Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he arrives at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on May 28.Pool/Getty Images
The most remarkable element of the sensational, salacious and politically significant Trump hush money trial, which goes to the jury of seven men and five women this week, reaches far beyond the substance of the legal proceeding.
The trial’s surpassing meaning, aside from the possibility that Donald Trump may face jail time, may instead be this: Americans in recent years have witnessed so many moments of the unanticipated and the unprecedented, the thoroughly inexplicable and the arguably intolerable, that a former president – once in control of 3,750 nuclear weapons but seldom possessed of self-control – being brought up on charges that he bought the silence of a porn star seemed utterly unremarkable.
It’s not that the country is bored with the legal peregrinations of Donald Trump, with the vivid, too-much-information account of his alleged sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, or with his bid to defeat Joe Biden and reclaim the White House. It’s just that Trump Agonistes is a reality show that is constantly being renewed, just as its protagonist hopes that the Trump presidency will be renewed next January.
The first of potentially four Trump trials – and perhaps the only one to conclude before the election, and thus the only one that could brand him a convicted felon while it still matters to voters – swiftly moved from comic opera to soap opera. It was a stage spectacle with, according to Ms. Daniels’ testimony, silk pajamas but no condom. Sometimes, it was hard to remember in the midst of the indecent particulars and the promiscuous charges of mendacity that this was the first such trial of a former American president, with an election in the balance – an election that both the Trump and Biden camps have labelled a test of the sturdiness of American democratic values.
That such a test came down, at least in part, to a trial such as this will be a mystery to historians decades from now.
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The Trump trial may lack the cultural significance of the Salem witch trials (1692), the trial of the abolitionist John Brown (1859), the Leo Franck murder trial (1913), the Scopes-Monkey evolution trial (1925), the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927), or even the O. J. Simpson trial (1995), each of which once held the title of “trial of the century.” But it was a weeks-long trial of a former president in the middle of a political campaign. It had its moments of high drama and high dudgeon, and in some ways it marked a new low for Mr. Trump and American politics.
Like Mr. Trump did with his indictments, his arraignments, the release of his mugshot and his other legal travails, he has managed to transform peril into opportunity, both financial and political. As the trial was winding down, he sent repeated messages to the millions on his e-mail list. One of the e-mails described him as “the most persecuted man in American HISTORY – and IT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE!” He continued: “I’ve been Stripped of my Rights and I’ve been ILLEGALLY GAGGED INTO SILENCE. But I am still here fighting for you because YOU TRULY MEAN THE WORLD TO ME!”
The United States has witnessed trials of passion before. The country was transfixed by the 1907 and 1908 trials of Harry Thaw, who killed the prominent architect Stanford White in a fit of jealous rage over the ingenue Evelyn Nesbit (Thaw’s wife) in front of nearly a thousand people on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden. The country was again mesmerized by the 1980-81 trial of Jean Harris, the headmistress of the tony Madeira School, who was convicted of murdering Herman Tarnower, the author of the popular The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.
The Trump trial was over an alleged one-night stand, though the former president apparently did say, “We were great together.”
When senator Dale Bumpers rose in Bill Clinton’s Senate trial, which grew out of the impeached president’s sexual involvement with a White House intern a full quarter-century ago, Mr. Bumpers had it half-right. “When you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex,” the senator said in an old-time stem-winding defence of his fellow Arkansan, “it’s about sex.”
Mr. Trump’s case is about more than sex.
To oversimplify, the Salem witch trials were about community hysteria and the potency of accusation, the John Brown trial about fanaticism and zealotry, the Leo Franck trial about antisemitism and the nature of justice, the Scopes-Monkey trial about the power of religious fundamentalism and the resistance to modernity, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial about extremism and xenophobia, the O.J. Simpson about celebrity in America. In a way, the Trump trial, and by extension the Trump phenomenon in the United States, is at once a trial about all of them.