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A grand jury in Manhattan on Thursday indicted former President Donald Trump on what’s reported to be more than two dozen counts, making Trump the first former president charged with a crime. It won’t be clear what Trump is being charged with until the indictment is unsealed at his arraignment, after his surrender and arrest. But the indictment itself has already made history.
Just about everyone agrees that charging a former U.S. president is a very big deal, one that’s compounded by Trump’s already unusual decision to seek a second term after losing re-election. But from there, reactions to the historic indictment fell into a few categories.
Trump’s critics, including many Democratic lawmakers and Trump-averse Republicans, portrayed his imminent arrest as evidence that, in the U.S., nobody is above the law. Meanwhile, “a large group of former Trump Organization employees was quietly cheering the latest developments via text messages,” The New York Times reports, “a reminder of how many people have felt burned in various ways by Mr. Trump over the years.”
Most Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures, meanwhile, have followed Trump’s lead, alleging that the indictment was a politically motivated persecution by an overly aggressive and partisan Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Even Trump’s current and potential rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination rushed to his defense — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), for example, called the indictment a “weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda,” adding, “It is un-American.”
Putting a former president on trial is an American first, but does it violate American values?
What are the commentators saying?
No American president has been charged with a crime — though President Ulysses S. Grant “did get arrested for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage in 1872” and paid a $20 fine, Gary O’Donoghue writes at BBC News. But charging former heads of state, and even sending them to jail, “is not news” in much of the rest of the world. It happens all the time, often in healthy democracies. Still, “America regards itself as exceptional,” he adds, so in that sense, “joining this particular club is not just a problem for Donald Trump. It’s a further blow to America’s confidence and self-belief.”
Trump’s indictment “is a sad day for the country, with political ramifications that are unpredictable and probably destructive,” The Wall Street Journal says in an editorial. “If there was ever a case that opens Pandora’s box, the first indictment of a former president in U.S. history is it.” Yes, “Trump’s reckless personal behavior has made himself vulnerable as usual,” but the first indictment of a president after 230 years should be for something more serious than paying hush money to a porn star, and “the danger for America is the precedent this prosecution sets,” the Journal adds. “Once a former president and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered.”
“So many unthinkable firsts have occurred since Donald J. Trump was elected to the White House in 2016, so many inviolable lines have been crossed, so many unimaginable events have shocked the world that it is easy to lose sight of just how astonishing this particular moment really is,” Peter Baker writes at The New York Times. But while Trump’s indictment “takes the country into uncharted waters, the authors of the Constitution might have been surprised only that it took so long.”
“The framers would have been horrified at the possibility of a president ever being above the law while in office or after leaving it,” University of North Carolina constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt tells the Times.
And in some ways, Trump’s indictment is the most American thing you could imagine, Jonathan Lemire writes at Politico. Trump exploited America’s fascination with celebrity gossip to build up his real estate empire and political brand, starting with the New York City tabloids “that magnified his wealth and his tawdry exploits while catapulting him to a type of celebrity that he eventually wielded to capture the highest office in the land.” It feels somehow “inevitable” that a case centered on allegations he used a fixer to pay hush money to a porn star over an affair should be his first charged crime, he adds — it feels “ripped straight from the pages of the 1980s New York Post and New York Daily News.”
What’s next?
“Like most Trump stories, this one has now reached a recognizable chapter: where the audience wonders how the protagonist escapes,” Lemire writes at Politico. “Trump has faced plenty of doomsday moments before — bankruptcies, the Access Hollywood tape, impeachment and Jan. 6.” This time, though, the Manhattan case is “only just the beginning of his legal troubles,” with more serious potential charges looming from prosecutors in Georgia and the Justice Department.
Trump’s lawyers say he will surrender in Manhattan on Tuesday. He will be “photographed and fingerprinted in the bowels of a New York State courthouse, with Secret Service agents in tow,” the Times reports. “He will then be arraigned, at which point the specific charges will be unsealed.” Many political analysts expect Trump to get a short-term political bump from outraged Republicans, but the longer-term political fallout is unknowable.
After he’s booked, Trump’s case will be in the hands of the American legal system. At this point, nobody outside of the Manhattan district attorney’s office knows what’s in the indictment or how strong Bragg’s case is. “But I find inspiration in the words of William H. West, the police offer who arrested Grant for speeding,” Nicholas Kristof writes in the Times. Many years later, West recalled “he told Grant, ‘I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.'”
That, Kristof writes, is “the majesty and dignity of our legal system at its best. And if a police officer in 1872 could hold out his hand and force the president’s speeding carriage to a stop, then we, too, should do what we can to uphold the magnificent principle of equality before the law.”
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