The New York Times on holding Donald Trump accountable (March 30):

For the first time in American history, a grand jury has indicted a former president of the United States, The Times reported on Thursday. Donald Trump spent years as a candidate, in office and out of office, ignoring democratic and legal norms and precedents, trying to bend the Justice Department and the judiciary to his whims and behaving as if rules didn’t apply to him.

As the news of the indictment shows, they do.

A pattern of disregard for the law often leads to a criminal indictment, and that is the outcome Mr. Trump now faces. Federal and state prosecutors were right to set aside concerns about political fallout, or reverence for the presidency, and initiate thorough criminal investigations of Mr. Trump’s conduct in at least four instances. The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney is the first known to result in an indictment.

Mr. Trump completely transformed the relationship between the presidency and the rule of law, often asserting that a president was above the law. So it is appropriate that his actions as president and as a candidate should now be formally weighed by judges and juries, with the possibility of criminal penalties on the line. Mr. Trump badly damaged America’s political and legal institutions and threatened them again with calls for widespread protests once he is indicted. But those institutions have proved to be strong enough to hold him accountable for that harm.

A healthy respect for the legal system also requires Americans to set aside their politics when forming judgments on these cases. While Mr. Trump routinely called for his enemies to be investigated by the F.B.I., to be indicted or to face the death penalty, his indifference to due process for others shouldn’t deny him the system’s benefits, including a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. At the same time, no jury should extend to him any special privileges as a former president. He should have to follow the same procedures as any other citizen.

The indictment remains sealed, and the exact charges against Mr. Trump may not be known for several days. But Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, has been pursuing a case of possible fraud and campaign finance violations by Mr. Trump for concealing payments he made to the pornfilm star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. His actions — using money to silence critics and hide politically damaging information — were wrong. The question that will face a jury is whether that behavior meets the threshold for conviction as a felony.

If those are the charges, conviction will hinge on proving that Mr. Trump participated in falsifying business records while violating campaign finance law, a somewhat novel legal strategy. Falsifying records can be charged as a misdemeanor in New York; to make it a more serious felony requires proof that he combined it with a second crime, in this case, a potential campaign finance violation. The former president, who is seeking a second term in 2024, has denied the allegations and has said that the case against him brought by Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, is politically motivated.

While some legal experts have questioned the theory behind Mr. Bragg’s case, there is no basis for the accusation that it is politically motivated — a claim that Mr. Trump has made, for many years, about every investigation into his conduct. Just as jurors are routinely instructed to ignore evidence that is improperly introduced in a trial, they will also have to ignore the unsubstantiated implications raised by Trump supporters and attorneys in these cases and judge them strictly on the merits.

The decision to prosecute a former president is a solemn task, particularly given the deep national fissures that Mr. Trump will inevitably exacerbate as the 2024 campaign grows closer. But the cost of failing to seek justice against a leader who may have committed these crimes would be higher still.