Let’s not ignore the poetic justice: on 17 March, the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin; a scant two weeks later, a grand jury in New York voted to indict Donald Trump. Admittedly, the two cases are quite different. Putin is wanted for his role in orchestrating devastating war crimes. Trump stands accused of relatively minor crimes involving the payment of hush money to a former porn star. But there is a sense that these two men, so recently bound in mutual admiration of their bullying contempt for democratic norms and legal process, now find themselves in the clutches of the very systems of justice that they believed they could flout with impunity.
Of course, there is no guarantee that either man will ever be fully held to account. Those looking forward to the day of Putin’s reckoning before the ICC in The Hague should bear in mind that the only reason the allies succeeded in trying members of the Nazi leadership in Nuremberg was because Hitler’s Germany lay in ruins. Putin remains very much in power and presides over an arsenal of 6,000 nuclear warheads that he continues to recklessly brandish. Unless Putin finds himself ousted from power, his arrest warrant will remain a symbolic reminder that in the eyes of international law, the Russian leader is a pariah and a fugitive.
No such evasions will be possible for Trump. And yet the very legal system that Trump defames as hopelessly corrupt demands that an indictment have a coherent legal basis and that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is possible, then, that a court could dismiss the New York charges or, should the case go forward, the trial result in an acquittal. Which is why I believe those interested in seeing Trump brought to justice should look past this indictment – based on an untested legal theory and involving a constellation of tawdry wrongdoings – and train their attention on Fulton county, Georgia, where Trump faces likely indictment for soliciting election fraud. Or else look to the Department of Justice, which continues to investigate Trump for his actions culminating in the January 6 insurrection and for his refusal to hand over classified documents illegally stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
These investigations, particularly in Georgia and over January 6, involve far weightier allegations of criminal wrongdoing, allegations less vulnerable to attack as simply an exercise in political score-settling.
Not that Trump and his minions won’t malign any attempt to hold the former president and active candidate to account as the greatest witch-hunt in human history. Commenting on the indictment, Tucker Carlson apocalyptically told his viewers, “Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15.” Perhaps not coincidentally, his words echoed those of Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT channel, who responded to the ICC’s warrant with the observation, “I’d like to see the country that arrests Putin … eight minutes later. Or whatever the flight time to its capital is” – presumably referring to the time it would take a Russian nuclear warhead to reduce the targeted city to smoldering cinders.
Trump and Putin are both now legally, if not politically, cornered. If they first were joined by their adherence to a politics of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, now what they have in common is their pursuit of a denuded politics of destruction. With Putin’s dreams of military triumph and a restoration of Russian imperial glory dashed in the early hours of the invasion, the Russian leader now appears without strategy and goals, except to make Ukraine pay for his misbegotten aggression with death and ruination.
As for Trump, even some of his sycophants in Fox News had begun to ruefully observe that since declaring his candidacy, the former president has offered no political vision or plan except to present himself as the sum of all political grievance and as the avenging sword of his militant supporters as they wage the final battle against the fanciful forces aligned against them.
Putin has clearly demonstrated his taste for violence. Trump has done so on one fateful occasion. When first anticipating indictment, Trump cajoled his supporters to “PROTEST” and to “TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” – words that recalled his incitements on 6 January 2021. He has not since repeated that demand. But as the wheels of justice turn, it is hard to imagine Trump continuing to exercise anything that resembles restraint. It is not in his DNA to do so. If Trump were a man of restraint – respectful of norms, decency and the rule of law – he would not find himself in the legal peril he now faces. And so we can only hope that our nation and its justice system can absorb the barrage of attacks most likely to come.
Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College
