Former US president Donald Trump’s stunning criminal charges have triggered a fierce counterattack from Republicans, putting America on a collision course between partisan politics and the rule of law ahead of a potentially explosive election.
On Friday prosecutors unsealed a devastating 37-count indictment against Trump, accusing him of risking some of the country’s most sensitive security secrets after leaving the White House in 2021. He mishandled classified documents that included information about the secretive US nuclear programme and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack, the indictment said.
Trump is the first former president in US history to be charged with federal crimes. But he is also the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. This week’s indictment – and other cases against him – raise the prospect that he will spend the next 18 months hurtling between campaign rallies and court appearances. The convergence of the electoral and legal calendars could threaten America’s fragile democracy.
Far from disowning a former president who played fast and loose with national security and the lives of Americans overseas, Republicans rallied around him with renewed zeal. They falsely asserted that Joe Biden was seeking to jail his political opponent. They stepped up efforts to turn the tables by accusing Biden of a bribery scandal without providing evidence. And they used incendiary language that evoked political violence.
“We have now reached a war phase,” tweeted Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who sits on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee. “Eye for an eye.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana used what appeared to be military code words when he wrote on Twitter: “Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”
The 49-page indictment unsealed by special counsel Jack Smith puts Trump in his gravest legal peril yet. He kept the documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey. Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at more than 150 events during the time they were there, the indictment alleges.
The indictment includes photos showing boxes of classified documents stacked on a ballroom stage, around a toilet in a club bathroom and in a storage room, where some of the contents, including a secret intelligence document, spilled on the floor.
It also alleges that Trump discussed with lawyers the possibility of lying to government officials seeking to recover the documents and moved others around Mar-a-Lago estate to prevent them being found. It states that Trump asked one of his lawyers: “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
US District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, has been initially assigned to oversee the case. Trump is due to make a first appearance in the case in a Miami court on Tuesday, a day before his 77th birthday. Since he would serve any sentences concurrently if convicted, the maximum prison time he would face is 20 years for obstruction of justice, a charge carrying the highest penalty.
The case does not bar Trump from campaigning or taking office if he were to win the election in November 2024. Legal experts say there would be no basis to block his swearing-in even if he were convicted and sent to prison. As president, Trump could potentially try to pardon himself, a legal move that would be controversial and unprecedented.
Such possibilities pose the latest, perhaps the ultimate, stress test for American democracy after years in which Trump sought to undermine institutions, foreign powers meddled in elections, misinformation flooded the political discourse and many Republicans embraced anti-democratic lies and conspiracy theories.
Trump proclaimed his innocence and attacked Smith on his Truth Social platform with typically crude language: “He is a Trump Hater – a deranged ‘psycho’ that shouldn’t be involved in any case having to do with ‘Justice.’”
The Trump campaign, accusing the “Biden Justice Department” of abuse of power and attempted election interference, circulated comments from more than 50 Republican officials and conservative commentators backing the former president.
Among them was the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who asserted that Biden had indicted “the leading candidate opposing him” – a baseless claim since the justice department operates independently of the White House. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, nevertheless condemned “the weaponization of federal law enforcement” and drew false equivalence with allegations against Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Biden’s son Hunter.
Michael Steele, a former chairperson of the Republican National Committee, said “You’ve got his political opponents rallying to his defence. Why would Republican voters reject that? ‘OK, y’all think this is going out after Donald Trump? Then yeah, he is the guy.’ The thinking is to rally around Trump and then complain afterwards why is he still so popular among the base? You helped him stay popular! You gave the voters no reason to move on.”
Conventional wisdom suggests that Trump’s deepening legal woes would hurt him in a presidential election against Biden. But Steele still expects it to be close. “You cannot underestimate the vitality of his base to not just turn out but to cause disruption. The Maga [Make America Great Again] base are now running things. They’re on election boards, they are part of the electoral apparatus, they are members of Congress
“If this thing for whatever reason gets thrown to the House with Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the charge? Nothing should be taken as oh, yeah, this’ll get a lot easier in the general election for Joe Biden. No the hell it won’t.”
To that end, Republicans are working around the clock to weaken Biden. James Comer, chairperson of the House oversight committee, has been pushing allegations that, during Biden’s vice-presidency between 2009 and 2017, he was engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national. Comer is yet to provide evidence for abuses he claims “make Watergate look like jaywalking”.
But when Trump announced his own indictment on Thursday night, Republicans were quick to blame “two-tier justice” and insinuate a politically motivated prosecution designed to deflect from Biden’s own supposed crimes. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee tweeted: “The Biden DOJ buries investigations of President Biden and his family while it charges his political rivals. Making America look like a banana republic is incredibly irresponsible.”
Their efforts targeting Biden and Hunter are likely to become even more aggressive as Trump sinks further into the legal mire: he is due to go on trial in New York next March in a state case stemming from a hush-money payment to an adult film star; he is under investigation by Smith over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election; he faces a separate criminal investigation into his bid to subvert democracy in Georgia that year.
Kurt Bardella, who was a spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee from 2009 to 2013, commented: “We’ve seen already their willingness to use their congressional authority to try and muddy the waters and smear the Biden family. Despite the fact that there is to this day zero evidence that implicates President Biden in any way, shape or form, that doesn’t stop the Republicans from just going out there and making grandiose statements without any substance or proof.”
There are additional forces threatening to tear at the legal, political and social fabric of the nation during an election that Trump has dubbed “the final battle”. YouTube recently announced that it will no longer remove content that promotes false claims about US elections. Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter and the rise of artificial intelligence pose further misinformation risks.
Meanwhile, with more than 1,000 people having been charged in relation to the January 6 riot, a recent survey by the University of Chicago found that an estimated 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the population, believe that violence is justified to restore Trump to the White House. There are more guns in the US than people and, as of late May, there had been more than 260 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Bardella, now a Democratic strategist, warned: “We know that Donald Trump’s supporters are capable of fomenting violence when they don’t get their way so I do think that America needs to prepare for the worst possible outcome, which is Donald Trump once again fomenting violence. That right there is the illustration of what happens when someone isn’t held accountable already. They’ll just do it again and again and again.”
But Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, struck a more optimistic note. He said: “We’ve heard all this bluster from the Maga people, mainly from Trump in veiled ways or [Senator] Lindsey Graham: if you go after Trump, particularly during the election year, there’ll be this great uprising. Well, they predicted this great uprising when Trump was indicted in New York and I think five people showed up. It was an absolute fizzle. So I’m not really worried about these threats of a great Maga uprising.”
