It happened the way Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, described going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Last month in Georgia, Scott Graham Hall, an obscure bail bondsman and Trump supporter, took a plea. Hall had been indicted in Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis’s Georgia election fraud case on charges of helping Trump surrogates steal election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county. Hall bargained his felony conspiracy and racketeering charges down to misdemeanors, for which he would pay nominal fees and serve no jail time. To many of his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, it must have looked like an appealing deal.
Hall was a small fish in the Georgia scheme, just a minor player in what Willis had charged as a sprawling conspiracy. But the bizarre excursion to Coffee county that he had agreed to testify about was central to the charges against a much bigger fish: Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who pursued the most bizarre and brazen of the president’s post-election lies. Last week, she flipped too. Powell, who was facing multiple felonies, accepted probation and restitution fees in place of jail time – conditioned, of course, on her willingness to testify against her co-defendants.
And thus, the dominoes began to fall. Willis’s generous terms to the cooperating witnesses – along with the growing number of testimonies that are now lined up on the prosecution’s side – seem to have incentivized other co-defendants in the Georgia case to flip.
Powell’s plea was followed soon after by one from Ken Chesebro, the lawyer who devised the so-called “fake electors” scheme, whereby Trump would have overturned the results of the 2020 election by having Mike Pence disregard the genuine elector slates and instead adopt fraudulent ones composed of various Trump loyalists and cranks. Chesebro’s plea bargain indicates an abrupt change of heart: he had demanded a speedy trial just weeks before, a motion that had accelerated the court’s work, and by the time the news of his decision to flip was announced, jury selection for his hearing was already under way. Chesebro had reportedly refused another plea offer in late September.
And then there was Jenna Ellis. The Trump campaign lawyer – a member of the so-called “Elite Strike Force” legal team that Powell had said would “release the kraken” to vindicate Donald Trump’s election lies – has been central to the effort to overturn the election. Ellis had gone about recruiting potential fake electors for Chesebro’s scheme, soliciting Republican officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan to back the plan. She is also alleged to have been involved in planning ways to disrupt and stall the 6 January 2021 certification proceeding. This all could have sent her to prison for a long time; instead, she got probation and a “first offender” status that will expunge her record. She’ll be testifying, too.
The news of the flips in the Georgia case came as another rumor went trembling through the political press: that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and the man who was closest to him in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, was cooperating with Jack Smith’s office in Washington DC, in the January 6 trial there that covers many of the same events as the Georgia case. ABC News reported that Meadows had been granted immunity to testify to a grand jury – a development that could signal serious danger for the Trump defense.
The reports on Meadows are mixed: has he flipped, or merely provided some testimony under limited protection? Is he still loyal to his former boss, or is he now looking to save his own skin? And who benefits from the leak about his testimony so far? But no matter what, Meadow’s involvement – even if only partial and temporary, even if it does not lead to a bigger deal – suggests a more significant crack in the hull, and only added to the growing feeling that, as the Trump criminal cases proceed, many of the rats are starting to flee the ship.
For their part, the defendants turned witnesses in Georgia have taken various positions on their own decisions to quit team Trump. Jenna Ellis tearfully apologized in court, claiming she was misled about the veracity of her false claims by the other lawyers. Chesebro’s lawyer issued a terse statement to the press saying that the plea bargain somehow vindicated his client.
Powell, for her part, always the conspiracist and true believer, has spent the days since turning state’s witness trying to publicly signal her continued loyalty to Trump and his lies, sworn testimony be damned. On her social media accounts, she had continued to claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and that Willis’s office “extorted” her plea by threatening her with jail time – which is, indeed, more or less how plea bargains usually work.
How does Trump feel, watching all of these former loyalists agree to testify against him? Trump stands now a diminished figure, still ominous and still very much capable of winning a presidential election, but increasingly isolated. On the one hand, his various criminal and civil cases are distracting him from the campaign trail, and he seems doomed to lose many of them; on the other hand, his grip on the Republican presidential nomination is so firm that his challengers increasingly look silly for running against him, and he seems to have retained at least some degree of kingmaking power in the House, where this week he was able to instantly sabotage the short-lived speakership candidacy of the Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer.
Trump wields decisive power within the Republican party, and he commands the unceasing, unconditional loyalty of its base: about one-third of Republican voters who will never vote for anyone else so long as his name appears on a ballot. But in his real life, among the people who actually interact with him, Trump has long been paranoid and embittered, prone to blowout fights with close aides and dead-to-me turns on those he sees as insufficiently loyal. He has the kind of sad resentment of someone who knows he has never felt the warmth of a friendship he has not bought.
When Chesebro and Ellis announced their flips in Georgia, Trump was in New York, listening to the testimony of another former loyalist, his one-time fixer Michael Cohen, in a corporate fraud suit brought against the Trump organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. “Don’t know anything, we’re totally innocent of everything,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s shouted question about Ellis. Increasingly, it’s hard to tell who “we” is.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
