The indictment is essential for democracy
Special counsel Jack Smith delivered a powerful indictment of former president Donald Trump on Tuesday for his alleged scheming and actions to overturn the 2020 presidential election. But it wasn’t stunning. Yes, there were further details, but little of the indictment’s main thrust was new.
This is a trial the United States must have if we are to safeguard our democracy. It’s a strange and uncomfortable thing for a country to see its former leader charged and tried for anything, let alone for allegations of scheming against our democracy itself. That is, against us.
But it is unavoidable here, unavoidable because Trump, through his conduct, made it so. If there’s one forum with the ability to cut through the lies and the absurd claims and to determine the facts, and then to weigh those facts against the law, it’s our court system.
The basis for these charges will be familiar to anyone who followed the hearings of the US House’s Jan. 6 committee. So too will the lies, the scheming, the skullduggery, and the rogues’ gallery of players, though they aren’t identified by name but rather as coconspirators.
Four of the coconspirators will be obvious to everyone: louche lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey
Clark, and John Eastman, the disgraced gang that allegedly aided and abetted Trump’s effort.
The former president quickly denounced his indictment as the kind of thing one would see in Nazi Germany. That’s par for the course for a man who has long been a shameless demagogue. We can expect him, as he always does, to play the victim and tell his supporters that by prosecuting him, special counsel Jack Smith is really persecuting them.
Some will believe that, but it is, of course, arrant nonsense.
This a mess of Trump’s own making. As the indictment lays out — and as the Jan. 6 committee has previously revealed — he was repeatedly told by a variety of highly placed members of his own administration and his own campaign that there had been no widespread, results-changing election fraud. The indictment also makes it clear that an array of his own appointees will be testifying against him.
In some way, what’s sadder than Trump’s outrageous Nazi comparison is watching elected Republicans who obviously know better denounce this indictment as the weaponization of government or an abuse of power.
As Smith said in brief remarks about the indictment, Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But it’s hard to see him beating all of these charges.
Beyond the legal issues, there are two political matters that will be telling. One is whether this indictment will finally sink in with the Republican grass roots and lead to a real erosion of support for Trump as a contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, if only because of a recognition of how little chance he has to win.
The second is whether, watching this trial unfold, they will come to realize just how serious and sinister an undertaking Trump embarked on.
There, one can only hope.