(Dobbs) If He Has Committed Crimes, Should Donald Trump Go To Trial?
Civil war is a risk if he does. A diminished democracy is a risk if he doesn't.
Is our nation better off if Donald Trump is prosecuted for his alleged crimes, or worse?
There is no easy answer. There is no right answer. But it is equally true that there is no shortage of crimes for which Trump is accused. Serious crimes and, in many people’s minds, treasonous crimes: Interfering in an election. Inciting an insurrection. Espionage.
Yet even on the liberal side of the political aisle, there is no consensus.
Columnist Charles Blow of The New York Times frames it this way: “The questions before the Justice Department are not only whether there is convincing evidence that Trump committed the crimes he is accused of but also whether the country could sustain the stain of a criminal prosecution of a former president. I would turn the latter question around completely: Can the country afford not to prosecute Trump?”
Blow’s answer is no.
His counterpart at The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, agrees: “It will be bad if Trump is prosecuted, and worse if he isn’t.”
Why worse? Because, as The Boston Globe wrote in an editorial, “Norms in a democracy are only as good as our willingness to enforce them. It cannot be the case that there is no line— no hypothetical act of presidential criminality— that would not rise to the level of seriousness that merits setting aside our qualms.”
But in the case of Donald Trump, even among liberals, there are qualms. Colossal qualms. They are real and they are rational.
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin points to one of them: “One mark of modern despotism is the legal pursuit of former leaders by current office-holders, and the United States has wisely avoided this cycle throughout its history. To be sure, this practice has its limits, and pervasive and obvious criminality by a President should be prosecuted regardless of this tradition. But if there's a close call, restraint is the better course.”
The Brookings Institute’s Senior Fellow Elaine Kamarck, while allowing that “no one is above the law,” points out the possibility of radical repercussions if Donald Trump is brought to trial. “Prosecuting a former President of the United States whose followers maintain an almost cult-like loyalty to him is a decision with enormous consequences. Would a successful prosecution and perhaps jail time make Donald Trump a martyr and exacerbate the ugly divisions he has launched on the country?”
What’s worse, those ugly divisions are not just political. David Klepper of The Associated Press catalogued the poisonous divisions in a comprehensive piece on Tuesday:
• The judge who authorized the search at Mar-a-Lago has had his home address publicized on right-wing websites and death threats left on his phone.
• A man wearing body armor and armed with an assault rifle and a nail gun, after posting on Trump’s own “Truth Social” website that federal agents ought to be killed on sight, tried to break into the FBI’s offices in Cincinnati. After shots were fired, he was killed by police.
• A man was arrested in Pennsylvania after posting threats against the FBI on social media such as, “You’ve declared war on us and now it’s open season on YOU.”
• The words “civil war” increased tenfold after the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago. One post said, “You started this civil war. And others are going to sure end it for you.”
Some of these flames are fanned by Trump’s political allies. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Defund the FBI.” Colorado’s Lauren Boebert called the FBI search “Gestapo crap.” Arizona’s Paul Gosar wrote, “We must destroy the FBI.”
And some flames are fanned by the ex-president himself. “This is an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our Country,” he railed without ratifiable merit on his website. “Third World!”
No wonder that University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq fears that prosecuting someone like Trump, “who continues to be popular, has the potential to make that person into a martyr and to facilitate and to enable— radicalize, even further— the movement they are associated with.”
That movement already has put ugly scars on American democracy: overt racism rising to levels unseen since the 1960s, menacing threats and mortal violence against the men and women sworn to preserve and protect, politicizing once-apolitical institutions like the United States Secret Service, subverting election laws to undermine the prized principle of one-man-one-vote, elected officials endorsing the lie about a rigged election. And most of all, the rabid insurrection of January 6th.
On a political level, The Los Angeles Times projected that if there is a Trump trial and “the prosecution is unsuccessful, he could gain more currency than he has now as a political loser.” The widely read Washington website The Hill ran a piece by political operative Keith Naughton that agreed: “Worst of all would be an acquittal. If Trump were tried and acquitted, he could just coast off that victory right into the White House.”
And yet there’s that nagging feeling that he’s already coasting. As his son Eric said on Newsmax the day after Liz Cheney lost her seat in Congress, “Last night, my father killed another political dynasty, and that’s the Cheneys. He first killed the Bushes, then he killed the Clintons. Last night he killed the Cheneys.”
Cheney’s defeat also led to worrisome warnings. In the Financial Times, Edward Luce wrote, “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” General Michael Hayden retweeted Luce’s observation and added, “I agree. And I was (under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama) the CIA Director.” The Republican-founded anti-Trump Lincoln Project wrote, “Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is in fact an authoritarian nationalist cult dedicated only to Donald Trump.” Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman put it most succinctly, reporting that according to some of his own advisors, “Mr. Trump embodied Louis XIV’s phrase “L’état, c’est moi,” or “I am the state.”
But if Donald Trump is indicted and is prosecuted and is convicted of any of the crimes for which he is accused, there’s a dispiriting caveat: It’s Not Just Trump.
He has inspired a countless coterie of copycats. The well-known ones like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, and lesser-knowns who are winning elections at the statewide level and parroting the Big Lie.
Even if Trump is prosecuted, even if Trump ends up behind bars, they will still be around. They will still be a danger to our nation. Because whether they truly think this way or have merely seen that it resonates with a huge segment of American voters, they show no signs of backing off their attacks on the traditions, the norms, the institutions, even the laws that have kept us stable to this point.
For my part, putting the arguments for and against prosecution on a scale, I think if prosecutors can make an ironclad case that Donald Trump committed crimes, they should do it. Even Trump ally Lindsay Graham made the same case just last year, when Trump was impeached for the second time: “If you believe he committed a crime, he can be prosecuted like any other citizen.”
Yes, there are risks to the nation, even to the point of civil war, if Donald Trump is taken to trial. But there are risks to the very survival of our democracy if he isn’t. Either we treat every citizen equally, or we don’t. Either we respect the rule of law, or we don’t. Put that way, I see no choice. Like I wrote at the beginning, there is no easy answer, there is no right answer. Some stories just don’t have a happy ending.
I rely for hope on Liz Cheney’s words as she conceded her election Tuesday night in Wyoming: "Let us resolve that we will stand together— Republicans, Democrats, and independents— against those who would destroy our republic. They are angry and they are determined, but they have not seen anything like the power of Americans united in defense of our Constitution and committed to the cause of freedom. There is no greater power on this earth.”
As she has been right before, may she be right again.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
"There is no greater power on this earth.” Interesting wish. But, is it a fact?
Think of the reality… a militia driven “civil war” vs the US Military… this would not require US Grant to defeat quickly and totally
A purge of that nature would afford decades to restore and update American Democracy.
Im with Blow, Robinson and many more — he must be prosecuted and hanged for high treason ( there, got it off my chest)