I began mulling over this post on March 19, when Donald Trump announced that he would be arrested (or indicted) the following Tuesday. The corporate media went wild with speculation pretending to be analysis, as anyone might have expected. Trump was not indicted that Tuesday, but that didn't stop the buzzing of the pundits. He was indicted a week later, which led to more gleeful buzzing although the charges were sealed until his arraignment on March 30. The MAGA Right was furious, while liberals were mostly uninterested in the substance of the matter, preferring to dwell on the fact that no president or ex-president had ever been indicted before, and speculating about what effect we could expect the indictment to have on Trump's candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. NPR's Morning Edition relied on the usual gang of inarticulate academics, Republican "consultants," and right-wing media commentators. Television news offered up prolonged coverage of Trump's motorcade to the airport, his plane idling on the tarmac before takeoff, and again, his return to Mar-a-Lago. Gag-making, but only to be expected. (If you think this is just an American media failure, try this BBC story, complete with a flowchart.)
True, no US president or ex-president has been held accountable for his crimes before, but that's an indictment of our political and justice system. It obsessed the media because it could pass as an "objective" fact so no one could accuse them of bias, because it fit with the media's fondness for collecting firsts, and it also let responsible pundits express their shock that a rich and powerful person was being held accountable as if he were poor and black, which is so unfair.
Trump and his toadies have denounced the indictment as "political," which is true but unimportant. It's also political that Trump has escaped prosecution for as long as he has. If prosecutor Alvin Bragg previously declined to prosecute him, that was also a political decision. Trump's impeachments were political, and it was political that Senate Republicans refused to vote for conviction. Bill Clinton's impeachment was political, as was Richard Nixon's resignation to escape removal, and Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon so that he wouldn't face prosecution after he left office. The same is true every time a political official is removed (or not) from office. I'm not saying, of course, that there are no actual legal issues involved in any of these cases, but as the mainstream coverage of Trump shows, they get lost in the flurry of distraction and propaganda.
I was mildly surprised when some leftists, such as the journalist Doug Henwood, objected to Trump's indictment. On March 30 Henwood tweeted, "This case against Trump seems flimsy and he can work his martyr role. I could see him gaining from it." Of course he'll work his martyr role, and he's done that. It's quite possible he'll gain from it, even if he's convicted. But he'll also gain if he's not indicted; that's how he became president in the first place. I don't know how flimsy the case against him is, and I don't believe Henwood really does either. That will be up to the jury.
Henwood also agreed "100" percent with a tweet that read "This is a huge mistake but whatever / The frivolity of this particular charge diminishes the actual serious crimes Trump has committed. It also opens the door for frivolous charges on every Democratic former president forever". Again, this is trivially true, but it was also true of Nixon's downfall. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was GOP payback for Nixon, and it failed, nor was it followed up. I believe I also saw similar objections to both impeachments of Trump. Yes, it's a risk, but there's also a risk of not prosecuting Trump. He'll work his martyr role no matter what he's accused of, and even if he's convicted of anything, he'll be appealing for the rest of his life; he'll never pay any other penalty. But there are other, cleverer GOP / MAGA pols waiting to take his place. Convicting Trump might be a tiny deterrent.
The political cartoonist and writer Ted Rall posted on Facebook at around the same time that Trump was only indicted because he had proven to be a "class traitor" so the elites were ready to toss him overboard. Also trivially true; I remember leftists such as Noam Chomsky saying the same about Nixon, that he only got into real trouble because he clashed with his peers, attacking the Washington Post and so on. But that was not a reason to give him impunity, nor to leave him in office. I'm not sure Rall intended to imply that, but it was a stupid post anyway. Anyone who wants Trump to be punished should bear those considerations in mind, but the precedent against indicting ex-Presidents has already fallen; it's time to break the precedent on convicting one.
There's a lot more going on politically than Trump right now -- the removal of two Democratic state legislators in Tennessee, action by the MAGA right against libraries, against drag performance and transgender people, against abortion drugs, revelations about Clarence Thomas's corruption, need I go on? For now I would rather let the wheels of justice grind and let a jury decide about Trump. He's under investigation elsewhere, though, and I fully expect that our media will do their best to exploit any outcomes that may emerge while obfuscating their significance.
