Column: Trump’s election lies got him indicted, but they’ve worked all too well
The timing was apt, if unintended: Just a day before we got the news Tuesday about the latest indictment of Donald Trump — setting up the most momentous legal case in U.S. history, over his unprecedented attempt to overturn an election — we also got polling evidence of the damage Trump’s election lies have done. Not “alleged” lies, as we say of criminal charges yet to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and not “alternative facts,” but his actual lies.
But first, the indictment: United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
A grand jury found probable cause to charge that the disgraced former president perpetrated three criminal conspiracies: to reverse seven states’ 2020 election tallies favoring Joe Biden, to obstruct Congress’ certification of the presidential result on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive Americans of their right to vote and have their votes counted.
From its first page, which says “the Defendant” — Trump — “spread lies” about nonexistent voting fraud that he claimed, and still claims, cost him reelection in 2020, the 45-page document is replete with examples of his deceit. Trump lied to his advisors and his lawyers, to Republican state officials and members of Congress and, most heinous of all, to American citizens.
His constant mendacity, the document asserts, was intended “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
The indictment alleges that Trump pursued discounting legitimate votes and subverting the 2020 presidential election results through three criminal conspiracies.
He has done that, for sure. Trump’s utterly damaging legacy is undermining democracy, and the indictment lays it out.
I’d say Trump succeeded beyond measure, but we have a measure of sorts: the much-buzzed-about New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday.
The survey suggests that Trump is virtually assured of getting his party’s nomination. He was 37 percentage points ahead of the next-highest candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and a rematch against President Biden held right now would be a dead heat.
Read the indictment: United States of America v. Donald J. Trump
It’s still early but, yes, Trump could well be nominated and reelected in 2024. And there is little reason to believe the new charges will shake the political dynamic buoying him, except perhaps to further solidify Republican voters’ rally-’round-Trump response, as previous indictments have done.
It’s difficult not to despair that so many Americans have so completely bought into Trump’s lies and denigration of the institutions that sustain democracy and the rule of law — the Department of Justice and FBI, the free press, the courts and juries — that they would reject the damning evidence piled up against him. That they would vote again for a man who is manifestly unfit to lead a company, let alone the world’s greatest and most powerful country.
Predictably, Trump wasted no time condemning the charges (and grifting for donations as well). He blamed “the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice” along with “the Deep State” for his “persecution.”
Biden, of course, had no role in special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, investigation or findings. Trump’s accusation is all projection from a man whose actual legal abuses of the Justice Department for political ends are well-documented in the indictment. As for the supposed Deep State sabotaging Trump, the indictment — just like the House Jan. 6 committee’s final, damning report — relies almost wholly on the words of Republicans in Trump’s administration, his campaign and state governments to make its case.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation yielded an indictment of the former president for his role in events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Trump obnoxiously compares his prosecution to the travesties of Nazi Germany. That’s just more projection: It was the Nazis who perfected the Big Lie, blaming Jews for Germany’s woes: “The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one,” Hitler wrote.
What’s a bigger lie in a democracy than telling Americans over and over that an election was stolen, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, including from the lying former president’s own attorney general, his director of national intelligence and a multi-agency group headed by his own appointees that called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
As the indictment recounts, Trump once commanded his top two officials at the Justice Department, when they insisted for the umpteenth time that there was no actionable fraud: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
Speaking of Republican congressmen, right on cue Tuesday they were jumping to Trump’s defense. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — “My Kevin” to Trump — castigated what he called “a two-tiered system of justice” that prosecutes Trump and other Republicans and favors Democrats, including Biden and his troubled son Hunter. McCarthy characteristically saw conspiracy, not coincidence, in the back-to-back news of the Times/Siena poll and Trump’s third indictment.
The latest indictment of former President Trump is the most serious by far, laying out charges uniquely damaging to democracy. Sadly, it may only help him with his base.
“Just yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent,” McCarthy said in a statement. “Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump.”
It’s that kind of dishonest echo of Trump that has allowed the former president to get away with eight years of gaslighting the American people.
Our polarized political system has been unable to hold Trump accountable, as Congress ultimately did President Nixon for the Watergate abuses of power. Yet, for all my despair about Trump’s hold on so many of my fellow citizens, with this indictment I am optimistic that — unlike in Nixon’s case — the legal system will do what politics cannot.
I just hope accountability comes before November 2024.
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