This is a huge deal. Trump is not only a former president, but is also the leading Republican nominee for the White House in 2024, meaning that this has potentially serious implications for the next presidential election in addition to featuring one of the country's most well-known citizens on trial with a tabloid-heaven subject matter. We still are figuring out the ramifications of this, and even the details of the charges are not yet clear, but I wanted to do one of our "five thoughts" articles as much for myself to wrap my head around it as to share my thoughts with you.
As I said above, Donald Trump will be the first president (sitting or otherwise) in over 150 years to be indicted on criminal charges. It cannot be stressed enough we don't know what the charges are, or if they are limited completely to his relationship with Daniels. The grand jury has called former National Enquirer Chairman David Pecker twice to testify, which could indicate that some charges might relate to Trump's relationship with Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also received payments in relation to an alleged affair with Trump immediately prior to the 2016 election. The scope of these charges is a big deal, because it will shape public opinion on the trial. This should hopefully not impact whether he's declared innocent or guilty, but having multiple stories to pursue is going to be a bigger deal and make it harder for Trump's presidential campaign, which is very much in full swing, to control the narrative.
The narrative could also shift as this was not the case most experts expected to get an indictment. The justice department cases related to January 6th and to the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as the election tampering case in Georgia were considered more likely to involve charges...not to mention the ongoing civil suit from E. Jean Carroll which will go to trial in April. Now that Trump is under trial, there's less precedent in some of these other investigations to also go to trial, though there is always a political risk-it's possible that having to fight a half dozen cases at once will have the public sympathizing with Trump...
...but it's also probable that this is a potential catastrophe in waiting for Republicans. Republicans, even some whom you wouldn't expect like Jeb Bush, were quick to run to defend Trump when the indictments were announced even before their contents were known, with Republicans threatening investigations into Alvin Bragg, the New District Attorney who brought the charges. It's probable that this is a plea to their base who considers Trump to be a type of deity to show them they're "fighting against this" by proclaiming it unprecedented (more on that in a second), but it also invites two really big side effects that I think they're under-thinking in the wake of a momentary payoff with voters (i.e. this has to be good for fundraising-Trump alone has supposedly raised over $4 million since the indictment announcement).
First, they don't know how big of an issue this is. It's possible they are defending something truly indefensible right now. It's possible they don't care, but they should. Donald Trump is the Republican frontrunner in 2024, and the longer they defend him, the more likely it is that he'll become the nominee, regardless of what happens here. People like Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, & Nikki Haley rushed to Trump's side, even though this is a clear place for them to basically say "I like the guy, but he's too toxic to win as our nominee." Republican candidates for president have to find a way to draw a distinction with Trump even outside of this indictment-that's how primaries work, and a failure to do so in 2016 caused him to win. Waiting for him to implode has been something that Republican voters have shown over four election cycles they don't care about, even if it means they lose.
The second thing to consider is just how bad this could get. It sometimes gets lost in these conversations, but Trump lost the 2020 election, and would have to pickup at least three of the six closest Biden states from 2020 (some combination of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, & Arizona) while not losing his tightest state which is very much in reach for Biden against a weakened opponent (North Carolina).
My thought process early on is that the public will not be super sympathetic to Trump's position, even if his base will. Republicans have been saying this "hands him the election" but it doesn't, not the general election at least. The idea that political investigations always backfire is largely connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment. But Clinton had two things going for him that Trump did not. First, he was more popular than Trump is, even at the nadir of the investigations (unlike Trump, Clinton would've won another term after his impeachment). And second, Clinton's PR team did a very good job of making it seem like he was being punished for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, not for lying under oath. The American public thought this was something that his wife should be mad about, but that they didn't play a part in it. I struggle to think that Trump will be disciplined enough to follow that line-of-thinking (partially because unlike Clinton he has not confessed, to date, to the affairs with Daniels & McDougal). Thirdly, the bribery aspect becomes more extreme-Lewinsky was not paid off by anyone connected to the Clinton camp, and therefore there's a different element that is untested here. And lastly, Trump's other criminal cases compound the argument here-Clinton was not facing dozens of investigations when he was trying to get the public on his side during the Lewinsky affair.
