Will Donald Trump please take the stand?
I was reminded recently, inanely, of an episode of the original Star Trek. Captain Kirk is being court-martialed. Kirk’s quirky and old-fashioned lawyer calls for Kirk to be allowed to confront the witness against him — the ship’s computer. Of course the stunt worked. That was the 60s and reality worked that way in the fiction of the times. Such fictions typically conclude with predictably satisfying and neatly packaged denouements where the misunderstood hero is returned to his former glory.
As satisfying as the idea may seem, a defendant facing multiple charges connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol asking to subpoena former president Trump as a trial witness probably isn’t going to happen. This is the real world and such courtroom stunts usually don’t work. Besides, when and if Donald Trump is ordered to take the stand will occur as the direct consequence of forces applied equal to his station. Don’t kid yourself, America is every bit the aristocracy I live in here in England, and there are two sets of rules: those for the elite and those for everyone else. Defendant Dustin Thompson emphatically belongs to the “everyone else” class.
Thompson’s attorney said some of the other witnesses they would like to subpoena include former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, conservative lawyer John Eastman, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Donald Trump Jr.
“[The] Defendant submits that the testimony of Mr. Trump and his conspirators will establish that they were determined, by any means necessary, to prevent Congress from fulfilling its constitutional mandate to certify the election results,” the court filing proclaimed. It would be great to see a Trump subpoena happen, and if any material witness was required to appear in order to fulfill the state’s obligation to provide Mr. Thompson with a fair trial, that witness would be duly subpoenaed. But it’s probably not going to happen with Donald Trump, because he’s a former president and, for all its egalitarian promise, America is far from the ideal of equal justice under the law.
Should the time come that Trump goes to prison, lawmakers in the United States would do well to use him as an exemplar of the fact that equal justice under the law really is possible, and they should make sure the full weight of the law is distributed more fairly from that point forward. 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.