“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
Trump post in September aimed at Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AG Merrick Garland and the many US Attorneys, federal judges, state courts and prosecutors that challenged Trump’s claims of winning the 2020 election.
“They talk about democracy: I’m a threat to democracy. They’re the threat to democracy — with the fake Russia Russia Russia investigation that went nowhere.”
Trump at the September Presidential Debate
With a Supreme Court putting a Trump-biased thumb on the scales of justice, an archaic Electoral College system fully capable of electing a president of the United States despite a popular vote to the contrary, red state election boards and legislatures working overtime to find ways to exclude likely Democratic voters as well as being able to reverse voting results they do not like after the fact, legions of MAGA lawyers retained to pre-structure a Trump bias into election machinery and throw roadblocks and judicial reversals should Trump still lose despite such efforts, and well-armed MAGA-driven militia threatening civil war should Trump lose, you have to wonder whether this election could ever be fair. Will a loss indeed be the “bloodbath” Trump has ordained?
With ample proof, sustained by 60 judicial opinions (many by Trump appointees), that the 2020 election was fair, the results accurate, it seems that a free and fair election remains a direct threat to Trump’s path back to the White House. So, the Trump and MAGA pre-election strategy is to rig the election so absent a massive groundswell electing his opponent, he cannot lose. Despite all that evidence, both Donald Trump and, as illustrated in the VP debate, JD Vance firmly believe that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and that the January 6, 2021, vicious armed attackers who descended on the Capitol, overwhelming and injuring well over a hundred Capitol Police, were “patriots” and their incarceration following conviction for the related criminal acts makes them “hostages.”
Trump himself believes he was given a “get out of jail” card when the Supreme Court granted him “immunity” for “official” presidential acts (minus a relevant definition). The federal trial court where Trump is facing criminal prosecution is now reviewing a post-immunity ruling, revised criminal complaint and a lengthy associated trial brief addressing how the remaining charges against Trump are for actions that were not “official” presidential matters. As summarized by the October 3rd BBC, “‘Donald Trump resorted to crimes’ while trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and should not escape charges, prosecutors say.
“A new court filing challenges Trump's claim that he should avoid a trial thanks to a recent landmark US Supreme Court [immunity] ruling… Trump was president when the alleged offences were committed - but prosecutors say he was acting in a ‘private ’capacity, not an official one.
“In response, Trump has repeated false claims that the 2020 vote was ‘rigged’ and suggested the timing of the filing's release was designed to hurt his 2024 campaign [clear “election interference,” Trump maintains]... US District Judge Tanya Chutkan released the document - filed by [special federal prosecutor Jack] Smith last week - with redactions on Wednesday [10/2].”
Most legal scholars agree that, if elected, Trump will defund and stop all these federal efforts to convict him for his efforts at overthrowing the 2020 election. Many believe he will also follow through on his pledge to reconfigure the Department of Justice, using the US military, if necessary (currently illegal), to arrest and convict his US political opponents. But how could he implement that threat in reality? Writing for the October 3rd New York Times Magazine relying on a survey of 50 prominent lawyers and jurists in D.C. (roughly equal representations of each major party), Emily Bazelon and Mattathias Schwartz address that question, beginning with the outrage and resulting policies generated by Richard Nixon’s participation in the 1972 Watergate Scandal:
“But these safeguards are all dependent on voluntary compliance. And so, despite the precautions Biden and Garland have taken, the charges filed by Smith establish an uncomfortable precedent. Maybe the most harmful thing the former president has done to the rule of law is to engage in behavior so reckless that he effectively dared his successor’s Justice Department to investigate him.
“It’s easy to see what the peril of not investigating Trump’s most law-defying conduct might have been: For laws to have credibility, they must be applied to everyone. Once those investigations led to indictments, however, different perils emerged, which Trump has been quick to exploit. Trump urges his supporters to trade faith in the American system for faith in him. His claims that the cases against him are corrupt have undermined his supporters’ confidence in the justice system itself… Still, for all the strain that Trump has placed on the system, both during and after his term in office, it has for the most part held. The big question for American law — and democracy — is whether it would continue to do so in a possible second Trump term…
“[An] overwhelming majority of our respondents told us that they are alarmed about Trump’s potential impact on the Justice Department, many to a degree that they don’t think the public conversation reflects. Forty-two of the 50 former officials said it was very likely or likely that a second Trump term would pose a significant threat to the norm of keeping criminal enforcement free of White House influence. Thirty-nine of the respondents (all but one of the Democratic appointees and most of the Republican ones) said it was likely or very likely that if re-elected, Trump would follow through on ordering the Justice Department to conduct a specific investigation. (Six more said it was possible.)
“Some conservatives as well as liberals said that an extremist president in general, and Trump in particular, was the biggest threat they saw to the rule of law. Peter Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society and an assistant attorney general as well as acting attorney general for President George W. Bush, captured how many of our respondents felt. ‘There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the F.B.I. as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what will happen, but the risk is more concrete, with a higher probability, than in any election in my lifetime.’…
“Prosecutors and F.B.I. agents often say their work begins with looking into a crime, not a person. ‘But if you really want to start with a person, it can be done,’ William Yeomans, a career lawyer in the Justice Department for 26 years, told us. ‘The political people can ask the F.B.I. to investigate, and the F.B.I. is going to do it, at least by taking a preliminary look. And frequently you can find something, some hook to justify an investigation. And once it starts, who knows what’s going to happen.’”
Sure, FBI agents and US Attorneys could push back, even resign, at such controlled intimidation, but a President with no moral compass could easily fire, reassign or replace those who oppose his vindictive efforts. And while federal judges, appointed for life, could mount a judicial campaign to support the rule of law, we already know that there is an ethics-impaired Supreme Court smiling down on Donald Trump… who appointed three of them. Can the tsunami against a reconfigured legal system, benefitting one man, be stopped? I hope we don’t have to find out!
I’m Peter Dekom, and we literally have no idea what the government might look like at the end of a second Trump term; we just know that the rule of law and the system of checks and balance may well be in irreparable tatters… and that the next generation of presidents may be preordained without resort to a fair election process.
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