LONDON: Trump, facing multiple legal battles, receives special treatment while openly undermining the rule of law, raising concerns about the justice system’s integrity.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”, said Donald Trump in Iowa before the 2006 presidential election that brought him to power. Trump later claimed it was a joke, but many saw this as an early indication that, unlike ordinary mortals, Donald Trump considers himself above the law. Fast forward to today and as Trump’s legal problems build up to a crescendo, law experts in the US are astonished by the special treatment he is receiving, even though he denigrates prosecutors, openly vilifies judges and their families, and lies about his cases. “I can’t imagine any other defendant posting on social media about a judge’s family and not being very quickly incarcerated”, said Russell Gold, a law professor at the University of Alabama, adding “his ongoing efforts to impugn the integrity of the legal proceedings against him make a strong argument for his detention.”
In recent months a series of judges have been forced to reckon with the ex-president’s arrogant behaviour. Donald Trump pretends to be furious when called to account for his actions and is openly disdainful of the rule of law, but secretly sees political advantage in provoking sanctions on himself. He considers the indictments as “badges of honour”, telling his supporters “I am doing this for you. I am your voice. I am your warrior. I am your justice.” The curious thing is that many voters are duped into believing every word he says and subsequently his poll ratings have soared. Analysts have concluded that if judges give Trump too much latitude, he undermines the standing of the US criminal justice system; if they act too forcefully, they end up rewarding his worst behaviour.
Friday marked the end of the third week of Trump’s first criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to conceal a hush money payment of $130,000 intended to silence porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election. Signs that the patience of the judiciary was wearing thin came on Tuesday when New York judge Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt of court and fined him $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order that barred him from making public statements about witnesses and jurors. If he does it again, the judge warned, he could be jailed raising the spectre of a former president campaigning for the presidency from behind bars. Trump has already been fined for more than $15,000 for violating a gag order during his civil fraud trial last year.
Donald Trump is currently facing 91 criminal counts in four separate indictments. In this first criminal trial in New York, commonly called the “Hush Money Case” and considered the weakest of the four, Trump faces 34 first-degree felony charges for allegedly working through his former attorney Michael Cohen and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to “catch and kill” embarrassing stories, passing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to silence allegations of affairs and a child born out of wedlock, then allegedly falsifying records to conceal payments. The prosecution claims that Cohen paid out the money, which was then reimbursed to him through a series of instalment payments processed by Trump’s company. It’s claimed that the former president fraudulently disguised those instalments as corporate legal expenses in violation of New York law.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg who is leading the prosecution insisted that “we cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.
Donald Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election, which was fraud, pure and simple”. Trump has pleaded not guilty, with his defence arguing that the 34 charges faced by their client “are really just 34 pieces of paper”, a simple dispute over “bookkeeping”. This trial is expected to last another month or more and Trump, who has inevitably cast the prosecution as an effort to hurt his 2024 presidential campaign, is required to be present. “They don’t want me on the campaign trail”, he insists, promoting yet another conspiracy theory.
Waiting in the wings, however, are three considerably more serious cases, two of which relate to the 2020 presidential election. In the “Federal Election Case”, Donald Trump is charged with mounting a wide-ranging campaign to subvert Joe Biden’s victory by spreading false information about voter fraud, urging Republican state officials to undermine the results in states Biden won, assembling false slates of electors and pressurising Mike Pence, the vice president, to unilaterally toss out the legitimate results.
This case is of monumental significance. In effect, Trump is charged with having orchestrated a conspiracy to subvert the bedrock of democracy – the outcome of a freely held election – as the first president in history to resist the peaceful handover of power, culminating in the infamous Jan 6th storming of the Capitol.
Then there’s the “Georgia Election Interference Case”, where Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election were perhaps the most aggressive. Multiple recounts confirmed that Joe Biden narrowly won, but it’s alleged that Trump and his allies spread lies about voter fraud, urged Georgia officials and state lawmakers to reverse Biden’s narrow win and send fake electors to Washington. Incriminating evidence is provided by Trump himself in a recording of a conversation with Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, the number needed to overcome Biden’s victory.
The third pending “Classified Documents Case” accuses Trump of taking highly sensitive national security documents when he left the White House in January 2021. He’s accused of stashing these documents haphazardly throughout his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstructing the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve them. On at least two occasions, Trump showed the documents to unauthorised individuals, one of which was audio-recorded and concerned a top-secret military plan of attack.
Whether or not these three cases are heard before the presidential election in November depends on the decision of the US Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating on Trump’s claim that he is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal charges for actions committed while in office. Those against pose the question, “Would total immunity mean a future president was free to kill his or her rivals?” Those arguing for immunity say that without it, presidents leaving office would be subject to the whims of individual prosecutors and thrown into jail as part of political vendettas. Lower courts have rejected the concept of presidential immunity, agreeing with the argument that Trump’s novel legal theory of enjoying absolute immunity from criminal liability would immunise any president who commits bribery, treason, sedition and murder—or in Trump’s case, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power.
How the Supreme Court will rule is the subject of much speculation. Many believe that the four conservative members, most of whom Trump appointed, will vote for an outcome that in some form spares the ex-president from facing a jury before he faces the American electorate on 5 November. Chief Justice John Roberts even appeared to suggest that he might be tempted to push the case back to a lower court for further time-consuming deliberation. All of which would play precisely into Trump’s hands as from day one his strategy has been delay, delay, delay. His aim is to kick the prosecutorial-can as far down the road as possible so that he can win re-election and appoint a manipulative attorney general who will scrap all charges. He might even pardon himself!
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.