has a legal system in which “justice for all” is not some throwaway phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, there will be more trials to come.
Mr. Trump and his lawyers have labored mightily to forestall these proceedings, the first criminal prosecutions of a U.S. president since the nation’s founding. He is right on one thing: It’s an unprecedented moment. But what’s unprecedented is not the imaginary plot he claims to be playing out against him; it’s his unprecedented behavior and apparent disregard for the law that have brought him, and the country, to this point. In this first criminal trial, in Manhattan, Mr. Trump stands accused of 34 state felony counts of falsifying business records in the course of making and covering up hush money payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels, who says she had an affair with him. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says Mr. Trump’s attempts to prevent the public from knowing about that and other scandals while he was running for president in 2016 rose to the level of felonies because they involved violations of tax law and state and federal campaign finance laws as well.
Mr. Trump has tried in and out of court to fend off this and three other criminal prosecutions. In court, he has tried to argue that he’s immune, as a former president, from prosecution, an audacious argument that’s yet to be ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this particular case, he has, among other things, sought to have State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan recused on grounds that he’s biased
Mr. Trump, mainly because the judge’s daughter is active in Democratic politics. The judge refused, and the state court system found no substance to Mr. Trump’s accusation.
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump from engaging in dangerous, highly personal public attacks on the judge and his family, a transparent attempt to stir anger among his supporters and behavior that’s more befitting a mob boss. The judge quite rightly issued a gag order, which Mr. Trump only added to the legal appeals he has employed to try to slow the case down.
To his credit, Justice Merchan is handling Mr. Trump’s legal and extralegal antics professionally, and probably more patiently than a defendant with such little regard for the court deserves. Especially a defendant who once took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
We can’t say as much for U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the federal case Mr. Trump faces in Florida for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office. Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has already once been faulted by a higher court for a poorly reasoned ruling that came down in Mr. Trump’s favor. The slow pace she has let Mr. Trump’s legal team set in the case may well delay it so long that it will be impractical to try him before the election. Concerns are that if Mr. Trump wins the presidency, he could order at least the two federal criminal cases against him stopped, though he could still face a second state trial in Georgia for alleged election interference. The courts should thwart Mr. Trump’s attempts to run the clock. The American people deserve to know this November if a major-party candidate — one already found in civil courts to have sexually assaulted a woman and committed massive fraud in his business dealings — is indeed guilty of the dozens upon dozens of crimes he’s been credibly accused of, crimes that could send him to prison.
Mr. Trump suggests this is all just political retribution — a rich accusation, indeed, from a politician who made “Lock her up!” one of the catchphrases of his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, and who now vows to have the U.S. Jusagainst tice Department go after his political opponents if he regains power. It is, of course, just another of Mr. Trump’s self-serving, inflammatory grievances against an institution that he hasn’t been able to bend to his will — whether it’s the electoral system in which he decisively lost the 2020 election, the dozens of courts that rejected his flimsy claims that the election was stolen, or the Congress that ultimately validated his defeat to President Joe Biden. Unprecedented as the proceedings that begin Monday may be, this is prosecution, not persecution. Unlike Mr. Trump, who has always seemed to be unburdened by the need to prove his many wild claims about his adversaries or himself, Mr. Bragg has offered credible evidence for the charges against the former president (and this year’s presumptive Republican nominee). The district attorney will now make that case in detail to a jury. We will all get to see it, and to see how the system works. Hopefully the system will work as it should, despite all of Mr. Trump’s attempts to break it. And hopefully justice will be done, despite all of his attempts to avoid it.