A Post–Labor Day Trump Insurrection
Trial? Great, Bring It On.
Why it’s good if
Trump is on trial come Election Day
PETER FOLEY/POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
I’ve
had a few conversations with fellow liberals over the last two days that went
something like this: I can’t believe the Supreme Court did that.
Although I guess, you know, of course they did. But I still can’t quite believe
it. I just didn’t think they’d be quite this corrupt about Donald Trump
returning to the White House.
If
nothing else, the court’s announcement Wednesday that it will hear
the Trump immunity case seven weeks from now should tell us
once and for all—yep, don’t put anything past these people. Anything. They are
as capital-P Political and Partisan as we suspect at our most
cynical. More so.
Now,
the quickly formed conventional wisdom after the announcement is that while the
court’s six conservatives are obviously trying to help Donald Trump by
slow-walking the process here, surely they won’t all accept the facially absurd
and unconstitutional arguments of Trump’s attorneys. I tend to go along with
this. It’s hard to imagine judges of any sort ruling that our laws don’t apply
to an ex-president.
And
yet … I opened this piece saying that they keep surprising us. They keep
Lucying the ideological football on us, and we keep falling for it. So what
if—nah, it can’t be. No way five justices could really grant Trump immunity.
Right?
Well,
two probably will, and we know which two. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are
totally ready for authoritarian America. And from there, who knows? I mean, I’d
like to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say, Ah, they’d
never stop a state recount. Oh, come on, are you kidding? They’ll never
completely overturn Roe.
So
count me unconvinced. I guess with a gun to my head I’d say it’s 60–40 they’ll
reject Trump’s claims. But 40 is damn high.
Now.
A late-June decision by the court against Trump would mean a late-September
trial date in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom. She gave Trump’s lawyers 88 days
to prepare for trial, and that clock starts ticking when the Supreme Court
rules, so a June 30 decision, say, would mean (I think) a September 26 trial
date. Here, the liberal impulse will be the fretful one: Oh no! That’s
too close to the election! We can’t do that! It wouldn’t be fair!
Pardon
me, but: bullshit.
First
of all: If you’re thinking—worrying—that this is in Merrick Garland’s hands,
exhale. It apparently is not. Yes, the Justice Department has a rule about not
interfering in the political process in the fall of an election year. But that
has only to do with charging people with crimes. It stems from Reagan-era
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s decision to charge former
Reagan official Caspar Weinberger four days before the 1992 election. It was
after that that the department agreed upon an unwritten rule about not bringing
those kinds of charges within roughly 60 days of a general election.
So
that rule is only about charging. It’s not about when trials should be held.
Here’s a good primer on the whole matter,
debunking a recent Trump lie about it.
Also,
Garland was asked this very question in
January by CNN’s Evan Perez:
PEREZ: The department has policies
about steering clear of elections. Is there a date in your mind where it might
be too late to bring these trials to fruition? Again, to stay out of the way of
the elections as the department policies?
GARLAND: Well, I just say what I said,
which is that the cases were brought last year. [The] prosecutor has urged
speedy trials, with which I agree. And it’s now in the hands of the judicial
system, not in our hands.
So the feckless Garland, who has striven so hard to
be apolitical that he’s actually become political in the other (pro-Trump)
direction, has nothing to do with this.
With
that out of the way, are there other objections to a late-September trial?
Trump and MAGA world will howl. I’ve been told that we can expect this trial to
last six to 10 weeks. That would mean that it won’t be over before Election
Day.
Is
there a political risk there? That Trump’s base will be ultra-energized? Sure.
But why shouldn’t it also ultra-energize the pro-democracy base? It certainly
should.
And
more than that: It will make the election about Trump,
not Joe Biden. If Trump is literally sitting in a courtroom on Election Day—or
even if he’s not sitting there but, say, Cassidy Hutchinson is on the stand
describing that steering wheel incident, or Mark Meadows is on the stand
squirming and sweating—the election is about him, the insurrection, the future
of democracy. Your typical swing voter in Oakland County, Michigan, is going to
be walking into the voting booth thinking about that, not Biden’s age or gait.
That’s
what liberals should want the election to be about. There are two warring
explanations afoot in our land about Trump’s legal trials. One, his own, is
that all these indictments constitute election interference—the deep state
trying to stop him from rightfully recapturing that which was stolen from him
in 2020. The other, the planet Earth explanation, is that he’s a uniquely
corrupt sociopath who thinks the law doesn’t apply to him and wants to get back
into the White House for two simple reasons: to absolve himself of all crimes
and to illiberalize our institutions and wreck the democracy to the point that
he can do anything he wants—including, probably, be president for life.
If
that’s the debate the nation is having on election eve, if that’s what
neighbors are discussing across the fence post as they prepare to go vote—I’m
good with that, and you should be too. And if those corrupt bastards on the
Supreme Court inadvertently helped make that happen, so much the better.