Defendant Trump
David Cay Johnston summarizes what it must feel like to be defendant Donald Trump this way: “Ahead lie expected indictments in New York and Georgia, contesting 20 civil lawsuits, massive legal bills, and keeping up payments on $1.3 billion of debt as his businesses struggle. His three golf resorts in Scotland and Ireland have lost more than $100 million in just seven months, he must refinance his $100 million Trump Tower loan.” All of which ought to keep Trump miserably busy for the rest of his life. Remember, none of this stuff is going to get settled quickly. We are talking about the American legal system here, which is no more quick and efficient than any other legal system.
Then, of course, there’s the dire Mazars predicament. When Trump’s own accounting firm fired him and proclaimed the last decade of his financial statements null and void, a veritable economic Pandora’s Box was opened, with ramifications that could result in many more lawsuits and more possible indictments.
MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell is of the opinion that it’s impossible to conventionally incarcerate Trump because there would be no way to do so with Trump’s full Secret Service detail. I dispute that without recourse to anything but common logic. Is his detail with him everywhere? Are they with Trump in his bedroom? Other than being posted outside doors are they in his home? Do they follow him into his bathroom? Of course not. They aren’t needed in those places. Why would they be needed if he were in solitary confinement, where he would be surrounded by law enforcement anyway? Besides, there is no Constitutional requirement that Trump have a Secret Service detail with him at all times.
The question of whether or not Trump will go to prison isn’t up to me, of course, it’s up to the American legal system and due process. I hope he does, because if Trump doesn’t go to prison then very few should. The cause of my uncertainty has been largely misunderstood, so I will repeat it here for clarification.
The fact that America has never indicted let alone jailed a former president doesn’t mean that it won’t. I was born in a world where human beings had never set foot on the moon, no American president had ever resigned and exactly one American president had been impeached exactly one time. It would be absurd for me to suggest Trump can’t be indicted and jailed merely because no American president ever has, and I have never once suggested otherwise, despite being accused of just that. I hope that settles that question for all time.
What I did say is, since it’s never happened before I have no way of computing the odds that it will happen this time. In other words, I don’t know if the American justice system is up to the task. I’ve seen cops get away with murder literally hundreds of times. If they’re hard to bring to justice, how much harder will it be to do the same for the president of the United States? We shall see. I make no predictions. I merely fervently hope.
All of which is to say, I won’t be proven wrong if Trump goes to jail. In fact I will be just as gratified as you are if he does. But when you strip away the raw circumstance that America is most emphatically NOT a land of equal justice under the law, and has never earned the right to suggest otherwise, I can hardly be faulted for fearing that Trump might get away with it. We still have a thing called Due Process, which is every citizen’s right. Only in totalitarian regimes are trials strictly for show.
When I was a youth I believed in the space program and believed we’d make it to the moon despite the odds. And we did it. I have refused to be bitter or cynical about the question of whether or not Trump will go to prison, I just remain hopeful. The bottom line is that I just don’t know for sure, but I’m okay with not knowing. It doesn’t bother me. If you’re in the same boat then it shouldn’t bother you either.
Meanwhile, the fact that Trump is impoverished and miserable and will be kept that way for the rest of his life will serve, for me anyway, as an interim consolation prize until and if the real prize comes our way. But I will not use my uncertainty as an excuse to give up. Quite the contrary, I am galvanized by it. So should you be. In the end we may not win everything, but we certainly won’t win if we give up — or never try in the first place. Never forget that justice is a thing always worth fighting for. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.