Yesterday (hours before the latest Trump indictment), I commented on a poll that established Trump's commanding lead over his GOP rivals no matter how damning the evidence of his unfitness to govern (by my lights, of course, as a small-d democrat): "... I am tempted to think: Republicans will be ready to ditch Trump by the time voting starts in 2024, won't they? But we're not following the rules of the 1960s or '70s or '80s ... are we?" My answer, in the negative, matches the answer political scientist Julia Azari gives today (hours after the latest Trump indictment) to a similar question, more elegantly framed than mine:
Going back to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, there’s a strain of American commentary that keeps waiting for the Trump action or revelation that turns the tide against him, presenting such clear and devastating evidence that the public and his party can’t help but turn on him. The Aug. 1 indictment seems like a straightforward candidate for this: It quotes the president of the United States calling his vice president “too honest” for refusing to overturn certified election results — even as an insurrection interfering with the peaceful transfer of power was under way. What could more clearly contradict the version of U.S. democracy that we all learned in school — the one where we respect election results, and in which the first peaceful transfer of power after an election loss, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson after the election of 1800, was a major point of national pride?
She offers a response beginning with these words, "I don’t think it works like that in 2023."
Nope. Not with a starkly divided electorate, increasing partisanship that colors our divergent worldviews, and recent history "with a few Republicans abandoning the former president, many rallying around him and a substantial number forced to defend things they really don’t want to defend."
I've read the indictment, which retraced much of the ground covered by the January 6 Committee. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. I expect a guilty verdict. Unless Trump (or, less likely, another Republican) wins the presidency in 2024, I believe the man will end up in jail.
But this will hinge on the outcome of the 2024 election. And as Ed Kilgore observes, the latest indictment "will inevitably focus the intraparty and interparty debate already underway on the events of the last presidential election." Kilgore anticipates that "as has so often been the case since he came down that escalator in 2015, this strange man and his obsessions will remain center stage."
The stakes for constitutional democracy and the rule of law couldn't be higher.