Everything Has Gone Trump’s Way. Will It Last?
He keeps coasting past accountability.
LAST WEEK PROVED THE U.S. SUPREME COURT was always going to find a way to help Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Though that may not be their intention, conservative justices in the majority seem set to do the opposite of helping to bring justice or accountability to Trump before Election Day. Because that would be perceived as helping President Joe Biden’s campaign.
The high court had already effectively killed off the prospects of a timely trial for Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election, by taking up the immunity issue at all and then waiting eight weeks for oral argument. It is now possibly poised to enable presidents to skirt some laws, and to expand presidential power—because Trump staged a two-month coup that, once unsuccessful, transitioned to a deadly insurrection he encouraged and cheered.
A president’s job, under the Constitution, is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”—which Trump refused to do in his first term. Now the Court could essentially secure new powers for an authoritarian-in-waiting who already has plans to centralize vast powers within the executive in ways heretofore unimaginable.
Team Trump was already celebrating the Court’s eliminating any chance of a trial before the election, but last Thursday’s oral argument in the case was like winning the lottery.
Judge J. Michael Luttig was aghast at the justices’ arguments. He told the New Republic:
The conservative justices’ argument for immunity assumes that Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump is politically corrupt and seeks a rule that would prevent future presidents from corruptly prosecuting their predecessors. . . . But such a rule would license all future presidents to commit crimes against the United States while in office with impunity. . . . Which is exactly what Trump is arguing he’s entitled to do.
Dictator-palooza.
This is all familiar though. Because Trump has the best luck. Flukes, twists of fate, cowardice, and interventions along the way have dramatically smoothed his path through the legal peril he unleashed with 88 alleged crimes.
Go back three years to February 13, 2021 when Republican senators refused to convict Trump—in an impeachment trial GOP leader Mitch McConnell delayed until after Trump left office—on the grounds that he was no longer president and so couldn’t be impeached and would have to be criminally prosecuted instead.
If you’re Trump you get to evade impeachment because you can be criminally prosecuted but then evade criminal prosecution because you were impeached without conviction.
That criminal justice system that was supposed to take care of Trump then dragged its feet. Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t get around to appointing a special counsel until November 18, 2022, two years after Trump and his allies plotted to overturn the 2020 election results, and nearly two years after the insurrection on January 6th.
Then—luck of the draw !—in his prosecution on charges of unlawfully possessing classified documents, the closest to airtight case against him, Trump gets the judge already happy to trash her own reputation for him, Aileen Cannon, a judge whom he appointed and who had been egregiously lenient with him in the process the court mandated for sorting through the classified material. She was randomly (by computer system) chosen from five eligible judges in the federal district court to preside over the federal documents case. The New York Times described Cannon’s handling of the “special master” process this way: “Judge Cannon, 42, a Trump appointee in Florida, shocked legal experts across ideological lines last year by intervening in the investigation and issuing rulings favorable to Mr. Trump, only to be rebuked by a conservative appeals court.”
Whatever her motive, she has helped slow roll the proceedings, as is Trump’s wish. She still hasn’t set a trial date.
Next Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia prosecuting the subversion of the Peach State’s 2020 election, brought an unwieldy case against nineteen defendants that would have been challenging under any circumstances—but then she became lovers with one of her handpicked lawyers on the team and the whole circus sideshow eroded her credibility and slowed that case, too.
Republicans from Colorado sued to keep Trump off the state’s ballot under the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office. The state supreme court agreed. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Trump couldn’t be removed from the ballot. The justices wouldn’t touch the question of whether Trump had engaged in insurrection, rendering this section of the Constitution essentially defunct.
In March Trump was sweating a half a billion dollar bond he had to post in his civil fraud case, as speculation swirled that New York Attorney General Letitia James would begin seizing his properties—when suddenly an appeals court cut it down to $175 million.
Along the way, he has attacked judges, prosecutors, and their family members and isn’t likely to ever be held to account the way any ordinary defendant would. As Trump has trashed the legal system, it has bowed to him, not the other way around.
But last week, as the Supreme Court pondered presidents approving assassinations of political enemies and plotting future coups to hold on to power, Trump became an unindicted co-conspirator in yet another fake elector scheme. Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman were among eighteen people indicted in Arizona. With each passing charge Trump’s henchmen incur, it makes it more and more difficult not to flip on him. (Should he win the election, Trump will not be able to issue pardons for state crimes.) Legal experts have speculated that is what the Arizona attorney general is likely working towards now.
Plus, this brings to four the total of fake elector prosecutions in critical swing states that voters will become familiar with—Democrats will see to that. According to the New York Times, a total of thirty-five people in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada are facing criminal charges in fake elector plots in which they signed false certificates declaring Trump their state’s winner.
LUCKY TRUMP GOT ONLY ONE criminal trial instead of four—but by anyone’s measure, things are not going Trump’s way at the Manhattan courtroom he’s tied to for the next six to eight weeks. The case there centers mostly on a secret plot to pay off Stormy Daniels so the voters wouldn’t learn in 2016, shortly after hearing Trump brag about how he grabs women “by the pussy,” that he also cheated on his wife with a porn star.
More than just the affair and the hush money, the case is interesting for the testimony of how Trump not only got to kill off embarrassing stories but how he created fake news to kill off his political rivals. The trial has provided telling details about what a dirtbag Trump is, with more to come.
What’s also interesting is how much of a petulant man-baby Trump comes across as, even more than usual. He complains about the air conditioning and lies about how law enforcement has blocked off access to the entire area so that his road warriors can’t get close to him. This isn’t true—in reality, just a paltry few MAGAsses have shown up to protest the trial and Trump is embarrassed. Last Thursday, only one guy showed up and he admitted it was lame. “We got nothing here right now, let’s be real,” he lamented. “You don’t see any prominent Republicans here today, do you?”
In “loss of control” stories about Trump adjusting to his new limited life, aides and advisers lament Trump’s constraints and how they affect his mood. “The former president is accustomed to near-daily rounds of golf, ‘constant stimulation’ and cheers when he enters and exits a room at Mar-a-Lago,” these sources told the Washington Post.
Undoubtedly a hung jury or acquittal—which are not out of the question—would boost Trump, and without the other trials the verdict would resonate for all of his crimes: a witch-hunt.
But this trial is a reminder that Trump sits atop a lifetime of many, many vile secrets and a mountain of evidence against him. While much of it is known, the vast amounts that remain not widely known are enough to make voters’ hair fall out.
His strategy remains to delay, delay, delay. He knows that if he runs out the clock and wins the November election, he can avoid accountability for his more serious crimes and avoid going to jail.
Still, six months is a long time for everything to stay hidden, for everyone to stay silent, and for Trump’s luck to keep stretching.