Is there a more annoying, pretentious writer on the planet than a New York Times political reporter who thinks he has something deep to say? Peter Baker makes the case that the answer is no.
The subject is Donald Trump’s Indictment And What It Means For Democracy. Answer: We don't know, but … we think, with the most furrowed of brows, that maybe it’s better for democracy if Trump gets to be above the law. We’re just asking questions, here!
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The indictment “tests democracy,” according to the headline. When Trump got into the White House despite losing the popular vote, we got years of “Trump voter in an Ohio diner” takes, and now we’re supposed to believe that democracy is the concern?
Check out these prose stylings:
For more than two centuries, presidents have been held on a pedestal, even the ones swathed in scandal, declared immune from prosecution while in office and, effectively, even afterward.
No longer. That taboo has been broken. A new precedent has been set. Will it tear the country apart, as some feared about putting a former president on trial after Watergate? Will it be seen by many at home and abroad as victor’s justice akin to developing nations where former leaders are imprisoned by their successors? Or will it become a moment of reckoning, a sign that even someone who was once the most powerful person on the planet is not above the law?
Can’t you just hear that being declaimed in some kind of weird do-I-think-I’m-British-or-do-I-think-I’m-a-Kennedy tones? Or maybe a World War II-era newsreel narrator? You read that pablum and know Peter Baker thinks he’s writing the history while it’s happening.
There are a lot of possible counterfactuals, but maybe if “some” had been less fearful after Watergate, we wouldn’t be here now. And we can’t worry too much about how these charges are viewed by the “many at home” who, to this day and despite all the evidence to the contrary, believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. For them, anything that involves Trump not being a winner among winners is a violation of the natural order of the universe. The criminal justice system cannot run according to the views of the biggest fans of one specific likely criminal. What about top House Republicans using their positions to try to interfere with a criminal prosecution? Is that not a concerning precedent?
The real underlying question here is, “Should we maybe agree that some people are above the law? Because it might get scary if we don’t?” Trump’s years of subverting democracy, and the Republican Party’s eager participation, are what make this moment a scary test. But rather than firmly answering that that means it is particularly important to show that he’s not above the law, the Times and Baker are taking the position that there should be a vigorous debate about whether it would be better to just let Trump slide.
“There is”—there is, just trust him, it’s happening with some people—“consternation that the barrier-shattering indictment would involve something as unseemly as paying hush money to cover up a sexual romp.” As we are always reminded, they got Al Capone on tax evasion. And while it’s true, as Baker points out, that Trump “has been involved in far more earth-shattering events like trying to overturn an election and inspiring an attack on the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power,” the man is tawdry to his core. And if he committed a crime—which is yet to be proved, and he will have the benefit of due process—should Trump get off just because it was an unseemly crime?
As is generally the case with this breed of pontificating that tries to appear Very Serious to cover up the wishy-washiness that defines it, there’s a ludicrous imbalance in the “on the one hand/on the other hand” calculus.
On the one hand, the Founders explicitly envisioned, even putting it in the Constitution, that a former president might someday be charged with a crime. On the other hand, it is possible to locate a legal expert willing to fret about anything if it will get his name in The New York Times. For instance:
In 2008, voters in two small towns in liberal Vermont approved resolutions accusing Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of “crimes against the Constitution” and instructing their town attorneys to draft indictments. Nothing ever came of it, but it is not hard to imagine a conservative local prosecutor trying to charge President Biden with, say, failing to adequately guard the border.
“This presents the opportunity for potentially thousands of state and local prosecutors to investigate and charge a president without the impediment imposed by D.O.J.’s policy against indicting sitting presidents,” said Stanley M. Brand, a former House counsel whose firm represents a couple of Trump associates in the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. “It theoretically subjugates the presidency in a way I don’t believe was ever constitutionally contemplated.”
Let’s walk through the so-called logic here, step by step. Voters in two towns voted on something non-binding well over a decade ago, and nothing happened as a result. But now, because of something completely different, we must contemplate the possibility of a local prosecutor trying, for partisan reasons, to do something they cannot do. And, says, a lawyer whose firm represents some Trump associates, maybe criminal charges against a former president will open the floodgates for state and local prosecutors, oh, I dunno, maybe thousands of them, to charge a sitting president.
Like … what? How does any of that hang together? The answer is it doesn’t have to, because it’s political analysis in The New York Times. The fear of giving a straight answer in defense of democracy and idea that no one is above the law just oozes off the page.
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