Yahoo Sports Even Trump can’t survive this legal quagmire
America has the best democracy money can buy. But the indictment of Donald Trump for holding classified documents is cheap. It might be counter productive, too.
This is the first time a former president has been charged with federal criminal offences. It is also the first time that the leading candidate for one party’s presidential nomination has been charged as a criminal under the administration he would run against. Indicting Trump under the Espionage Act – a panic measure from 1917 – seems excessive. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
First, it should be said that Trump is not the only one who seems to have a casual attitude to handling documents. As the Justice Department is investigating, documents from Biden’s time as Obama’s vice-president ended up in the garage of his Delaware mansion and in the cupboards of an Ivy League think tank bearing his name. I am an honest man, Biden insists. I am an innocent man, Trump persists.
The truth is that Trump’s campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination is in trouble. His claim that all prosecutions are persecutions might aid his furious milking of the Maga base for donations. But his court battles will distract him from campaigning. And his paranoid digital vituperations will further damage his appeal to the moderates and independents who will decide the 2024 elections.
Trump will have to plan his campaign stops around court appearances in Miami. He faces state charges in New York about alleged hush-money payments to a porn actress in his 2016 campaign. More seriously, in Augusta, Georgia, a prosecutor might charge Trump and his aides with trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Jack Smith, the special counsel who has led the documents inquiry, is also building a broader investigation into Trump’s effort to undo the results of the elections. They call Trump “Teflon Don”, like the mobster John Gotti, but Gotti got caught in the end. For the first time, the charges against Trump are starting to stick. In May, he lost a civil suit brought by the journalist E Jean Carroll. So add Trump’s appeal against that verdict to his list of legal combats.
Even Republicans can see that he’s damaged goods. His presidency allowed all Americans to experience the bait-and-switch disappointment previously reserved for the Trump Organisation’s casino gamblers and property flippers. Having failed to “drain the Swamp”, Trump is older but no wiser – no better organised and much more cranky.
The word in Washington is that Trump has the 2024 nomination locked, and that he will then lose to Biden. The same wiseacres laughed when Trump ran for the 2016 nomination, and said he’d never win the White House. The wisdom of the hour is usually wrong about Trump. He could lose much sooner, in Iowa and New Hampshire, to the well-funded Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
Either way, it’s not wise to politicise the law. Joe Biden’s document saga may be different for now, and criminal charges cannot be brought against a sitting president. But his administration has broken the taboo against charging an ex-president. If he loses in 2024, it’s “game on” for Republicans itching to investigate the Biden family.
It’s really not wise to accelerate the delegitimisation of American democracy. The court of public opinion already knows Trump is a corner-cutter. These charges may look like a pre-emptive strike, an attempt to fix the field for 2024.
Ultimately, the Democrats might be hitting the wrong target. If they take out Donald Trump, they hand the Republican nomination to DeSantis. If he runs against Biden, then it really will be “game on”.
