The Trump Prisoner’s Dilemma: Why Trump’s Campaign for the 2020 Election is a Misleading, Harassmentous Political Process
Mr. Trump’s move came as no surprise. The lead candidate for the Republican presidential nomination isn’t rushing to see the Georgia case or three other criminal cases against him. The election interference case in Washington, D.C. will last until the general election in 2020, but Mr.Trump’s lawyers want the trial to start before the election.
RICO can bring up a 20-year prison sentence and is known as a powerful and dangerous legal weapon. Out of dozens of possible crimes, a prosecutor may only have to prove two to gain a conviction. The state is fairly ambiguous about what constitutes an “enterprise.” Jurors, meanwhile, may be shown a veritable tower of evidence and instructed, usually in some narrative fashion, to see a “pattern” in the defendants’ acts; something the human brain is already trained to do, even at a subconscious level. If the case is allowed to progress to the point where a jury decides the case, it would be a disaster for Trump and his team.
The indictment is a culmination of Trump’s political career that included ignoring checks and balances, mocking the law and the courts, and cheering on his supporters who used violence in his name. More than 1,100 of his most committed supporters have been charged in the past 31 months with trying to physically stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. More than 80 of them have pled guilty to beating police officers who had ordered them to disperse. Four police officers died from suicide within 200 days of the event, according to a report.
These are not Trump’s only casualties. While deceptively trivial in the face of actual death, millions in damages, and election interference, legal experts have long warned that Trump’s personal brand of politics—acrimonious, wielding tools of harassment—is corrosive to the very norms and conventions upon which the electoral process has long relied for stability. Prosecuting Trump could help make distinct lawful election challenges from those considered outright criminal. His arrest has pointed out to the public that political activities are not good for democracy, even if the court thinks otherwise.
In the Georgia case, the question of whether to change the venue — a legal maneuver known as removal — matters because it would affect the composition of a jury. If the case is not kept in Georgia, it will come from a part of the state where Donald Trump was soundly defeated in 2020. If the case is removed to federal court, the jury will be drawn from a 10-county region of Georgia that is more suburban and rural — and somewhat more Trump-friendly. Because it takes only one not-guilty vote to hang a jury, this modest advantage could prove to be a very big deal.
Mr. Trump told the court that he wanted to cut his case from the rest of the defendants because he was uncomfortable with going to court so soon. The judge has made it clear that the early trial date only applied to the man, Mr. Chesebro, who had been indicted in a large racketeering indictment.