Trump’s criminal acts — will America care?
America still had the naive ability to be shocked back on Nov. 16, 1973, when a rambling then-President Richard Nixon stood up before 400 Associated Press journalists. Wallowing in the Watergate scandal, the 37th president joked morbidly about his plane crashing before he could be impeached, then uttered these famous words: “‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
Quitting before he could be impeached and pardoned by successor Gerald Ford, Nixon never had his day in court. Some 48 years later, a Watergate-style investigation and accelerating probes in both New York and Atlanta have the nation now asking whether their ex-president is a crook. And with each passing day, new revelations about Donald Trump’s involvement in Jan. 6 coup plotting or other misdeeds are raising the stakes.
In 2022, the real question for a frazzled, exhausted America is becoming less whether the 45th president was a crook, but more what are we going to do about it?
This may sound like a weird thing to say about a man who’s been through a handful of business bankruptcies and divorces, two presidential impeachments and finally getting unceremoniously booted from the Oval Office
after just one term, but last week might have been the worst week of Trump’s 75-plus years on Earth. Consider:
• Remember the possible “smoking gun” in the House Jan. 6 investigation that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago? Now, thanks to an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling requiring the surrender of key documents, we’ve seen the draft presidential order in question — and you can smell the gunpowder. On Dec. 16, 2020 — or two days after electors in state capitols teed up President Joe Biden’s victory — the draft circulating in Trump’s White House called for declaring a national emergency in which U.S. troops would be deployed in seizing ballot boxes, putting the 2020 election in the realm of a corrupt banana republic.
• The Washington Post and CNN reported that Trump’s personal attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was a key architect and an organizer of the scheme in which Republicans in five key battleground states won by Biden sent forms to the National Archives and elsewhere falsely claiming they were the “duly elected” electors, for Trump. The tallies were part of a scheme by Trump advisers for Vice President Mike Pence or Congress to somehow invalidate Biden’s victory at the Jan. 6 certification.
• From Georgia came news that the district attorney for Fulton County, home to Atlanta, has asked for a special grand jury that would investigate “possible criminal disruptions” in the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. That would surely include the notorious tape recording of Trump, one of the planet’s most powerful people, hectoring GOP functionaries to find him the 11,780 votes to undo Biden’s surprising victory in that state.
The big picture for Trump right now is this: The House Jan. 6 committee — along with overlapping probes like the one in Georgia and continued investigative reporting — is closing the circle on a criminal conspiracy.
I’m worried by this: In a year when the fate of U.S. democracy is at least competing with mask mandates in public schools for the attention of voters, there is the very real possibility of learning in prime time that our president was a crook — and then doing nothing. And that feels like it could be the actual fatal blow for our American Experiment.
The late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we paused ever so briefly to honor this month, said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” I can’t help but wonder if America will begin to end if we choose silence about the criminality of Donald Trump.