Trumpists will portray any indictment as political. Prosecutors can’t let them make that argument persuasively.
Keeping track of all the cases Donald Trump has caught can be hard. There’s the Georgia election-fraud investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 results in that state, which he lost; there’s the New York civil investigation into alleged financial fraud by the Trump Organization; there’s the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into possible campaign-finance violations from Trump’s alleged hush-money payment to the adult actress Stormy Daniels; and there’s the federal special-counsel inquiry regarding Trump’s handling of classified material.
Over the past few weeks, media speculation about criminal indictments has led to conservative media figures and Republican legislators threatening retaliation against prosecutors, with some Trump supporters (and Trump himself) hinting at the possibility of political violence. This is an object lesson in the distinction between “law and order” and the actual rule of law: The former is a conservative shorthand for lawlessness that exempts those in authority from the rules, while the latter applies the law to everyone. Some Republicans’ demands for Democratic Party leaders to pressure legal officials over prosecutorial decisions are themselves a clear expression of the idea that the law should be enforced only against people whom conservatives despise.
