Former U.S. president Donald Trump visits with campaign volunteers at the Grimes Community Complex Park on July 18, in Des Moines, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press
Donald Trump may be facing yet another indictment. Ho hum.
This time the former president is potentially looking at charges involving his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, remaining in power in defiance of American law and custom. It would be Mr. Trump’s third indictment. The last two actually enhanced his political position. This one may do the same.
The message in the indictment likely being sought by special counsel Jack Smith is serious enough – actually it is deadly serious, far more so than the earlier two, this time involving obstruction and fraud: a man who sat in the White House and was the chief executive of one of the most influential republics in human history took steps to undermine the values that for nearly two and a half centuries have been a beacon of inspiration around the globe. As many as 160 countries, representing nations on all six inhabited continents, have adapted elements of the American constitution into their own ruling document.
Now an American president may be facing charges of traducing that tradition. A similar notion was floated a half-century ago, when Richard Nixon was accused of trampling the Constitution during the Watergate scandal. But Mr. Nixon, who resigned the presidency in disgrace in 1974, was a conventional political figure who accepted the norms of American political life and even, in his 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, refused to pursue legitimate claims that his rival’s allies might have cheated, in Illinois and perhaps elsewhere.
For all the conventions that were shattered in the Watergate period, which reshaped American politics for a generation, the upheavals of the Nixon period seem tame in comparison with the seven years in which Mr. Trump has been at the centre of American politics.
The fresh indictment of the 45th president comes at a time when the country’s politics are riven by divisions, with the two parties careering in different directions, leaving a gaping hole at the moderate centre – a centre that is occupied by fewer and fewer voters. The Republicans have a profile that is more conservative than at any time since its 1854 founding. The Democrats are moving leftward in ways that leave the increasingly fewer surviving members of the New Deal coalition, which dominated the party since 1933, discomfited. And a new group this week announced its intention to build a third party that would put on its ticket a Democrat and a Republican.
Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, which include his controversial business practices, his louche personal habits and his possession of secret government documents in addition to his effort to retain the White House after losing the 2020 election, are the capstone – they are the symbol – of a fractious period in American civic life. Since he emerged on the American scene as a legitimate political force rather than a boastful billionaire, a flamboyant playboy, a purveyor of kitsch and a garish celebrity, the unprecedented has become unremarkable and the controversial has become common.
His predecessors were generally faithful to the established rules of politics, if not always to accepted notions of marital fidelity. Mr. Trump shattered both, but his greatest political impact was to mobilize a fresh coalition of Americans – disillusioned, impatient with the way Washington and the economy worked, often angry – and mould them into a voting bloc that has remained loyal to him despite his peccadilloes and others’ prosecutions.
His support in his effort to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and his fundraising performance, soared after the earlier indictments, one involving payments of hush money to a porn star and the other involving illegal possession of presidential documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
His rivals accuse him of disregard of established law and of cherished democratic values. His supporters believe his accusers are politically motivated representatives of the “Deep State” and of an elitist conspiracy that sees Washington and Wall Street as tools to enhance the prospects of the few and to oppress the many. Like so much else of the Trump era, this represents a reversal of the assumptions that have animated American politics for a century.
In this reading, the Democrats – who, despite Southern resistance, generally supported the Civil Rights movement and who have backed efforts to liberalize American social life – are regarded as conservators of the status quo of power while the Republicans – once the party of devout respect for tradition and slow, measured change, if any at all – see themselves as the vanguard of social revolution.
Mr. Trump’s domination of the Republican Party has only grown since his first indictment was filed in Manhattan in early spring.
Where once the struggle for the Republican presidential nomination seemed to be a battle between Mr. Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, with a gaggle of other hopefuls waiting for a political opening, Mr. Trump now has a commanding lead. By portraying himself as the victim of a Democratic effort to punish him for his beliefs rather than for his conduct, he has forced his rivals to denounce the prosecutors and to mount pained but frequent attacks on Mr. Trump’s tormentors.
The bleats of criticism of Mr. Trump have come from two former governors, Asa Hutchison of Arkansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey – two former Trump supporters whom the former president now regards as apostates – and from Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, who refused Mr. Trump’s demands that he overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. Those three have a combined support of 10 per cent in the New Hampshire Primary (the first in the nation), according to a St. Anselm College poll of likely voters taken last month. Mr. Trump stands at 47 per cent, unaffected by court action but, for now, triumphant in the court of Republican public opinion.