The United States v. Donald Trump: Trump cannot win. That’s what makes him so dangerous

Open this photo in gallery:

As always with Donald Trump, the failure of imagination is ours. The standard line in the commentary is to exclaim over how extraordinary it is, how unprecedented, that a former president should be charged with a crime – or rather with a federal crime, Mr. Trump having already been indicted for falsifying business records “to conceal criminal activity” by the state of New York, and as good as convicted of sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

But that’s not really the story. There have been previous presidents who were crooks, even if none were indicted. And just about all of Mr. Trump’s behaviour is unprecedented and unthinkable, not just the crimes.

To focus on his indictment is to miss the larger story, which is his reaction to it. Consider: With the full power and might of the U.S. justice system ranged against him, Mr. Trump’s response is not to cop a plea, nor even, beyond a perfunctory “not guilty,” to contest the charges. It is to bring the whole U.S. justice system down around him.

This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain. It is the reaction not of a criminal but of a revolutionary nihilist, someone who is not interested merely in breaking the law but dismantling it. Mr. Trump cannot win his case on the evidence, but I’m not sure his behaviour would be any different if he could – recall his contention that not only the 2020 election was rigged, but also the 2016 election: the one he won.

And so, having convinced his millions of followers that American elections are a con, easily manipulated by the Deep State or magic voting machines or Italian satellites or what have you – the better to justify their own attempts to steal the last election, and the next – Mr. Trump and his acolytes have now set to work tearing down the rule of law.

Lawrence Martin: The Trump charges are great for the Democrats – and America

The lines they have learned to repeat in the Mar-a-Lago case are fundamentally the same as in the New York case. It’s a witch hunt. The Democrats have weaponized the justice system. The prosecutor is biased, or corrupt, or both. Mr. Trump has been singled out for punishment, while others who did the same or worse were not charged. There’s even the same veiled threats to the prosecutor’s family members, the same coded appeals for Jan. 6-style violence.

But then, it’s not as if they have any better arguments. The contention that a president, let alone a former president, can simply declassify documents with his mind; the premise that the law is only concerned with government documents that have been classified, and not with those, whatever their classification, whose disclosure would be harmful to the national interest; the claim that the Presidential Records Act allows former presidents to claim government documents, top secret or otherwise, as their personal property, and not, as the law actually states, the opposite: it’s all nonsense.

The rest is whataboutery. What about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails? What about Joe Biden’s records? What about Mike Pence’s – a Republican, mind you, but still. Even if these were remotely comparable, they would not diminish the gravity of what Mr. Trump is accused of. But in fact they are entirely dissimilar. In none of the cases cited was the breach of security of anything like the same seriousness as those found at Mar-a-Lago: documents to do with nuclear weapons, for heaven’s sakes, and the state of U.S. and allied military preparedness; documents left strewn about, or stored in bathrooms and bedrooms and on ballroom stages, in a resort frequented by thousands of international visitors every year; documents that on at least two occasions he showed to certain visitors.

And in every other case the documents were returned, on request – in some cases even before they were requested. By contrast, Mr. Trump refused to return the documents he had misappropriated for months, not only defying the repeated requests of the national archivist but grand jury subpoenas. He hid them from investigators, lied about how many he had, demanded his lawyers lie as well, even lied to his lawyers. Any one of these charges, on even a single count – stealing documents, storing them insecurely, revealing their contents and obstructing efforts to recover them – would ordinarily be enough to send the accused to prison. Mr. Trump did it all, dozens of times, and boasted about it on tape.

So no, the Trump strategy is not to win his case on the merits. It is not even to win the case in court. His team may be attempting, by their inflammatory references to “banana republics” and “Third World dictatorships,” to taint the jury pool in Mr. Trump’s favour. Or they may hope that Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee whose inventive efforts to derail the Mar-a-Lago investigation earned her a memorable rebuke from an appeals court (to accept her ruling, they wrote, would imply “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that “would defy our Nation’s foundational principle”), and who for some reason has been permitted to hear the case now that it has been brought to trial, can bail him out again.

But the primary focus of their strategy seems to be outside the court: to so inflame popular opinion with the supposed injustice of his case – “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic,” the eternally ludicrous Senator Josh Hawley tweeted, as if it were all up to Joe Biden and not a succession of independent judges, grand juries, special prosecutors and finally a jury of his peers that would decide Mr. Trump’s fate – to so thoroughly discredit the U.S. system of justice that, that … well, what is the plan, actually?

Is the idea that his supporters should descend en masse upon the courtroom and bodily free him from detention? Do his allies in Congress hope to pressure the Justice Department to set aside the case, either by withholding funding or, as Senator J.D. Vance has proposed, refusing to approve nominations to government office? Is it, as Mr. Trump himself has floated, that he should win the next presidential election from his jail cell, then pardon himself – and launch an investigation into Joe Biden?

As with the Jan. 6 plot, there doesn’t appear to have been a lot of thought put into the question of what happens next. (Suppose they’d pulled off their mad scheme to substitute fake electors for the real thing – is it to be imagined that this would settle the matter? The 80 million Americans who voted for Mr. Biden would just roll over and accept this obvious fraud, with a rueful “well played”?) It appears to have no intent but to create as much havoc as possible, with whatever harm to national security or the rule of law: a vast primal scream, releasing the populist id from whatever lingering restraint may still confine it.

The tumultuous Trump saga graduates from the unprecedented to the dangerous

This is what makes Mr. Trump so dangerous. There’s no plan. There’s no purpose. It’s all id. That’s all he is: a bloated, incontinent bag of every conceivable vice, belching forth at irregular intervals and covering everything within reach. Had he any of the normal human impulses – for respect, or dignity, or even self-preservation – he would be more easily recognizable, and thus comprehensible. But as it is he is invincible. It isn’t his vast wealth that is the source of his power, or his mastery of social media, or the bottomless cynicism of his enablers in the Republican leadership. It is his utter shamelessness, his refusal to be bound by any norm, convention or law, even the laws of logic.

You can see how this appeals to his supporters. What is Mr. Trump’s desire to be free of all restraint but their own, on a gargantuan scale? What is Mr. Trump’s disregard for facts but their own preference for fantasy, to believe what they want to believe? But it also consistently disarms his critics. It is simply impossible to comprehend a void so profound: The temptation is always to think of him as merely an ignoramus, or a crook, or a liar, or an authoritarian, or a child of 9, or a serial sexual molester, or a sort of grand national arsonist, setting fire to every institution in sight, and not as all of these things and more.

Worse, he succeeds in corrupting them, as much as his supporters, wearing them down by the sheer volume of his offences, to the point that they find, in spite of themselves, they are grading him according to his own constantly shifting curve. Sure, this latest thing he has done is outrageous, but is it any more outrageous than we have come to expect from him? Or if it is, does it exceed previous records by as much as had been expected? Perhaps his behaviour is growing steadily worse, but is it actually accelerating toward the abyss? Or merely steady as she goes?

So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice – as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly.

Watergate gave us the phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” It’s not the crime with Mr. Trump, either. It’s that he does not even need to cover it up.