The New York Times editorial board issued its proclamation.
Donald Trump spent years as a candidate, in office and out of office, ignoring democratic and legal norms and precedents, trying to bend the Justice Department and the judiciary to his whims and behaving as if rules didn’t apply to him.
As the news of the indictment shows, they do.
Do they? As of this moment, the indictment still sealed, the putative defendants unarraigned, the banner headline, “Trump Indicted,” reminiscent of the two times Trump was impeached which accomplished little if anything, what does this indictment show?
An indictment is merely an accusation upon probable cause as found by a grand jury. We assume we know what Trump was indicted for, although it’s possible there are things in there about which we’re as yet unaware. Regardless, Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence as does every defendant unless and until convicted. Whether he will be convicted remains a very real question.
Should the first indictment of an ex-president be under a novel legal theory that could be rejected by a judge or a jury? What do we make of the doubts about this case even among those who have zero sympathy for Trump? Does District Attorney Alvin Bragg know what he’s doing?
None of us can be sure of the answer to these questions until we’ve seen the evidence presented at trial, and I worry that a failed prosecution might strengthen Trump. Yet I’d also worry — even more — about the message of impunity that would be sent if prosecutors averted their eyes because the suspect was a former president.
Three other investigations remain open, each being for conduct far more serious and far more connected to the wrongs committed in office, no matter how incompetently performed. It remains possible that there will be an indictment, if not more than one, for this conduct during the pendancy of the New York County indictment. Should that happen, the significance of this indictment will fade. It will always be the first, but it surely won’t be the worst.
Then again, years have now elapsed since Trump left the White House for the last time. Prosecutors manage to indict swiftly when they want to, when it’s the “nobody” who isn’t above the law. The years of investigation without charges is stunning. It’s not hard to rationalize the delay, the efforts to be as thorough as possible, the desire not to jump the gun and pursue a prosecution that isn’t certain to result in conviction. the attempt to make a prosecution of a despised former president not smell like political retribution but the only possible product of a legitimate exercise of the police power.
But as many of us who despise Trump as the vulgar, narcissistic, deceitful, ignoramus that he is realize, this is not the case that will bring him down. The New York Times is wrong. This indictment does not show that Trump is not above the law, but feeds into the belief that New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is hardly a radical Soros-backed socialist, is pursuing a political indictment against a hated enemy of the left.
The question is not whether a former president is above the law. He is not. The question is whether the law should be dubiously stretched in various directions to take down a former president for what will, at worst, be a relatively petty offense unrelated to his conduct in office when there are three other far more serious, far more substantive and far more connected to the wrongs committed as president. I have no clue why there has been no movement by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis or Special Counsel Jack Smith (or his predecessor in prosecution, Merrick Garland), after all this time.
And yet, Trump has been indicted. So what?
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