•The Niger Coup...
indictment states: “he was determined to remain in power” despite having lost an election. But the horrifying situation is that former president Trump is not only the front-runner for the Republican [or GOP/Grand Old Party] nomination, but in the latest polls is closely matched with President Joe Biden in a hypothetical rematch [a repetition of the 2020 presidential contest]. Trump’s third indictment details a clear and chilling plot to subvert the will of voters in 2020 and to severe the chain of voluntary transfers of power between presidents (CNN/ Stephen Collinson, Aug. 3).
Special counsel Jack Smith’s charges are more significant than those in two earlier indictments against Trump in separate cases. This “strikes at the core of America’s founding values and the republic’s constitutional underpinnings” (CNN). Trump has pleaded not guilty in the other two cases – the first in Manhattan,N.Y. over business fraud charges related to a hush money payment to a porn star and the second in Florida over alleged mishandling of classified documents. Trump flatly denies wrongdoing in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Impeachment would have been the most serious constitutional remedy to constrain a president, but two attempts didn’t produce a conviction in a Senate trial because the Republicans were just too cowardly. Consequently, the United States now faces a constitutional and political crisis of unimagined proportions. The third indictment represents the most concrete attempt yet to subject Trump to personal culpability as the alleged ringleader of the 2020/2021 conspiracy. It may be the final effort to hold him to account on the federal level.
The prosecutors have repeatedly and powerfully illustrated how Trump was told by his own legal, political and campaign advisers that the election was lost, only for him to then continue to take actions to undermine it. After all, he is the ‘liar in personification’.
Now, the Fourth Indictment
A grand jury in Georgia has now indicted Trump with conspiracy and other charges involving efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
The indictment is an unprecedented challenge of presidential misconduct by a local prosecutor (NYT, Aug. 15).
In any other democratic country, the noose would have long been firmly around Trump’s neck.
But while Trump’s legal prosecution is an attempt to account for his highly aberrant presidency, it has also deepened America’s gaping political divide. As the astute NYTcolumnist Charles M. Blow has implied: ‘Unless the country denies Trump re-election – an outcome still too early to predict – the country courts its own undoing’ (July 22-23).