No one is above the law. But indicting the frontrunner for a major political party’s presidential nomination, a former president to boot, on charges with a maximum sentence of 400 years in federal prison sets the stage for a full-blown constitutional crisis. Is there some way to hold Donald Trump accountable for playing fast and loose with state and federal law, without forcing him to campaign while on trial or asking voters to head to the polls while the de facto leader of the Republican Party rots behind bars?
Consider how crazy this could get. Would Club Fed pipe in wifi for the debates? Can an inaugural ceremony be held in the visiting room? Who takes that 3 a.m. crisis phone call when the felon-in-chief is sitting in stir?
Biden and the Democrats fantasize about putting Trump in prison. If they calm down and think about it even for a moment, however, they should be able to see how badly doing this now, during an election, would inflame our highly combustible politics. Three prosecutors, all Democrats, all working for Democratic administrations with the support of Democratic-leaning corporate media organizations, are seen as waging nuclear lawfare to deny 70 million-plus Republican voters the right to support the presidential candidate and party of their choice.
I don’t know how this ends. Civil war? Random political violence? Polarization like you’ve never even dreamed of? Whatever happens, I guarantee it won’t be good.
There is a way out.
Offer Trump a plea deal.
At this writing, here is the legal lay of the land. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records, some related to paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels. Legal experts think Bragg has a better-than-even chance to nail Trump in court, despite the novel construction of his case. Now Trump faces 37 counts for mishandling classified documents in federal court in Miami; his odds of walking away free are still worse there. Soon, in early August, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis may join Indictment-a-palooza with her own set of felony charges, that Trump tried to interfere with the 2020 election.
Trump is famous for ignoring his lawyers’ advice. But he’s never before faced odds this long or downsides this steep. If a plea deal is offered, his legal team will be screaming at him to take it.
Assuming the former president is wise enough to listen—or listen to his second and third set of attorneys after he fires his first ones, for they too will be shouting at him to make a deal—the terms of a plea arrangement will have to satisfy the courts (i.e., Democrats) without enraging Team MAGA.
Charging parties in Georgia, New York and the Department of Justice would need to agree on a set of conditions that would ensure Trump was covered by any and all claims likely to be filed before the November 2024 election.
Now for the terms:
No prison.
By all means, disrespect Trump the man. Trump the former president and Trump the major-party candidate, however, represent the aspirations of tens of millions of Americans who felt unheard and unseen before he rode down the Trump Tower elevator in 2015. If you humiliate this man—trials, convictions, handcuffs, chains, jumpsuit—his supporters will feel his shame as their own. Furthermore, it would be impossible to overstate the international scorn and disdain that would be heaped upon the U.S. after a sordid spectacle better suited to an s-hole country in the developing world. We have a two-party system. If you hobble one candidate, tie him up in court and/or jail him, you no longer have the pretense of a democracy—you’ve created a one-party system. Biden will become America’s Saddam.
Who would ever listen to another pompous declamation about American exceptionalism?
For decades I was angry at Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon because it sent the message that presidents are above the law. I was wrong. I have since come to appreciate Ford’s calm, common-sense Midwestern wisdom. Ford understood that America needed to move on, that to do otherwise would have meant we would have been talking about Nixon for the rest of the 1970s and beyond—the way we can’t stop obsessing over Trump now. Hard as it is to accept that Trump should walk free on so many charges, charges that his own administration pursued against far nobler people who went to prison as a result, if you want to salvage the republic Trump must be spared prison.
Federal prosecutors sometimes require that a politician drop out of politics as part of a plea deal. In 1982, for example, a Congressman from New York agreed to resign his seat in Congress, stay out of politics and to plead guilty to federal tax, narcotics and conflict-of-interest. Plea bargains filed by state DAs forced out the governors of Alabama in 2017 and Missouri in 2018.
Trump’s ability to campaign and potentially regain the presidency in a fair election is essential to assure Republicans that they have not been victimized by a weaponized government. Democrats and Never Trump Republicans will find this tough to digest. Surely a man who incited the January 6th Capitol riot doesn’t deserve to be president. But democracy requires at least two candidates, neither behind bars or banned from participating.
If not prison or proscription, what?
Fines. Big fines.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.5 billion. Let the two states and the federal government split $2 billion, payable within a year of settlement. If he defaults, clap him in cuffs and frog-march him out of his hidey-hole, whether it’s Mar-a-Lago or the White House.
For a man who values money more than anything else, taking a financial haircut would represent real accountability. His agreement to pay a significant public settlement would serve as tacit acknowledgement of his guilt. No amount of grandstanding at his rallies would convince anyone of his innocence.
For God’s sake, offer Trump a deal before it’s too late.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
2 Comments.
Yeah, I don’t want him to wiggle out of prosecution. Tired of politicians being above the law. I do like your huge fines solution, at least it’s something. Who knows if he will ever pay though.
Remember Mike Milken? He got fined about $1 billion for securities shenanigans and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was worth about $2 billion at the time. He paid the fines, turned against his co-conspirators, and got the sentence reduced to two years. Years later, Trump pardoned him. Today? Mike Milken is worth $6 billion and is one of the richest people on the planet.
The Sackler Gang? The family is worth about $13 billion. Their opioid settlement — in which they admitted no wrongdoing — cost them $4.5 billion. It’s the same cold equations as with Milken: if a few years, they will be worth even more than $13 billion. Apparently (why follow the details closely when I know how it will end anyway) they are immune from prosecution as part of that settlement.
Now’s let turn to the criminal of the hour: the totality of the democratic party’s leadership. You want trials? Put the dnc, the leading donors, the head honchos, and so forth in jumpsuits and try them. Broadcast it like the Eichmann trial.
Donald Trump was in office for the longest four years of anyone’s collective memory. His presidency seemed to stretch to the horizon. All the prosecutors had months, if not years, to do all the prep work for some of Trump’s doings. And for the things Trump was involved in that were more recent (e.g., the January 6 Reichstag fire), they certainly should have had it done in less than two and a half years.
In no way, shape, or form, has the democratic party behaved with anything like vigor, confidence, or stridency in any way whatsoever since winning the election. They lost Roe v. Wade. Afghanistan was a fiasco. The “signature” legislation to save the environment was kneecapped by a multimillionaire from West Virginia who made Biden turn it into a nothingburger. Biden’s student loan token gimme of a pittance ($10K, we’re back to the Sacklers and Milken — in a few years, the interest will wipe out that $10K discount) is headed toward defeat. Now they say they want to put Trump in prison. They won’t succeed. Why?
If they put Trump in prison, that means that when Hunter Biden finally gets called up on charges, and the paper trail is linked back to Big Daddy Bull Joe Biden, Biden’ll have to go to prison too. If he doesn’t, the Trumpistas will go kamikaze.
The whole mess is the democrats’ fault. They didn’t clean it up in the window of opportunity they had, just like Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn’t leave office when she could have been replaced with a liberal, just like Feinstein is still being wheeled around like Queen Xanxia, just like the democrats didn’t pass universal healthcare or codify abortion rights. Just like Harris hasn’t been told to hit the showers.
Trump’s a Three Stooges villain. He gets ALL the media coverage. Everyone seems scared to death of him as an existential threat, but no one did anything to get him into a cell for years. He was left to run around with scissors while everyone stared into space. Can we just admit it: the dems missed their window, Trump’s up for election, and because of how the democrats hamboned this, it’s going to energize the Republican base to vote for Trump specifically to spite the democrats.
About a hundred years ago, Hitler got sent to prison by his political opponents. He turned it into a campaign plus. I hope we’re all ready to watch the exact same scenario play out.