Trump Will Burn America Before He Faces Justice

Politics doesn’t get easier than this. American voters may face a choice next year between a criminal defendant who vows retribution against his pursuers and another man. It will be a referendum on the rule of law.

If the first man wins, he will likely escape prison for his many alleged crimes. If the second wins, the first is likely to go to jail. If democracy could be reduced to one of those brutal reality TV games, this would be it. How Donald Trump likes it, of course.

The question is not whether a victorious Trump will deploy the machinery of justice for personal ends. They have repeatedly declared that they will use the law as a tool for revenge – and they will. It pays to take it literally.

The question is to what extent will Trump go to stay out of jail. He would have nothing to lose. The other man he’s facing is Joe Biden.

Most Americans go through their lives without ever committing a felony. Some get records for relatively trivial things. Trump is accused of 71 felonies in two sets of indictments – paying a porn star secretly and hiding highly classified documents. He could theoretically face centuries behind bars.

By the time the other investigations are over – his chargesheet tally could exceed 100 – on his efforts to subvert American democracy on January 6, 2021, and for trying to hold elections in Georgia.

It is surprising that any free society would reward such a candidate. there is too much. Look at the late Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, who spent decades in a revolving door between electoral victory and the courtroom. Or Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants to nullify Israel’s independent judiciary in order to avoid his day in court.

Such figures build a cult around themselves that ultimately has little to do with ideology. It’s about what they’re willing to do to survive. They succeed by confusing their own sense of victimization with a broader sense of victimhood.

This explains why Trump’s support among Republicans grows with each indictment. In some elections he now gets more than all the other candidates combined. Echoing the claim that Biden has weaponized the justice system, his rivals cite him as the narrative. If Trump is the banner victim of the system, why bother with his chorus?

It remains to be seen whether former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has been the lone Trump attackist, will resonate. Christie said of Trump this week, “Look how angry he is.” “It is never about what is being done to the country. It’s me poor, hunt me down.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump’s legal threat makes his party’s nomination more likely and his general election victory less likely. The first one is definitely correct. The second is open to doubt.

In both 2016 and 2020, Trump repeatedly said that the election against him would be rigged. In the first, it was only his pride at stake. Although he won the Electoral College, Trump’s vanity was wounded enough to insist that he had not lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. He also launched a futile investigation to uncover electoral rigging.

The personal stakes for Trump in 2020 are higher than in 2016 as he has already been impeached once and is facing multiple investigations, mostly into his business affairs. But that was apparently before he secreted dozens of boxes of classified material at Mar-a-Lago, which led to his arraignment in Miami this week. Nor has he yet been accused of inciting the attack on Capitol Hill to prevent Biden’s victory from being confirmed. He had previously tried to intimidate Georgian election officials into changing the outcome of the election.

In his first two elections, Trump nevertheless violated American norms. One of his 2016 rallies was a Clinton-targeted “Lock Her Up”.

Those days seem pleasant by comparison. How far will Trump go next year to keep himself out of jail? The question is rhetorical: We can only guess what, if anything, he would consider not doing. On the plus side, a majority of American voters believe Trump’s criminal charges should make him ineligible to run for re-election. In the minuses, Trump’s character and methods weren’t exactly a mystery in 2016.

Most modern US elections start with roughly 50/50 odds. Due to the quirks of the Electoral College, Trump would need about 47 percent of the vote to be within range of reclaiming the White House. It will be his get-out-of-jail-free card – and America’s last rites.

edward.luce@ft.com