After Monday’s late-night filing in Georgia, we have finally seen them all: Every single known criminal investigation into Donald Trump has produced an indictment.
The former president is now facing four trials on 91 separate counts whose maximum sentences, put together, amount to hundreds of years of prison time (though it’s unlikely Trump would receive the harshest possible sentence in each case). The cases’ verdicts will not “merely” determine Trump’s fate. They could be the closest thing we can get to official pronouncements on some of the most pressing political issues in American politics.
In the two most important cases, the new Georgia indictment and special counsel Jack Smith’s federal January 6 indictment, the key question is whether Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election constituted a crime against the American people. In the lesser cases, the Mar-a-Lago document retention and New York hush money cases, the core question is whether Trump’s well-documented habits of lying and unethical behavior led him into outright criminal territory.
With such weighty issues on the line, juries will be deciding more than Trump’s guilt or innocence on specific charges. They will be issuing a broader ruling: determining if Trump and Trumpism have, beyond a reasonable doubt, run afoul of America’s democratic system and the rule of law.
Such a trial is unprecedented in American history, but it is exactly what’s supposed to happen in a democracy when a political leader (allegedly) commits crimes against democracy. (Trump denies he committed any crimes.)
Democracy is, at the very highest level, a system for turning the idea of human equality into practical political reality. When leaders can get away with whatever they want, there is no real political equality: We are electing kings, not fellow citizens. If powerful actors try to act above the law, independent institutions need to check their misbehavior.
Criminal…
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