Sorry, #resistance twitter, it’s not going to land the guy in jail, but it might be the first step in a long march toward justice.
Barring some major surprise in Tuesday’s expected announcement of the charges against former President Trump —like that he did shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue—the indictment is likely to contain low-level, white-collar felonies. Under New York law, these crimes do not carry any mandatory prison term and the likelihood of Trump being incarcerated, given the years of appeals that lie ahead, is low. So why did District Attorney Alvin Bragg decide to bring these charges? (And yes, he did make the decision to bring them — DAs almost always get the indictments they want from grand juries.)
The Trumpy answer — that Bragg is a ravening racist socialist who wants to stop a second Trump victory—is just silly. Bragg’s trajectory from Harvard Law School to a prestigious federal court clerkship, to Southern District of New York federal prosecutor, to Deputy Assistant Attorney General in New York, and then elective office, is a typical and sought-after path for many of New York’s legal elite. It usually culminates in a federal judgeship or a corner office in a bourgeois white-shoe law firm. It is not a life of left-fist raised chanting “to the barricades.” The guy is even a Sunday School teacher. Bragg was elected on his promise to reform Manhattan’s highly unequal criminal legal system that disproportionally contributed to the mass incarceration of the 1990s and early 2000s.
