(Dobbs) "Lock HIM Up?" It Might Start Tomorrow
Supporters threaten violence, but justice will proceed.
Donald Trump has a big day tomorrow. And we pretty much already know everything that’s about to unfold.
First, he has been ordered to show up at the federal courthouse in Miami where, unless the authorities make a special exception, he will be arrested and booked. Remember, this is the immediate past president of the United States of America, soon to be taken into custody like a common criminal by the very government he once led.
Then he heads upstairs to a courtroom to hear the charges against him. Charges of espionage. Charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. It cannot be said often enough: this is our immediate past president we’re talking about, soon to be arraigned for obstruction of justice and espionage against the nation he once led.
Then he heads home to Mar-a-Lago, the estate he carelessly and cavalierly used as a storage locker— and sometimes a display case— for documents that, seen by the wrong eyes, could put the lives of American agents, American soldiers, and American sources in jeopardy. Documents that revealed, according to the indictment against him, “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
It’s against that backdrop that Donald Trump will go on TV tomorrow night to address whatever part of the nation that chooses to watch. Just as we already know what will be said about him in court, we also know— because he already has broadcast it— what he’ll say at Mar-a-Lago: I AM AN INNOCENT MAN.
No surprise. When he tried to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to find dirt on his rival Joe Biden— the starting point of his first impeachment— Trump insisted it was a “perfect call.” After he tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the wake of his loss in Georgia to “find 11,780 votes” to change the outcome, he had the same narcissistic excuse: “It was a perfect call.” So tomorrow night, we’re likely to hear again what Trump wrote on his website after the indictment, calling prosecutor Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic” and a “psycho.”
And we’re likely to hear once again, and in verbal all caps, that he himself is an INNOCENT MAN.
Who knows, maybe he is. He certainly is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But if you actually read the indictment, you know that federal prosecutors have witnesses, photographs, notes from Trump’s own lawyers and even tape recordings with his own voice that reinforce their allegation that once caught in the act of misappropriating top secret documents, this one-time president lied and connived to conceal them.
Trump’s rival Ron DeSantis laid out the rationale for putting the ex-president on trial. The one-time Navy lawyer said that if he had taken classified documents while in the military, “I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute.” Or as another former military lawyer, one-time Army judge advocate and now commentator David French wrote, “It’s hard to imagine a more brazen and irresponsible mishandling of our nation’s secrets.”
Of course you can bet that true to character, Trump will tell the nation that it’s all a hoax. He already got that ball rolling the day the indictment was announced, asserting that a photo of classified documents strewn on the floor of a room at Mar-a-Lago “clearly shows there was no ‘documents’ but rather newspapers, personal pictures, etc.” It reminds me of the classic quote attributed to the mid-20th-Century comedian Groucho Marx: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
What’s scary is how many Americans don’t believe their lying eyes. From news reports around the nation, Trump Republicans are rallying around the MAGA flag, including most Republicans running for president. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott proclaimed that the charges against Trump reflect “a justice system where the scales are weighted.” Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley declared, “The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics.” Former Vice President Mike Pence had the sense to say that “No one’s above the law,” but also the audacity to say, “I’m deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward.”
Are they telling us that because Donald Trump is a former president and a candidate for president again, he should get a pass?
That’s scary enough for our embattled democracy but none of it is as scary as this: on Trump’s speciously named Truth Social website, a disciple wrote when the indictments were announced, “It is time We The People exercise our 2nd Amendment rights and burn the corruption out of DC.” Arizona congressman Andy Biggs tweeted, “We now have reached a war phase,” which is what insurrectionists were saying before January 6th. And Biggs’s fellow Arizonan Keri Lake, last year’s defeated gubernatorial candidate who unashamedly maintains the fiction that she lost because her race was rigged and who some believe is unabashedly angling to be on the ticket next year with Trump, appeared at a Saturday convention of the GOP in Georgia, where delegates wore ball caps saying “God, Guns and Trump.” Her message? “For Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden… if you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”
I’ll say this plainly: that’s the kind of provocative and incendiary rhetoric that gets people killed. And it comes from leading lights in a party that once revered the rule of law. But now, instead, they revere a man convicted last month of sexual assault, charged this month with espionage, and likely to be indicted in another month or two in Georgia with illegally seeking to overturn an election. Plus, probably waiting in the wings: federal charges of sedition in connection with January 6th.
Columnist Maureen Dowd summed it up well. After many years of Donald J. Trump v. United States of America, she said, the tables have turned. Now it’s United States of America v. Donald Trump.
In the same column in which former judge advocate David French said Trump had to be indicted because his behavior with the top secret documents could not have been more brazen, French also wrote, “Any other decision would place presidents outside the rule of federal law and declare to the American public that its presidents enjoy something akin to a royal privilege. But this is a republic, not a monarchy, and if the Justice Department can prove its claims, then Donald Trump belongs in prison.”
Predictions about prison for an ex-president, however, are new territory. But the one thing for sure is, the law is closing in. It was Trump himself who led the chant against Hillary Clinton to “lock her up.” Now the chant he’ll probably hear is, lock him up.
Donald Trump has a big day tomorrow. So does the nation.
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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg- I read your post for today right after reading Heather Cox Richardson's. They make excellent companion pieces. I'm trying to give you a BIG compliment here, since I think HCR pretty much walks on water.
I see the whole Trump phenomena as something stranger than the wildest fiction. How could this ignorant, infantile narcissist command so much support? How could millions of people drink his make-me-stupid kool aid? How could all these republican politicians bend reality until their heads are, shall we say, stuck in their dark places?
How can our nation survive this?
Good summary Greg. Bret Stephens offered me the one clear explanation for his loyal following. In essence he hears and validates their feelings of being disdained by the elites and they in turn have disdain for the elite... to belong to his cult submission to his lies is the price they pay... and right wing media lies and ignores the laws he allegedly broke. So a resolute minority remains though at the ballot boxes significant republicans who are not trumpists will not vote for him.