Jack Smith makes an excellent case against electing Trump
Timothy P. Carney
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If Republicans remove their partisan goggles before reading through the latest indictment of Donald Trump, they will come away with a picture of a man who is grossly unfit to be president of the United States.
If Democrats set aside their appetite to lock up their political opponents before reading the indictment, they will come away with a nagging doubt that any prosecutor could prove that Trump committed a crime in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
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Most Republican presidential candidates responded to the indictment by expressing concern over a prosecution for politics. This is a fair point, but it is woefully inadequate. Mike Pence (as my colleague Jack Elbaum notes) made the crucial point: the facts recited in the indictment remind us how unfit Trump is for the presidency.
A good way to understand Trump is to first consider all the worst traits of other politicians, and then imagine those traits undiluted by any sense of public-spiritedness, shame, or human decency.
Yes, Al Gore made ridiculous legal demands in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2000 election, but he eventually gave up and conceded. Yes, Barbara Boxer and House Democrats tried to overturn the 2004 election, but they did it as cheap political theater, knowing they would lose. Yes, Hillary Clinton after losing the 2016 election called Donald Trump “illegitimate,” and the Democrats teamed up with the news media to peddle the lie that the “election was hacked” by Russia and Trump was a Putin pawn, but only the most ridiculous actually tried to block the transfer of power.
Trump, when he lost in 2020, did what the Democrats did every single time they lost this century, but Trump did it without limit, and thus to much worse effect. Jack Smith’s indictment helps show how relentless, how absurd, and how reckless Trump and his co-conspirators were.
But we shouldn’t wipe away the similarity between Trump and the standard Democrat of the 2000s. Trump was, ultimately, practicing politics, including the lawfare part of politics. For that reason, this federal indictment ought to worry democracy defenders.
Conservative anti-Trump attorney Ted Frank lays out the case.
https://twitter.com/tedfrank/status/1686702328164839424
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Perhaps Jack Smith will present evidence in trial to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump knew he lost the election and nevertheless tried to overturn it. So far, it seems perfectly possible that Trump was just so mentally addled, so narcissistic, and so unconcerned about the consequences of his actions that he really believed he won and that he should thus keep power by any legal or political means.
That shows how bad Trump is for the country. But it doesn’t show he’s a felon. And prosecuting people for losing and politics and losing in court is also not great for democracy.