“Why are they even doing this,” a Kansas Republican asked me the other day, “when it’s only going to give him the nomination?”
The “this” and “it” we were talking about was of course Donald Trump’s most recent indictment, for allegedly stealing and stockpiling documents that detail some of our most sensitive military and nuclear secrets. The Department of Justice only got involved after Trump refused to surrender them to the National Archives, as required under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Eventually, the Archives’ Office of the Inspector General sent a referral to the DOJ requesting that it investigate Trump’s handling of records.
Trump had chance after chance to comply, but would not. So now, more than two years after those first efforts to recover what never belonged to him, Trump has been charged with urging others to lie to authorities about his stash of the kind of secrets that can get people killed, while also showing them off to various randos toddling through Mar-a-Lago. If we’ve ever had a president who acted more like a seventh grader, I’m not aware of it.
Some of these documents about our assets around the world were left spilling out of cardboard boxes in a ballroom and bathroom of the club where a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine who’d passed herself off as a European banking heiress was photographed on the golf course with Trump. It’s also where two Chinese women suspected of spying were caught trespassing. One of those, Yujing Zhang, was carrying two Chinese passports, multiple cellphones and a bag full of electronics, including a USB stick infected with malware, when she was arrested at Mar-a-Lago in 2019.
Despite the OMG seriousness of these charges, many if not most Republicans — including officeholders and ordinary voters, loyalists and those who’d rejoice if he dropped dead — believe that Trump’s arrest will only guarantee him the nomination, and maybe the presidency.
“Every attempt that the Democrats and the ‘Deep State’ make to try to destroy him, it only makes him stronger,” crowed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
“I think Donald Trump is stronger today politically than he was before,” said that former fan of national security, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“He’s going to go higher in the polls,” 28-year-old new Floridian Brionna Paltona told The Palm Beach Post.
It’s too early to know if they’re right that his legal problems just clinched the nomination for him, but they could be.
What they cannot be right about, though, is that 1) this indictment is politically fantastic for Trump and yet somehow 2) this indictment is politically motivated, and is only happening because President Joe Biden is trying to kneecap his rival.
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio said that if “Merrick Garland wants to use these officials to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents, we will grind his department to a halt” by blocking all DOJ nominees.
Mild Merrick Garland, someone frustrated Democrats have seen as maddeningly unpolitical, picked a truly independent special counsel in Jack Smith, who made his career putting away war criminals.
And why would Biden, whose political skills have repeatedly been underestimated, try to neutralize an opponent by strengthening him? Why would he “weaponize” the DOJ, with the weapon so likely to boomerang?
Of course, Biden is not behind these charges, which only Trump himself made inevitable.
But if the president were pulling the strings at DOJ, as Trump himself quite overtly tried to do, and is promising to do again if reelected, machinations of the kind that so many Republicans have accused would be self-defeating. Or at least, too risky to try.
Quaint, I know, trying to impose consistency, but Biden also cannot be both a world-class schemer and suffering from dementia.
Still, Trump’s defenders continue to insist that Trump is being treated worse than anyone else would have been. Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt called the charges against him a “political hit job.”
“I think the country is very frustrated,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said, “when you don’t feel like there’s equal justice,” There certainly isn’t equal justice, though not in the way he means it; anyone but Trump would not have walked away free after his white glove arraignment.
Others were not arrested for mishandling classified documents because they didn’t do what he did: Hillary Clinton possessed no classified documents, but discussed classified topics on an unsecured server. Mike Pence and Biden volunteered the classified documents found among their papers. The proof that Trump himself would not have been prosecuted if he had just forked over what he had is that he was not charged with mishandling those documents that he did surrender.
Remember when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infuriated Democratic activists by trying to avoid impeaching Trump, because she knew it would further divide the country and could benefit him politically? In the end, though, he left her no choice, just as he left the DOJ none.
Ordinary Democrats and some other Americans, too, think Trump should have been indicted, not because it will benefit Biden, which it may not, but because they believe he has committed serious crimes. They recognize the political risk, but think it would be even riskier to our system to grant blanket immunity to presidential perps.
What’s at stake is so much more important than either Biden or Trump, and one of them knows that.
