The volume of Donald Trump’s indictments might lead some to believe they’ve somehow become routine. When the Republican was first indicted in late March as part of his hush-money-to-a-porn-star scandal, the historic nature of the charges — never before had Americans seen a former president face formal criminal allegations — made the developments astonishing, but for some, that amazement has probably faded.
Indeed, now that Trump has been indicted three times in roughly 18 weeks — four if we include the superseding indictment in the classified documents case — and with yet another round of charges still likely to be announced in Georgia, there’s a familiarity to the circumstances. We’ve been here before. We have some sense of what to expect. Voters would be forgiven for thinking that developments what were, up until very recently, extraordinary now seem ordinary.
The problem with that sentiment is that it understates the significance of the newest charges the former president is facing. There’s nothing ordinary about this.
A New York Times analysis did a good job explaining that while plenty of American politicians have been accused of all kinds of misdeeds, it’s qualitatively different when a former president is “accused of plotting to hold onto power in an elaborate scheme of deception and intimidation that would lead to violence in the halls of Congress.”
What makes the indictment against Donald J. Trump on Tuesday so breathtaking is not that it is the first time a president has been charged with a crime or even the second. Mr. Trump already holds those records. But as serious as hush money and classified documents may be, this third indictment in four months gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy. At the core of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed during that summer in Philadelphia. Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence?
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump has been at the center of a stunning number of important scandals. What’s more, Americans have plenty of familiarity with historically significant White House scandals, from Teapot Dome to Watergate to Iran-Contra.
But the point that special counsel Jack Smith’s newest indictment helps drive home is that this isn’t just another Trump controversy, and it’s not just another White House outrage. Rather, in the case of U.S. v. Trump, the country is confronted with an indictment summarizing the biggest scandal in American history.
Trump lost a free and fair election, and he had an opportunity to accept the results, as many failed candidates and presidents have done before him. Instead, as Rachel Maddow explained on the air last night, Trump allegedly led “multiple criminal conspiracies to try to hold power by force after he was voted out of office by the people.”
A Washington Post analysis added, “This indictment makes the case that was Trump trying to dismantle democracy. This was Trump trying to orchestrate a mechanism through which he got to keep flying around on Air Force One, whatever the costs to the country. This particular U.S. v. Trump is, more so than the other indictment obtained by special counsel Jack Smith, very much about Trump vs. the U.S.”
Watergate tends to hold such a special place in our collective political memories that many observers still instinctively add the word “gate” to other nouns when labeling new controversies. But Garrett M. Graff noted just hours after the latest indictment was unsealed, “As a Watergate historian, it’s worth noting that nothing Nixon did — and he had plenty of crimes and conspiracies, involving more than 60 people criminally charged — approached the scale and severity of Trump’s assault on American democracy.”
None other than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have arrived at a similar conclusion.
Yes, Trump has been indicted before, and yes, he’s likely to be indicted again. But if there’s a temptation to simply lump these alleged felonies in with the other crimes the Republican has been accused of, or see this as just another data point on a timeline, that would be a mistake.
The prospect of holding the former president accountable for launching an unjustified attack targeting the foundations of our democracy makes this different and more important than any case of its kind.