What could be happening here is the Republicans, by backing Trump, are essentially giving him a gilded path to the nomination. There will be a point where DeSantis, Pence, & Haley simply no longer have a path forward, and have to concede; that's a few months away, but it's not as far as you'd think. Trump, even in the best of circumstances, is a tough sell for a third general election. While most focus on the Cleveland/Harrison races when it comes to presidential rematches (because they're sexier and allowed a president win back office), they ignore that the last two presidential rematches (Eisenhower/Stevenson and McKinley/Bryan) ended with the same guy winning both times, and most presidents who tried to win back the White House (Van Buren, Grant, Fillmore, Teddy Roosevelt) lost those attempts. This is a tough sell to the American public. So what the Republicans are signing themselves up for is a tarnished nominee, one far weaker than he was in 2016 & 2020, going up against Joe Biden in an election where they'll have to win over huge swaths of Biden voters to their party not just to take back the White House, but to keep the House. That's dangerous ground to be standing upon, and refusing to cut ties with Trump may well lead to the Democrats getting another term in the White House.
It's hard not to think of Hillary Clinton in all of this. On the one hand, it has to be a bit of a "Cersei drinking the wine" moment to know that Trump is finally being held accountable to the crimes committed during her campaign against him, crimes she has been trumpeting even as some Democrats wanted to move past them.
On the other side, it cannot be denied that, if these charges are true, that Clinton suffered far graver consequences than anyone, even Trump, involved in this case. It is probable that in the wake of the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump having to admit to affairs with an adult film star (and possibly a Playboy model if McDougal's affair is also in these indictments) would've cost him the election. When people say these aren't "serious" charges, that's the thing you need to think about, because they were, in fact, serious charges-they, if true, illegally covered a scandal that would've changed the outcome of a presidency that ended up giving the Supreme Court an enormous amount of power for the conservative wing. Clinton gets in, and Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, & Barrett likely are still on lower courts right now, while Merrick Garland is sitting on the Court preserving Roe vs. Wade. Not to mention the country officially has our first female president, one far more competent to be able to handle the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, which Trump's administration mishandled to the point where reports indicated 40% of the deaths during the pandemic were avoidable. These crimes had a profound effect on history, and therefore should be treated very seriously. And all of that has to be a really sad reality for Clinton to face-that she was essentially cheated out of the White House by criminal activity from her opponent. That is what's unprecedented here, and something no court case will ever be able to undo.
The last thing I want to say from an historical perspective is that this truly proves that Gerald Ford was wrong to pardon Richard Nixon. Historians have ebbed-and-flowed on this. Ford initially was punished (it's possible not pardoning Nixon would've won him the 1976 election), but by the early 2000's he won a Profile in Courage Award for pardoning Nixon, with many (including liberal icon Ted Kennedy) claiming that it helped heal the country.
That, this week, proved to be wrong. Ford's pardoning of Nixon, in my opinion, led to Presidents Reagan & Bush condoning (if not illegally supporting) the actions that led to the Iran-Contra and Torture Memo scandals under each respective president, and of course led to Trump's many criminal enterprises. Nixon not being held responsible made it seem like no president would be held responsible, and indeed, Republicans across the country are claiming that Trump's indictment sets a precedent that will mean all presidents will be charged for political reasons going forward. In reality, this is not political. We will see if there is evidence of wrongdoing, but I suspect given the high-bar of such a case, Bragg likely has that evidence. What was political was Ford trying to move on from Nixon, and the fallout from that led to Donald Trump flagrantly abusing power and continually bending (likely breaking) the law in order to hold and then keep power. In a world where Ford didn't pardon Nixon, would Trump have even run in the first place? A question that belongs to the ages, but I suspect the answer is no.
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