The end of Trump?

It’s happened so many times since Donald Trump inflicted himself on the public political stage in 2015, that it’s easy to lose count. And that’s the number of times that liberals and the media have asked “Is this the end of the line for Trump?” Another time came this month, when Trump made another bit of presidential history in becoming the first U.S. president to be indicted for a federal crime.

On its face, the 37-count indictment issued June 8 appears to be a “open and shut case,” that “speaks for itself”.

It’s a simple story. In clear violation of federal law on presidential records, Trump absconded with dozens of boxes of records, including hundreds with restrictive classifications. When the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requested the documents, Trump dissembled. Trump even went to lengths, with the help of his valet Waltine Nauta, to bamboozle his lawyers into certifying that they had searched all the available documents and had returned all of the classified materials. NARA, doubting Trump’s sincerity, referred the case to the FBI, which convinced a grand jury in South Florida to issue a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago social club in August 2022. The subsequent raid turned up even more classified documents.

The details—that audio tapes, texts, transcripts and testimony from Trump staffers all support—are classically Trumpian. Trump showing off some classified materials to visitors. [Some even theorize that one of those was the great foreign policy specialist Kid Rock.] Trump storing documents in ballrooms, bathrooms and in a storage room next the liquor supply in his gaudy “dictator chic” resort. The Keystone Kops antics of he and co-indictee Nauta to hide the materials, while text messages and surveillance videos clearly show what they were up to. Trump suborning his staff and lawyers to do his corrupt bidding. Trump admitting that as president he could de-classify documents, but as ex-president he couldn’t.

“Trump claimed to the Department of Justice and the FBI that he was ‘an open book’,” according to the indictment.

So, to return to the original question, is this the end of Trump? For members of the national security establishment, this is as clear as day. Just as all of the other Trump “national security” outrages—attempting to extort Ukrainian president Zelensky, publicly endorsing Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, or encouraging a quasi-coup to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 presidential election—were supposed to be.

Despite breathless pundit predictions of “final straws” after those incidents, Trump escaped. In every case, members of the so-called Republican establishment moved to prop him up. Even after Trump unleashed a mob that could have killed some of them, Republican senators voted to reject his removal from office. As Trump critic-turned-sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put it: “I’ve determined that [the Republican Party] can’t grow without [Trump].”

In 2023, Trump has lost the defamation suit that writer E. Jean Carroll filed against him for his disparagement of her after she testified that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1996. A Manhattan grand jury has indicted him for fraudulent business practices for covering up a payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels. Besides the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump faces the possibility of indictment in the state of Georgia for attempting to strongarm Georgia election officials to commit fraud on his behalf. A Washington D.C. federal grand jury could indict him as one of the authors of the January 6, 2021, sacking of the U.S. Capitol.

Conventional wisdom holds that none of this will prevent Trump from wresting the 2024 Republican presidential nomination away from one of his pretend-opponents. If Trump actually wins the 2024 election, then he can inveigh on his Justice Department to drop the charges against him—or issue pardons for himself and his co-conspirators from January 6 to Mar-a-Lago. Or, if Trump doesn’t win the nomination and one of his mini-mes does, it’s likely that they will signal that they plan to absolve Trump and to attack his “deep state” tormentors. So, in one way or another, Trump’s legal troubles will overshadow the 2024 election.

Trump and whatever legal team he can assemble will do all they can to delay the proceedings past January 20, 2025, when the next presidential term begins, and a hoped-for Republican administration rescues him. Trump got good news when a random assignment of judges produced Judge Aileen Cannon, a last-minute Trump appointee who, in 2022, helped Trump deflect the Justice Department’s documents probe before the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her. In the meantime, Trump can line his pockets with millions who will donate to his crusade against an “out of control” Justice Department.

It’s a good thing that the U.S. justice system is catching up with other nations that have held their top leaders to account. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently facing corruption charges in three trials. Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy served a sentence for campaign finance corruption. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—in many ways, a model for Trump—was stripped of parliamentary immunity and forced to perform community service for his conviction for tax fraud. When Berlusconi died earlier this month, he remained embroiled in multiple court cases and investigations. So, it’s about time that the US system finally shows that “no one is above the law.”

If Trump goes down for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, it will mark the ultimate irony. The law, passed as the US joined World War I, has regularly been used to persecute dissidents and critics of U.S. government abuses. In 1950s, the U.S. government executed Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on dubious Espionage Act charges that they provided nuclear secrets to the USSR. More recently, it has been used to charge government whistleblowers such as Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the U.S. campaign of lies in support of the Vietnam War, or Reality Winner, a government linguist who sent evidence of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election to The Intercept. The Obama administration regularly deployed it against investigative journalists and government whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who exposed U.S. government war crimes in Iran and Afghanistan, and government spying against everyday Americans.

Trump is certainly no government dissident. It’s obscene for the mainstream media to compare his plan to run for election from prison to that of socialist hero Eugene V. Debs, who won almost 1 million votes in 1920 while imprisoned under the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. intervention in the First World War. And liberals who are now cheering on the FBI and federal prosecutors are helping those historical enemies of democracy and free expression to rehabilitate themselves.

2024 will become, as every national election since 2016 has, a referendum on Trump and MAGA. In that circumstance, Joe Biden—despite holding the support of only about 40 percent of the public—will have to be favored by the Democratic Party for reelection, assuming a health crisis doesn’t derail the octogenarian president. The question will become: for how long will the GOP politicians and donors continue to prop up Trump before they conclude that he is so toxic that they need to cut him loose?