Former President Donald Trump greets supporters at Versailles restaurant on June 13 in Miami. Trump appeared in federal court Tuesday on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents and thwarting the Justice Department's efforts to get the records back.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
So, inside and outside a Miami courthouse – with his supporters holding flags and police officers circulating to preserve order while for the first time a former president was arraigned for a federal crime – it has come to this: Donald Trump, whose tumultuous eight years at the centre of American life left the country exhausted, has finally exhausted the English language.
The term “unprecedented,” which might otherwise be employed to describe this moment in the passage of American history, has been drained of its meaning; its death can be attributed to overuse since Mr. Trump emerged as a formidable presidential candidate in 2015. The word “spectacle,” which surely would be appropriate to describe the scene on North Miami Avenue, has been depleted of its power; its demise is due to the uncommon becoming frighteningly common in the Trump years. As for “extraordinary,’’ which this latest chapter of the Trump phenomenon definitely was – well, that has been replaced by the fatigued notion of “ordinary.”
The only expression that retains its force is “dangerous,” and – in the contemporary United States as in the episode that unfolded on the 13th floor of the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse – that has become a fighting word.
That fight – at the centre of the struggle for the survival of democratic values in a country that has valued democracy since its 18th-century founding – played out Tuesday before a magistrate judge who is a former newspaper reporter and whose case history includes legal proceedings involving a tortilla-chip company and the fabled Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel.
The underpinning of this 21st-century American drama – and of the astonishing graphic overlay “Donald Trump Now Under Arrest” that remained on the CNN screen for minutes on end – can be traced to 13th-century England and a legal theorist whose writing is at the heart of the purloined-documents case against Mr. Trump. He is Henry de Bracton (1210-1268), and is remembered for one sentence in On the Laws and Customs of England, published in the wake of the promulgation of the Magna Carta: “The king should be under no man, but under God and the law.”
That is the principle involved. The practice involved comes from only a half-century ago, Richard Nixon’s Watergate trauma and the maxim that evolved from the last serious American constitutional crisis: Sometimes it is the obstruction of justice, not the crime, that matters most.
The alleged crime is serious enough, the harbouring of secret national-security documents. But the obstruction – the frantic attempts to hide the documents, in a bathroom and on a stage, and the determined efforts, in the face of the the threat of legal punishment, to resist the calls for their return – is what separates the Trump documents case from other document-possession cases involving Joe Biden’s vice-presidential years and Mike Pence’s vice-presidential years.
There was eerie intimacy in this episode, the third occasion in a mere 10 weeks that Mr. Trump faced court action during his third presidential campaign. Additional indictments could be filed in the coming weeks.
Throughout the proceedings Tuesday, a sombre Mr. Trump sat at the defendant’s table only feet from special counsel Jack Smith, whom he had described earlier in the day as “deranged.” The Trump team, and many Republicans, are seeking to counter the 49 pages of charges Mr. Smith prepared by arguing, often in inflammatory language, that Mr. Trump’s political enemies have weaponized the arms of justice against him – a measure of how U.S. politics itself has become an exchange of weaponized rhetoric.
If Mr. Trump’s efforts to have the criminal charges dismissed are themselves dismissed, and if he is convicted, the main driving force in this affair will be the set of federal-sentencing guidelines. These are advisory only, but the offences Mr. Trump is accused of could produce a draconian sentence. “The worst-case scenario will likely not occur here,” said Gabriel Chen, a University of California, Davis, expert in criminal law. “If convicted, Trump could be sentenced to anything from probation to 400 years.’’
Then again, the entire matter may end up in the Supreme Court long after the 2024 election is concluded.
But for the present, Mr. Trump is seeking to display nonchalance and, in a scripted interlude, moved from the courthouse to the famous Versailles restaurant in Little Havana, his not-guilty plea followed by an offer of plaintains and other Cuban delicacies for all.
Right now, the arraignment and arrest of the former president has not diminished his prospects and may in fact have enhanced them. Only two in five likely Republican primary voters believe there was a risk in Mr. Trump’s possession of nuclear and military documents, according to the CBS/YouGov Poll taken in the two days after he was charged. But four-fifths of the rest of the country said they believed there was such a risk.
The result: Despite what happened in the courtroom Tuesday, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, with his opponents flummoxed and, at least now, powerless to change the political dynamic.
“Trump’s opponents are yet again in a bind as to how they respond to this,” said Charles Hunt, a political scientist at Boise State University in Idaho. “They really don’t have a choice except to defend him if they want a chance at winning over Republican voters who previously supported him. There’s so far not any evidence that there is a successful ‘attack Trump’ lane that could win a majority of primary voters.”