When Donald Trump became the first former president to face federal charges, he and his supporters went through a familiar routine of mounting a victim’s defense in the face of unprecedented allegations of wrongdoing. But this time, the stakes are higher.
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Donald Trump’s attacks on the justice system following his indictment on federal charges this week are the latest step in an eight-year campaign by the former president and his allies against the traditions and institutions that have helped sustain democracy north american
He went through a familiar routine of mounting a defense of victimhood to allegations of wrongdoing, but this time the stakes are higher as he faces years in prison if convicted.
Trump vowed to retaliate against President Joe Biden if he is elected president in 2024
According to experts, this underlines how the former president is willing to abuse the position to carry out purely personal activities
Trump upped the ante on his claims and threats as he faces the potential of years in prison if convicted of 37 counts of obstruction, illegal withholding of defense information and other violations. Hours after pleading not guilty, Trump said he is being targeted by the nonpartisan special counsel for political reasons and vowed to retaliate against President Joe Biden if he is elected president in 2024.
“There was an unwritten rule” not to prosecute former presidents and political rivals, Trump told supporters in a speech at his golf club in New Jersey. “I will appoint an actual special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and to go after the Biden crime family.”
The vote is reminiscent of the “lock her up” chants against Democrat Hillary Clinton that led Trump during his 2016 campaign, but the new level of specificity alarmed many experts.
“If he did, it would be an authoritarian system, the end of a system of laws rather than one man,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian.
Although he vows to retaliate if elected, Trump and his supporters say he is being targeted in a manner similar to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, where opponents of President Vladimir Putin have been jailed, or Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro. the main rival was prosecuted. There is no evidence that Biden has made the kind of commitment to mentor Trump that the former president has now made, and the president said he has never tried to influence the Justice Department in any case.
Trump’s attacks on the justice system are the latest step in an eight-year campaign by the former president and his allies against the traditions and institutions that have helped sustain American democracy.
Trump has long complained about being treated unfairly by the legal system, from claiming the judge in a lawsuit against his for-profit college was biased against him to targeting the FBI over its investigation into Russian interference in his 2016 victory. He even promised retribution in that case, appointing a special prosecutor to review how he handled the investigation into his campaign’s possible coordination with Russia, which led to a single conviction.
That track record makes his promise of retribution all the more threatening, said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that advocates for better government.
“He has demonstrated repeatedly during his presidency that he is perfectly willing to misuse and abuse his office to pursue purely personal activities,” Wertheimer said.
Stephen Saltzburg, a former senior official in the Justice Department’s criminal division who is now a law professor at George Washington University, said Trump was signaling he would use the department to settle accounts, just what he says led to his accusation
“This is typical of what Donald Trump does,” Saltzburg said. “It essentially accuses people of doing what they would do if they were in office.”
The indictment comes from a grand jury in Trump’s adopted home state of Florida following an investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, who is independent from political appointees in the Biden administration and has previously prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans. Speaking after the indictment was made public, Smith emphasized that investigations like the one in the documents follow the facts and the law.
“We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everybody,” he said.
Many experts, of all political persuasions, said the charges against Trump stemmed from the proper functioning of the legal system, rather than a political vendetta. William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, said the indictment’s allegations were serious and that Trump had no right to keep those documents.
“There is not one attorney general of either party who would not have filed today’s charges against the former president,” Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who was a conservative favorite for a Supreme Court post, wrote on Twitter. .
According to the indictment, Trump kept classified documents after he left the White House, admitted on tape that they were classified and that he no longer had the presidential power to declassify them, then refused to return the records when the government he demanded of them.
The former president’s complaints about being hounded, if not his retribution vote, have been taken up by a wide swath of Republicans, from longtime supporters in Congress to governors who position themselves as moderates. That includes Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who lamented on Twitter what he called “a two-tier justice system where some are selectively prosecuted and some are not.”
Another sign of how the right has absorbed Trump’s worldview came Tuesday night, hours after his court appearance, when Fox News briefly captioned footage of Biden and Trump with the words “a would-be dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” The network pulled the chyron and said in a statement that the matter had been “addressed” without providing further details.
Trump’s complaints about being persecuted are common for former political leaders in other countries accused of crimes, said Victor Menaldo, a political scientist at the University of Washington.
“It makes political sense if the leader has a rabid support group like Trump,” Menaldo said. But in other countries, he said, leaders are usually successfully prosecuted and democracy continues.
The federal charges against Trump come two months after the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business information for arranging payments to a porn star who he said was having an affair with him. He also faces legal jeopardy in Fulton County, Georgia, where local prosecutors have launched a broad investigation into his attempt to assign the state’s electors to him even though he lost the state to Biden in 2020 , a result that was asserted several times. . A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, continues to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.
The Manhattan charges have drawn skepticism even from some Trump critics, who say they are legally dubious. Trump’s supporters, which include much of his own political party, make no such distinction, condemning all probes of the former president. Indeed, after taking control of the House of Representatives after the November election, Republicans formed a committee investigating the so-called “weaponization of government” against conservatives that is highlighting perceived injustices in the probes from Trump
The combination of the new federal indictments, filed Friday, and the Republican presidential primaries, has led to heightened complaints about the former president’s scrutiny.
“I, and all Americans who believe in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted after Trump announced the impeachment against him. “House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
He and other Trump allies point out that Biden had also misclassified documents from his time as vice president, though there are big differences with Trump’s case. The current president turned over the records when asked and there is no evidence that he tried to hide more, as is alleged with Trump. A second special prosecutor is looking into Biden’s handling of documents.
Former US Attorney Roscoe Howard said he has faith the public will see past those protests in the current case just by looking at the indictment.
“You can read it and decide if it’s breaking the law. And anybody who does the same thing, we treat them the same way,” Howard said. “When you take back some of the arguments that we’re hearing, it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to follow these rules.’
That’s the point when it comes to Trump, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarians.
“It’s an old situation that he’s in, but now that this is extremely serious, of course it’s going to increase that narrative,” Ben-Ghiat said. “What strong men do is, if you’re corrupt, you have to come back to power to shut down all the institutions that can harm you.”
