If the federal government wants to uphold democracy and the rule of law, it can’t leave convicting Trump to the states.
Throughout his political career, Donald Trump managed to evade the law. It seemed possible that he always would. He was impeached twice but acquitted both times, and since leaving office, his team has been remarkably successful in delaying and undercutting the criminal cases against him.
On Friday, that possibility was laid to rest 34 times over, thanks to a New York jury finding him guilty on felony charges stemming from the cover-up of his hush money payments to an adult film actress during his 2016 campaign. The 34 counts make Trump the first ex-president in US history to become a felon.
“I think it’s extraordinarily significant,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “This is really the first instance of real accountability for Donald Trump.”
But even as the New York case brought Trump his first taste of criminal justice, it demonstrated weaknesses in the federal system. Neither of Trump’s federal trials — one for trying to overturn the 2020 election and another over his dangerous stewardship of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — seem likely to return a verdict before the 2024 election. And Trump, who’s leading in the polls and has told associates that he’ll undermine the prosecutions against him if he retakes the Oval Office, has a clear route to escaping federal consequences. Even if the federal trials were to reach a verdict before the election, he has toyed with the idea of pardoning himself once elected.
There are good reasons to set a high bar for prosecuting officeholders. Indeed, specifically going after political opponents for crimes, real or imagined, is a key part of the authoritarian playbook.
But there are also risks for democracy when the justice system lacks the power to enforce the laws in the face of obviously criminal behavior. Trump’s story reflects a seemingly fragile federal system that — due to its dependence on norms and officials’ willingness to put the rule of law ahead of partisanship — is seriously struggling.
Since the Manhattan district attorney indicted Trump last year, a lot of the commentary on the case has been that it’s a weaker and less serious case than the others against the former president.
And while it’s true that falsifying business records is less serious than trying to steal an election, the two are not entirely disconnected.
Trump’s hush money scandal — in which he paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair and falsified business records to cover it up — was in many ways a window into his willingness to break the rules to get to the presidency and his philosophy on power: That it’s his to take and that elections shouldn’t be respected.
“It is of a piece in some ways with the later conduct in the sense that this was criminal wrongdoing and deceptive conduct meant to help him get into a position of power,” Bookbinder said.
But it’s not enough for only one state to enforce the law against Trump. “I don’t think that it really substitutes for the role of the federal government,” Bookbinder said.
