What Do You Need to Know about Donald Trump’s Mistakes? It’s Time for a Dog to Take His Words Seriously
It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. There is no law against upsetting the order, but it is his crime to create chaos. It is not a grand criminal enterprise to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or an obstreperous child, even though it is very upsetting for people to see that someone is doing this.
Many Democrats have come to assume that the dastardly effect of Mr. Trump’s political success must mean that he has an evil purpose. Prosecutors will try to prove that link during his trials. But that might not be such a trivial challenge. He is being pursued under several broad, ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act, RICO, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind — and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.
His prosecutors will try to put him behind bars for the January attack on the Capitol that he admitted was caused by his words. He had classified documents, he had various, half-baked plots about how to game the electoral College system, and he had comments to Michael Cohen before paying off Stormy Daniels.
The pattern is obvious to everyone who’s had it with the ex president, he will say almost anything at any time, and even if he doesn’t mean anything, he will make a statement so confusing it will ruin one’s mental balance.
The three men are going to prove that the former president tried to distract the investigations into his affairs with a series of crowd-pleasing gestures and that his efforts to obstruct the investigation were criminal. I believe the Trump opposition is grateful that Mr. Trump hoisted himself by his own petard.
It was a challenge at the time and it brought into sharp relief at that moment to every news organization, election observer, academic and parent: What do you do with a man on the brink of the presidency of the United States peddling such an outrageous distortion? At the time, given the generations of its traditions in such matters, most of American mainstream journalism refused to use the word lie.
It was assumed that once the word lie was attached to political speech, it would become less valuable. And so indeed it has. The shock value of it used in the media is long gone. It has proven to be a tool and weapon for Trump.
We cannot say we were not warned. At crucial moments in his first campaign in 2016, Trump signaled his intent to behave in just this fashion — to revise reality and insist on his version. For example, in September 2016, after five years of harassing Obama over his birth certificate, Trump insisted he and he alone had resolved at long last the controversy he had promoted. He wanted credit for doing this.
In a sense, the Trump prosecution poses an even more fundamental question than the Nixon case. The reason for that is that Trump wants the perception of a stole election to prevail. He is in essence insisting that his reality — his version of the facts, his view of the situation — should take precedence over any other.
“At first I wasn’t sure,” Barr said, “but I have come to believe he knew well he had lost the election.” He said that the evidence in the indictment was the tip of the rest, and he believed Smith to be loaded for bear.
The problem is that Trump went far beyond his words to change the result of the election. Those actions, Barr stressed, would not be protected – regardless of what Trump believed
William Barr, who was Trump’s attorney general in 2020, spelled this out on CNN this week: “They are not attacking [Trump’s] First Amendment right [to free speech]. He can say anything he wants, he can even lie. He can even tell people the election was stolen when he knew better.”
There are two problems with this defense. One is that it does not matter what Trump thought because it would not excuse his actions. Even if he thought he had won, he would still have to face the charges Smith has brought.
The Nixon “Selective prosecution” in the 2016 presidential election: When Nixon, Ford, and Smith could confront Trump in Washington D.C.
In this sense, the question would become the famous question posed in the Watergate hearings on Capitol Hill in 1973: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
In that imaginary scenario, why not tell the secretary of state in Georgia to “find another 11,780 votes”? If you want the state legislatures to reverse the votes of the voters, call the relevant leaders and urge them to hold special sessions.
There is the idea that Trump did so many things in order to be blamedless because he genuinely believed he was “topping the steal”. He was carried out his own distorted sense of justice when he was convinced of his “sacred landslide victory”.
That assertion of an overriding right to supersede the law under certain circumstances may well figure in Trump’s defense, whether in court or in the media, when he goes to court to face the charges released this week by Special Counsel Jack Smith regarding Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
In 1977, almost three years after he had left office, Nixon was still telling BBC host David Frost that certain actions might be against the law, but that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Another argument likely to re-emerge from the Nixon era is the contention that presidents have unique responsibilities for the nation’s security and well-being and thus must, at least at times, exercise extraordinary powers to execute those responsibilities.
Donald Trump and his legal team are expected to attempt to make his trial in Washington D.C., an opportunity to attack the actions of past presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and to readjudicate his own claims of election fraud.
Nixon did not go to court to defend himself after the pardon. But he did speak to a delegation from the special grand jury that was considering cases against some of his former subordinates in 1975. On that occasion, under questioning, he admitted to making mistakes, but insisted he did nothing others had not done before him, calling himself a victim of “selective prosecution.”
Jaworksi could have indicted him at that point, but the new president, Gerald R. Ford, promptly weighed in with a full pardon. Case closed, at least for Nixon.
Nixon resigned after the House voted to impeach him and after Republican senators threatened to vote to convict him.
Jaworksi did not charge Nixon in 1974 because a legal memo fresh from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said a sitting president could not be criminally charged while in office.
Source: Trump’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of Nixon once more
Trump’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of Nixon once more: The case of Nixon and the Democrat Party headquarters in Watergate
Trump is accused of seeking to alter vote counts in individual states, promoting alternative electors to supplant the ones chosen by the voters and attempting to disrupt the reporting of the Electoral College votes to Congress. All are felonies with potential sentences of years in federal prison.
Nixon’s cover up of illegal black bag jobs that included wiretapping was one of the examples of malfeasance in his life. The Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex was the location of the most famous of these.
Both Nixon and Trump, who are seeking a second term in office, were determined to ensure their success even though it meant going beyond the usual processes.
That would mean the current, elevated levels of stress on the system – stress evident in many facets of everyday life in America – will only rise higher in the months (and possibly years) ahead.
When Nixon left Washington he left a big impact in its day, but he mostly kept his distance from the public eye. The Trump trajectory is still being drawn. He is currently in control of the polls and has vowed to fight on even if the courts rule against him. He says that he did not even come from prison.
If the president believed that his reelection was crucial to the nation, how far could he go to stay in office? And what would be his legal liability for the actions he chose to take?
Half a century apart in time, the cases against both men raised crucial constitutional questions about authority within the three branches of the federal government — questions about the legal culpability of presidents and the limits on their individual power.
The common elements of both Trump’s case and Nixon’s have come into view before. During the years 1973, 1974 and 1975, the impeachment process ended because Nixon resigned from office. The Senate acquitted Trump on both occasions because they wanted a two-thirds majority.
Source: Trump’s defense in 2020 election case could conjure ghost of Nixon once more
The Watergate Indictment: Donald Trump is not an unindicted criminal co-conspirator, but he is an all-white senator
The phrase was back in the news this week after the indictment of six unindicted co-conspirators. The ongoing prosecution implicates Trump in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost.
The reason for that distinction is that in March 1974 a special prosecutor indicted aides to Richard Nixon for their roles in the Watergate scandal. Nixon was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” but he was actually all of the president’s men.
The multiple criminal charges against former President Donald Trump are often described as unprecedented, and so they are. But Trump is not the first president to be named in a criminal indictment.