WASHINGTON — Donald Trump made history Tuesday when he was booked and arraigned in a Manhattan courthouse as the first former president ever to face criminal charges. But historians are looking beyond his indictment with anxiety over what might follow.
With the former president refusing to negotiate a plea deal with prosecutors in New York, where he confronts state-level charges that are shielded from presidential pardons, scholars are struggling to identify an off-ramp for Trump from a criminal trial as he seeks a second White House term in 2024 — a high-stakes test of the rule of law that could upend the presidency itself.
The imagery and spectacle of Tuesday’s developments produced indelible artifacts in the national memory — the scene of a former president sitting sternly before the court — but historians consider the drama of arraignment as less a significant milestone than the start of an uncertain, potentially destabilizing chapter in American politics, in which a leader could seek the nation’s highest office while facing the real possibility of jail time.
