Technically in custody, the former president had to push his own way through a set of doors at the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday, scowling at judiciously placed cameras but not allowed to speak, for he was not in charge. He headed into the courtroom, took his seat at the defense table and was arraigned on tawdry criminal charges.
A photo of a seated, silent, somber-looking Donald Trump, surrounded by his lawyers and guarded by police, soon was released. That image was as telling as it was historic.
“That’s a man who looks like a defendant,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Trump White House director of strategic communications, said on CNN. “He has lost control.”
The music had indeed stopped, even if potentially not for long. On Tuesday, the rule of law had thankfully imposed itself on the usual Trump circus with attack and distraction in the center ring. The man who has prided himself on always getting ahead of the story had been forced to deal with the reality that you can plead not guilty, and he did to all charges on Tuesday, but prosecutors still get to go first and frame the narrative.
And once you are in the context of a criminal trial, everything you say can and often will be used against you.
If Trump’s bravado and extravagant disdain for consequences had motivated his supporters to risk their lives and livelihoods to follow his lead on Jan. 6, 2021, here was the counterpoint and, let’s hope, the cautionary tale.
It was, and this is what matters most about Tuesday’s extraordinary events, a reminder that this nation still relies on the rule of law. A grand jury had spoken. Defendant Trump had been forced not to speak, not to issue all-caps calls for action like “TAKE OUR NATION BACK,” but to answer for his alleged actions like any other American facing such charges.
A few minutes later, the indictment was unsealed and the nature of those 34 Class E felony charges was revealed.
In essence, they allege that Trump and other parties tried to “influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him” (a “catch and kill” scheme, in the words of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg), “to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects” and, crucially, then falsified business records in order to do so, and then made false statements to cover up that crime. Prosecutors alleged that payees were not limited to porn star Stormy Daniels, but included another actress and a doorman.
Trump’s team likely will argue that the case is weak and politically motivated, that payments for nondisclosure agreements are not illegal and are common in both political and business environments and that any record-keeping violations hardly rise to the level of a felony, especially since the novel charges applied state election law to a federal election, and Trump could not be charged in this court with federal campaign finance violations.
And, indeed, the charges that were made did not appear to reveal any previously unknown facts. The payments all had been previously reported, and anyone who has been paying attention already knew that Trump, and his attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, had worked to “catch and kill” negative stories during the campaign. What we were witnessing were not fresh bombshell allegations, but the slow grind of the American legal system.
For those who see Trump as a victim of political prosecution, these charges will seem weak, especially in the area of whether there could be said to be a reasonable doubt as to whether the motivation behind these payments specifically was to influence the election, as distinct from protecting personal reputation or, indeed, preserving a marriage.
That burden of proof now rests on the prosecution.
Whether or not a fast dismissal of this case will aid Trump’s chances to be the Republican nominee is, frankly, not relevant here, and certainly is not an argument for nonprosecution, even though some made it Tuesday, any more than worries over how some may react should have influenced any decision. The rule of law is unpredictable in whose side it helps, and that is exactly how it should be.
Bragg, for his part, argued that his office has a history of persecuting tax violations, falsifications of business records and other untruths, in part because of New York’s centrality as a financial center. Indeed, he said, this is the “bread and butter” of his office’s “white-collar work.” Business records, he argued, must be equated with crucial trust of the system. Lying about those records should have consequences. He’s right.
“We today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg said. “No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring American principle.”
We could not agree more. It’s worth remembering that a grand jury agreed, too.
We now expect Trump to mount a rigorous defense in a nation where everyone, be they a formerpresident or far from the top of the political heap, remains innocent until proven guilty.
