"The symmetry of light forms. The gravity is my storm."
It looks like Donald Trump is doing to be indicted, after all.
This week’s soundtrack: Bog Oak - “A Sea Without Shore”
Tomorrow, former president Donald Trump is supposed to turn himself into authorities in Manhattan. The coming indictment of a former president is a Very Big Deal, mostly because it has never happened before (for good reason). It will be a big media circus not just because of the unprecedented nature of the situation, but also because Trump is very conscious of the way he is perceived in the greater media environment. He is, first and foremost, a creature of tabloids and the courthouse is his home field.
Nevertheless, the argument against indicting the former president is a fairly strong one. For one, white collar crimes can be harder to adjudicate than others for a variety of reasons (the complexity of them, the more-expensive lawyers maneuvering, etc.) and there’s a big road between indicting someone and whatever comes next in the judicial system. But, really, the structural argument against Trump being indicted – mostly argued by Trump allies, GOP lawmakers, weird contrarians and the most status quo-focused among us – is that it makes the United States seem like a tinpot autocracy wherein a transfer of power means punishing the opposition party.
Matt Taibbi put forward this argument over on Twitter last week, though he echoed a lot of people with more gravitas than he.
I don’t think he’s completely wrong, insomuch as this could set a template for future bad faith actors in the White House. The out-there notion is that the second Trump administration would prosecute Biden and Harris for false crimes in 2026 or so, but the more likely one is that another president’s Justice Department could target – oh, I don’t know – former Cabinet members for violating records rules or children of presidents for a host of crimes. The path forward is not hard to see if President Ron DeSantis wants to focus on any of the villains of the Fox News Cinematic Universe (Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez, etc.).
(A couple of week ago, I wrote an aside about the ICC and Putin and the architects of the Iraq War. I want to acknowledge here that I’m cognizant of those ideas, generally, when I talk about presidents violating the law. Every American president in my lifetime has done horrible, awful things, from droning weddings to everything attached to the Iraq War to lots of things involved in the immigration system. Extrajudicial killings are a tool in the proverbial toolbox for American presidents. But, the sad fact is that no one would be immune from prosecution for doing the ~job~ of president if they were looking over their shoulders to their post-presidencies. That argument has been made many times by GOP politicians over the last few weeks and I don’t think they’re inherently wrong… if these crimes were committed by every other president in the course of the job.
Trump, however, is a different story, as he’s not being prosecuted for doing the ~job ~, just as Nixon or Clinton or Trump weren’t impeached for doing the job, but rather for violating the law. We’re not talking about the Pentagon killing Iranian officials, we’re talking about regular old lawbreaking during a campaign.)
Where the Taibbi thing misses is twofold. The first is a point that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie QT’d him on:
To expand on Bouie’s point: The notion that presidents are above the law is attractive and a seeming unwritten rule, but it flies in the face of equal protection. If one citizens has more rights (the right to break the law is a weird right, but here we are) than others, the whole thing falls apart. As it is, this particular former president was trying really hard to not leave office because of the potential indictments hanging over his head; it’s hard to imagine this changing those incentives.
The second notion is something I want to point out. There is some othering of places that prosecute former presidents/leaders by saying the U.S. would fall into autocracy, though there is also a fair amount of complicated (insomuch all things regarding development levels of different nation-states is complicated because of colonialism) evidence that peer systems to the U.S. are ones that do this kind of thing. South Korea, France (more than once) and Italy have all recently prosecuted former leaders for various corruption- and graft-related crimes. For all the “law and order” bluster that a lot of people seem to spout, there doesn’t seem to be an accountability system for someone like the former president. Similarly, for all the “let the justice system play out” bluster, there’s a lot of conclusions of “innocent” being brought to bear by Trump’s defenders before the man ever even stands before a single judge (as opposed to, say, Black men killed by police officers). Human Trafficking T-shirt and such.
As has pointed out plenty, the American experiment’s framers specifically wanted to make sure the U.S. was not a monarchy, with some sort of divine ruler. These kind of cases need to go forward for that exact reason: No one is supposed to be above the law. Because of the precedent of Nixon-era DoJ policy, at least former presidents should know that they are, in fact, bound by the laws of the land.
One final thing: Tied up in the political argument is that idea that this is a Capone situation, in that New York is trying to get Trump in jail by hook or by crook because of Jan. 6, so the indictment that relies on (reported, of course) hush money payments, campaign finance and fiscal improprieties is ticky tack. I’ve even seen the #resistance/blue wave types say something akin to this, but I would also note that the law is the law. Building off the above, if New York thinks that Trump broke the law, that’s that. There are still plenty of investigations being done into the former president, including one in Georgia specifically tied to the post-election meddling into “finding” votes. This is far from over.
GovExec Daily
Today’s show features Anna Massoglia, whose work I really admire and I was really happy to have her on to talk about dark money’s effect on administrative burdens for taxpayers. Paying your taxes is a pain in the ass mostly because of the tax code, but Intuit, H&R Block and the like are spending millions to make sure it keeps being a pain in the ass.
We also talked to friend of the program Bill Eggers last week about a new Deloitte report about the ‘23 government trends report and I even talked to Tom Guarente about TikTok and the security issues therein for government network admins.
Lulu Update
As I get older and pare down my sports consumption, baseball has turned into the main sport I watch. Which means that Opening Day means I can – on social media – both be a dog weirdo and a baseball weirdo. So, I torture my dog by putting Chicago White Sox gear on her.
She has her own jersey, but she wears my hat.
A Recommendation: Sarah Squirm
I was late to Sarah Squirm’s comedy insomuch as I caught wind of her via the Sarah Vaccine, a semi-viral (no pun intended) video released in May of ‘21. She’s as masterful as anyone at slapstick, grossout comedy, while being pretty incisive about our current hell world. Her time at SNL has been remarkably weird, which is the only way she seems to be able to be. I’m not an SNL watcher, but I do try to check out her sketches the next day or so online because she does not give up on a bit. She’s the best thing to happen to SNL in a long time.