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The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump was indicted. It’s that it took this long. After Attorney General Merrick Garland dithered for two years, Special Counsel Jack Smith is making up for lost time. He’s been on something of a judicial tear, indicting Trump whenever and wherever he can. Smith’s latest move is a forty-five-page indictment assailing Trump for attempting to obstruct “a bedrock function of the US government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Bedrock, shmedrock. Trump’s followers are depicting the indictment as a new installment in the Deep State’s prolonged attempt to prevent Trump from returning to the White House. The indictment is itself an indictment, they suggest, of the Biden Crime Family’s attempts to besmirch a valiant warrior for truth, justice and the American way. Indeed, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung even invoked the specter of Nazi Germany — a sure sign that he isn’t grasping at straws; he’s lunging for them.
Trump’s followers may be recoiling at Smith’s mean mien, but it didn’t frighten the federal grand jury that voted to indict the former president on four counts, none of which can really come as a surprise. It appears that a variety of Trump confederates, including vice president Mike Pence, provided Smith with key information on what was taking place in the Trump White House during the perilous days leading up to January 6. Indeed, it appears that Pence did what Trump loathes — keep contemporaneous notes of their conversations in which he alternately cajoled and threatened Pence to do the right thing, at least as Trump saw it.
So will it be Judgment Day at the District of Columbia? An unsympathetic jury and judge do not augur well for Trump. Nor does the likelihood that Pence and co. will end up testifying in court against their old boss.
Still, Trump has a couple avenues of defense. One obvious line of argument will be to argue that he truly believed that he was being snookered out of victory by the machinations of a nefarious Joe Biden. In this version of events, Trump would be the hapless victim of a conspiracy rather than the conspirator. This argument conflicts, of course, with Trump’s constant refrain that Biden can barely lace his shoes in the morning, let alone supervise a conspiracy, then and now, to defame and neuter him.
His lawyers could further argue that Trump was simply not up to the job of creating and overseeing a grand conspiracy involving fake electors, attempts to suborn Congress and the actual storming of the Capitol. The garrulous Trump was simply musing out loud when he urged his votaries to head off to the Capitol to voice their displeasure with the outcome of the election. A few malcontents may have gone too far… but what did that have to do with the president’s stray thoughts?
The problem for Trump, though, is pretty basic. His pettifoggery didn’t work in the E. Jean Carroll case — and it’s even less like to in a federal trial, where patience for his well-known antics will be at an all-time low. A trial will help to establish further a public record of his malodorous actions before and on January 6, when he plainly connived to retain his hold on power. The notion that he would have to surrender it to Joe Biden, a man he considered his palpable inferior, who hid in a basement for much of the campaign, was more than he could bear. As he campaigns for a new term in the presidency — and with a fresh indictment in Georgia looming — Trump may discover that he can run but he can’t hide.
