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Right now, it might feel
like Donald Trump broke the rule of law. But, stop and consider for a moment:
this is how Trump wants you to feel. This is how all of the people around him,
the ones who envision their surge to take over government in January, want you
to feel. They want you to feel defeated. They want you to feel like Project
2025 is inevitable. They want you to give up, stay at home, and slowly subside
into miserably drinking wine.
That is not who we are.
Democrats may have lost the last election, but that’s not the same thing as
losing the Republic. Far from it. And Donald Trump has not broken the rule of
law. He has tortured it and stretched it out of shape insofar as it applies to
him. But he has not broken it, and he has not broken us. He cannot do that
unless we let him, and I don’t intend to let him.
On Monday, Special Counsel
Jack Smith asked the judges overseeing the federal criminal cases against
Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., and at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
to dismiss them. Judge Chutkan promptly entered an order dismissing the case the
same day. The Eleventh Circuit followed suit.
The cases were dismissed
“without prejudice” which means that technically, they could become live again
if Trump were no longer president and there were a Justice Department
willing to reinstate them. But let’s be realistic. The criminal cases are over.
Trump’s response on Truth Social was predictable:
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Trump posted, “These
cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty
and lawless, and should never have been brought.”
“It was a political
hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing
could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON. MAKE
AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he added.
It’s not true. Trump was
indicted by a grand jury that considered actual
evidence compiled by the Special Counsel’s investigation. It wasn’t
conjecture or politics, which is what Trump is made of. The judges who
considered the cases, including the United States Supreme Court, never
dismissed them as political artifice, although Trump asked them to. Instead,
they were permitted to move forward, and where there were impediments, they
were legal ones involving whether presidents were entitled to immunity for
criminal acts (the election interference case) or whether the Special Counsel
was properly appointed (the classified documents case). The cases weren’t
dismissed because they lacked merit, they were dismissed because Trump played a
delay game and ran the clock out.
Since Trump raises it,
the case in Manhattan that he tries to minimize resulted in a conviction before
a jury of his peers. It was the only case where a trial jury was permitted to
consider the evidence against Trump in a criminal case—not the politics, which
they were forbidden from taking into account, and not a jury biased against
Trump, as we know from what we learned about them during voir dire. So, their
verdict was hardly “empty and lawless.” Nothing about any of these case was.
If anything, the courts
bent over backwards to ensure defendant and convicted felon Donald Trump
received the due process rights he was entitled to. That’s frustrating in some
ways, but it’s also evidence that, as unsatisfying as the result in the two federal
cases styled as U.S. v. Donald
Trump was, our legal system is
still in place. Trump walked away, which is a tragedy for the country.
Defendants sometimes do, and it is always deeply disturbing when it’s on a
technicality, even more so here because of what he tried to do to the country.
But he has not irreparably broken our legal system, although it may feel that
way right now. Yes, it needs work; it needs refinement so that someone like
Trump can’t play games and escape accountability. But Trump gets that pass
because of the singular foolishness of a majority of our fellow citizens in
reelecting him. Had he lost, his cases would have proceeded to trial and
justice would have been done. The fault, as distressing as it is, lies at least
in part with the electorate.
I noted JD Vance’s tweet
after the government moved to the dismiss, finding inadvertent confirmation of
the view that justice would have been done had the election turned out
differently—although he certainly didn’t mean it that way—when he wrote that Trump
might have spent the rest of his life in prison if he’d lost the election.
Vance characterizes this as “political,” but as a Yale-educated lawyer, he
knows that the final decision would have turned on whether juries of Trump’s
peers deliberated and found him guilty and on how independent Article III
judges chose to sentence him. Those decisions, based on the facts and the law,
are anything but political. But apparently, they’re too political for the crowd
that was okay with “lock her up.”
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We can, and likely will,
debate whether the Justice Department could have gotten these cases to trial
had it gotten a fast and focused start on day one of the Biden Administration.
We can consider whether that kind of approach would have made it better or
worse. But the reality is that Trump never faced accountability in federal
court at the hands of a jury, and the question is, what are we going to do next
now that he’s been reelected?
I am still a very proud
American. I love this country. I love the Constitution and the rule of law. I’m
grateful to live in a place where, unlike the Eastern European cities my
great-grandparents escaped from, people are not hunted down and killed because
of their religion. I’m grateful to live in a country where, despite the
failings at the founding, we have progressed to include Black people and women
as voters, and where we continue to aspire to be more inclusive and open,
including action at the state and local level when a president
threatens to go the other way. Our progress is not always linear, but it is
still important and a sign that our country is worth fighting for, which I
intend to do. Not in the January 6, attack-the-Capitol sense of the word, but
intelligently and persistently, using the tools American democracy gives us to
their best use.
We still have a First
Amendment right to assemble, to petition our government, and to free speech and
a free press. They are ours to insist upon or lose. I intend to insist.
We have a right to vote.
Preparing for the upcoming midterm elections, where MAGA may try to make it
difficult to vote, is essential. That means both encouraging good candidates to
consider running starting now and making sure essential parts of the electorate
who feel defeated by what has happened find their way to get back up again. We
can’t afford to let anyone give up.
After the election, I
wrote to you about my intention of creating a Democracy Index so that we have a way to
focus on what the Trump Administration is doing without becoming either
overwhelmed with Trump fatigue or distracted by the bright shiny object of the
day. I remember what it felt like when the fresh horrors of the first Trump
Administration smacked us in the face week after week and keeping everything
bad that had happened straight because it was almost insurmountable unless you
could devote 24 hours a day to it (which absolutely no one should have to do
unless it’s their job and they’ve voluntarily agreed to it). That project is
critical to me because understanding what’s happening in real-time—even if that
understanding is imperfect and we need to evolve it over time as more details
come to light—will be essential when, on the eve of the midterm election,
someone who hasn’t been paying attention asks you, “Tell me three bad things
this administration has done?”
The way to get through
this? My personal North Star is Ben Franklin, who when asked about the form of
government our new nation would have responded, “a Republic, if you can keep
it.” I intend to keep it. That’s the work for the next four years. Can we do
it? It requires resilience. We can’t quit because we lost an election.
This is, in large
measure, about us and not about Donald Trump. Yes, we will have to pay
attention to understand what he is doing and assess how dangerous it is, but we
don’t have to give him control. We need to focus on why the Republic matters:
so we can do the things we care about and spend time with the people we love,
address climate change, secure the environment, improve infrastructure and
wages—a path Joe Biden started us on—and, as outdated and silly as it may sound
right now, live the American Dream. Isn’t that why we’re all here, so we can
have good lives and so our children and grandchildren can have good lives—not
so Donald Trump and his cronies can profit at our expense?
The cavalry isn’t
coming. It’s just us. And I’m thankful we’re together for it. It's no surprise
that people are exhausted. It's no surprise that they feel like they've given
their all and been betrayed by a country that reelected the convicted felon. But
history teaches us that progress is not linear and that people who want to have
a democracy, who understand that it's worth fighting for, have to stay the
course even at their lowest point.
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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington,
D.C.
We have two choices:
Give up or move forward.
It’s not even close. We
have a Republic to keep, and we are not quitters.
We’re in this together,
