Into the abyss
Perhaps the rarest creatures in American politics are those who can accept that our political order might be designed, and reasonably so, to thwart what their hearts desire.
That it is, for instance, possible to support legal access to abortion but also accept that there isn’t really a right to it in the Constitution, or to oppose capital punishment but also accept that the Constitution as written clearly permits it, or to support particular gun-control laws but also accept that some of which is proposed in that area is inconsistent with an honest reading of the Second Amendment.
The absence of such conflicted (and thus reasonable) thinking was especially evident in the reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—most of which has been based on what one thinks of Trump, not the merits of the legal case brought against him, as if that which should matter most matters not at all.
If you opposed Trump, then the indictment was justified, if you support him, it wasn’t.
But, again, it is possible to hold two ideas at the same time; in this case, and given the circumstances and facts as we so far know them, perhaps necessary: to both despise Trump and also believe that his indictment constitutes a spectacular abuse of prosecutorial power.
It becomes virtually impossible for those who hate Trump to acknowledge that the case against him in New York is an exceedingly dubious one, because what matters is Trump, not the case.
Since Trump is deplorable, any legal indictment of him must be justified, whatever the particulars. So goes what passes for the logic.
Many of the same folks who (appropriately) condemned “Lock Her Up” when directed at Hillary Clinton (containing as it did the banana-republic suggestion that the law should be used against your political opponents), now seem to have no problem with the concept when directed at Trump (even though an objective observer could plausibly conclude that Clinton’s alleged legal transgressions regarding her email server and classified material were of greater consequence than Trump’s alleged falsification of business records as part of a hush-money payment).
Charles Lipson, writing in The Spectator U.S., effectively summarizes Bragg’s approach when noting, “He had to do it with the thinnest of evidence, the weakest of legal theories. He focused on a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has expired. Using a novel legal theory, he wants to tie that misdemeanor to other alleged crimes and package them all as a felony. … That’s not how our justice system is supposed to work. Prosecutors are not supposed to begin with the target and then look for a crime.”
Indeed, perhaps the most damning evidence that Bragg’s indictment constitutes a case of politicized justice was the fact that an array of far more seasoned federal prosecutors as well as the Federal Election Commission (FEC) examined the same evidence and concluded there were insufficient grounds to justify even one count at the misdemeanor level, but Bragg, who had been elected on a promise to get Trump, lest we forget, was able to somehow find no less than 34 felony counts.
Sheer quantity is thus apparently expected to create the kind of perception of guilt in the public eye that quality and actual legal merit can’t.
All of which brings us back to the degree to which an ugly “ends justify the means” dynamic has overtaken our politics in the Trump age, in which the unsavoriness of Trump has provoked a similarly unsavory resistance; to the point where just about any means can be justified in bringing him down, even if it means undermining the integrity of our criminal justice system in the process.
It is possible that the only thing which has threatened our democracy more in recent years than Trump has been the response to him, and Alvin Bragg has now taken that response into genuinely dangerous uncharted territory.
The idea that one party can legally target a former president (and, in Trump’s case, also declared candidate for president) of the other party without reciprocity is the epitome of shortsightedness and naïvete.
The age of hyper-polarization and tribalism thus threatens to bring us a new normal consisting of serial impeachments and criminal indictments of presidents, current and former.
Yes, cleansing the body politic of the menace Trump is important, but how we go about it, and whether those methods preserve the cherished principles of our political order, matters even more.
Trump in that sense isn’t so much a threat to the rule of law as a test of our commitment to it.
The great irony in all this is that the Manhattan D.A., having cut in line with the flimsiest of cases, will now make it politically more difficult to prosecute Trump on other, potentially stronger and more significant ones (including possible mishandling of classified documents and encouragement of election fraud in Georgia).
Additional irony is found in the spectacle of a prosecutor with a reputation for being “soft” on crime finally deciding to prosecute someone.
That that someone is Donald Trump is the only thing which explains it all.