As a candidate, as president, and after leaving the Oval Office, donald trump It has forced the use of terms such as “historic”, “unpublished” and “unprecedented” so many times that they have practically worn out from use. Since this Thursday, when a grand jury in New York meeting since January by the Manhattan district attorney, the Democrat Alvin Braggdecided to charge him and make him the first president of USA facing criminal charges, those concepts regain their full force. In this case, also deep gravity.
The exact charges are not yet known in a case that revolves around the payments that the Republican made before the 2016 presidential elections so that the actress and porn director Stormy Daniels would not speak publicly about the intercourse which he claims they maintained in 2006, a tactic Trump also used with the Playboy model Karen McDougal. Sealed, these charges (between two dozen and more than 30 according to US media sources) will not be made public until Tuesday, when, as confirmed by his lawyers and the court, Trump will surrender to the authorities at approximately 2:15 p.m. New York, will be prosecuted and will appear before a judge, before which he will declare “not guilty”.
But whatever that grand jury has decided, whether or not it ends up confirming that the prosecution will combine document forgery with potential violations of campaign finance To compound the offense, the first criminal justice indictment of Trump, also a Republican 2024 presidential candidate and the subject of three other criminal investigations, including two federal ones, has already opened a legal and political pandora’s box of unpredictable consequences. And it opens in a socially and politically polarized country in a radical way and where the Republican himself, in the last eight years, has already capsized the democratic foundations.
The institutions and the system, up to now, have resisted those blows, whose maximum expression, although not the only one, was Trump’s refusal to accept the legitimate results of the last presidential elections that he lost to Joe Biden. Propagating the “big lie” that he continues to maintain today about a non-existent fraud, and mobilizing a gullible base that ended up storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump was about to prevent for the first time the peaceful transition of power in the US. And now he has thrown himself, with the backing of other Republicans and the conservative media, into following the assault.
Politicized justice or just justice
Trump and his allies portray their imputation like a politically motivated witch hunt. They denounce that it shows the alleged use of justice as a weapon by the Democrats and the call “deep state”. They affirm that with it they try to stop her candidacy and “interfere” in the elections. are everything blows that are further undermining confidence in the legal and electoral system. And, furthermore, they portray the prosecution as a sign of an alleged anti-democratic drift in the US under the Democrats they call the “radical left.” Trump directly assures that the country has become “a third world nation“.
Contrary to these arguments, it is ensured that justice is simply following its path and pursuing potential crimes, regardless of the fact that its author was the most powerful person on the planet for four years. Trump’s accusation serves, from this perspective, as a reminder that supposedly in the USno one is above the law, a necessary message of equal justice in a country whose prisons are full of citizens who have committed minor crimes. And it is argued that other political figures, from governors to senators or mayors and even candidates, have faced justice without the country plunging into irresolvable crises or political violence. Even if it’s Trump, those voices say, being able to judge him should be normal. But with him nothing is.
Other charges for election interference in Georgia or, at the federal level, for his role in the assault on the Capitol and for handling classified documents could come to him as this process progresses. In the case of the feds, they could advance faster. But for the moment they have arrived in New York, and for the case that many see weaker. And legal experts believe they sit precedents that raise thorny questions. Who can ensure that, from now on, local or state prosecutors cannot make politicized use of their offices? It is an idea that was raised in the pages of ‘The New York Times’ and that was also launched by Trump’s staunchest defenders on FoxNews.
a broken taboo
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As Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard professor and former Justice officer with George Bush, “whether the indictment is deserved or not, it crosses a huge line in US legal and political history.” And prosecutor Bragg, and the grand jury, have broken the taboo that for two centuries has kept American presidents on the pedestal of invulnerability. Gerald Ford granted a preventive pardon to his predecessor Richard Nixonbut according to his biographer he was “more to forget than to forgive”, trying to cauterize wounds in a country shaken by the water gate and social divisions. But Nixon was by then an outcast, ostracized. Trump is a candidate.
The White House is silent. Biden has been asked three times this Friday about the accusation, and the three times he has settled with “I am not going to comment.” But the storm is already unleashed. The impact that the imputation ends up having cannot be predicted, but the tension is already evident. The intensity of the coming days and months is intuited. And there is something already obvious: the US, with Trump, is once again being put to the test.