The System's Stakes In Trump's DC Case

"Man at the Crossroads" by Diego Rivera (1934)

In all of the massive quantity of commentary offered regarding Trump’s travails in three (and presumably soon 4) different jurisdictions, it has become increasingly obvious that continued survival of The System itself is arguably at stake in these prosecutorial processes. Two opinion pieces provide context for those likely stakes.

The first piece came from Alex Pareene last year:

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, electeds, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. But when the party does manage to win majorities, it depends on support from a substantial number of anti-system people. Barack Obama defeated the Clintons with this sacred knowledge, before he started reading David Brooks.

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.

...The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.

The second came recently from Ryan Cooper in The American Prospect:

[T]here has long been a culture of elite impunity in this country, both in and out of government. Washington elites who subscribe or acquiesce to this culture often evince what I call “chauvinist cowardice,” which is the neurotic belief that American institutions are the best in the world combined with a deep reluctance to make them actually work. As Alex Pareene writes, this type of person believes it “is important that people retain faith in our institutions, which does not mean that our institutions should work to earn people’s faith, but instead that people shouldn’t hear about it when they don’t.”

So when the president and most of his top advisers set up a torture program, we must “look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” to quote then President-elect Barack Obama. And when another president tries to overthrow the government, the succeeding top national law enforcement officer dithers and procrastinates for nearly two years, until shamed into action by a legislative committee.

A country whose political class was not so blinkered and self-satisfied would know what to do with Trump: remove him from the political field. Such a man cannot be allowed anywhere near presidential power.

Donald J. Trump’s political persona has been built upon thumbing his nose at (if not spitting in the face of) The System. It’s the core of his appeal to his MAGA base. The System has never quite figured out how to handle him (or the widespread disdain for The System that fueled Trump’s rise and gave him staying power).

There was a System belief that Trump could be neutralized by defeating him in the 2020 election. That viewpoint was exemplified by this quote from The System’s candidate in the Democratic primaries:

“I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

-Biden, during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

The core conviction of Democratic mandarins in 2020 was that, once Trump was defeated, he would, like past defeated presidents, fade into obscurity and The System could go back to business as usual as it existed on January 20, 2017. As Cooper notes, when the Obama/Biden administration took office in 2009, The System swept torture and “pre-emptive war” and financial crimes and the other parade of horribles from the Bush/Cheney era under the rug. There was an apparent presumption that something similar would happen with the parade of horribles from the Trump era.

The System vigorously prosecuted the small fish who stormed the Capitol on 1/6. As to the big fish who planned, financed, and/or incited this attempted insurrection… not so much. It took almost 31 months from 1/6 for Trump to become the first big fish to face indictment, and the insurrection itself was essentially incidental to that indictment. Were it not for the legwork done by the 1/6 Committee and the spotlight shone by the committee’s hearings, that indictment might never have been handed down.

This small fish/big fish dichotomy is a feature, not a bug. Trying a former president and his inner circle for attempting to overturn an election while in office raises unpleasant questions about the legitimacy of The System. Trying a former president for keeping classified documents after he left office is a lot safer. It’s not an accident those crimes were investigated first and that the first indictments were entered on them.

The System has a litany of failure dating at least back to the failure to address Reagan’s Iran/contra scandal. The System failed in the Thomas confirmation, in the 2000 recount, on the Iraq War Resolution, in dealing with the multitude of misdeeds of the Bush/Cheney White House, in the Garland (non)confirmation, in the 2016 election, and in the Kavanaugh confirmation. The System managed to get by in 2020. The System is so used to losing that it portrayed the decidedly mixed bag from the 2022 election results as a victory. That historical ineptitude puts these prosecutions in context.

The System is running out of survivable failures. If it cannot criminally convict Trump and keep him from getting the awesome power of the presidency in 2024, chances for it to regroup and recover in 2028 will be virtually nil. A second Trump presidency would be dedicated to doing to The System roughly what Rome did to Carthage. As disappointing and as discouraging this System is, whatever we would get as a result of Trump II would be unthinkable.

In legal shorthand, the chances of conviction in the DC case are visibly higher than in the Florida case. The current judge and the prospective juror pool are visibly more favorable to the prosecution in DC. Getting a trial date in DC prior to the GOP Convention would make it extremely hard for Trump to avoid a conviction. I’m not aware of any 1/6 defendant who has gone to trial in DC and not been convicted, and it’s hard to see the most visible such defendant avoiding conviction.

It’s impossible to predict whether Trump would be nominated were he convicted of felony charges in DC before the Convention. Perhaps a major party would have a nominee give his acceptance speech while wearing an ankle bracelet. The Democratic mandarins have already decreed that Biden will be their nominee, so, in the Battle of the Addled II, they could encourage people to vote for the soon to be octogenarian who would not be spending any part of his presidency governing from Club Fed.

My one common viewpoint with System supporters is that I realize that whatever System we would get under Trump II would be far worse than anything we have now. I further realize that undoing whatever system was put into place under Trump II in my remaining lifetime would be an extremely difficult task. For those reasons, I share the hopes that devoted System supporters currently have placed in Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. He carries a heavy weight on his shoulders in the looming Trump trials.