The Law Went Light on Trump—and Now America Will Pay the Price

If you had told me a year ago that Donald Trump was going to skate away from all the legal trouble he was in, I would have laughed in your face. I was confident after all his years of ripping people off and not paying taxes and taking the Fifth (nearly 450 times in one day in 2022, remember that one?), the law was finally going to catch him. You could get away with that stuff as a rich and powerful (if bankrupt) real estate mogul; but once you run for office, I thought (and wrote), you’ve entered a new arena, where accountability is more real and fancy lawyering can’t brush away obvious facts.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. OK, he didn’t totally skate. He was convicted in the Stormy Daniels case. He was scheduled to be sentenced—be prepared to wince hard here—Tuesday. As in yesterday. Imagine that reality for a few seconds.

But we live in a different reality, thanks to Trump’s election victory. And that reality isn’t only about the past. It’s very much about the future, because the lesson Trump is going to take away from these legal experiences is that he can do anything he wants.

Before we get to that, let’s review the cases, criminal and civil.

On the criminal side: Yes, he was convicted in the Daniels hush-money case. Judge Juan Merchan, in delaying sentencing last week, gave Trump’s lawyers until next Monday to file a motion seeking to dismiss the case. Manhattan Dristrict Attorney Alvin Bragg will fight such a move, but it would hardly be shocking to see Trump’s lawyers win this one. The voters elected the guy president.

Second, as we learned this week, Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith is closing up shop. Third, the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecution looks to be dead, thanks in part to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s insanely horrible judgment in having an affair with a special prosecutor working on the Trump case. Fourth and last is the classified documents case. I need only say two words about that: Aileen, and Cannon.

The three civil cases aren’t dead. The first is the $83 million defamation judgment against Trump for E. Jean Carroll, which Trump has appealed. The second is the judgment won by New York Attorney General Letitia James over Trump inflating the value of his real estate. That verdict was $454 million. Trump’s bond was whacked down to $175 million. It also is under appeal. Finally, the Central Park Five are suing Trump over comments he made about them in his one debate with Kamala Harris, so that one’s just getting started.

Civil suits can proceed against presidents (remember Paula Jones and Bill Clinton?). But they have to be conducted in such a way as to not interfere with the president’s performance of his … I choke on this word in reference to Donald Trump, but: duties. And they may just get tossed on appeal anyway. (Meanwhile, if you’re keeping count, Trump is also in court as a litigant; he’s suing CBS, ABC, CNN, and Simon & Schuster.)

It’s just staggering. The man called Georgia’s top election official and said, in essence, go find me 11,780 votes. Next, he very obviously incited an insurrection against the United States. Then, after that failed, he walked out of the White House with 13,000 government documents, at least 300 of which were classified, and spent months ignoring entreaties from the FBI to allow the bureau to conduct a quiet review.

Trump’s defenders say these were politically motivated prosecutions. I suppose I can see why some people would think that, especially with propaganda news outlets relentlessly driving home that interpretation. But in reality, if anything, the legal system showed restraint with respect to Trump. He could have been prosecuted for a number of things that the system just let go. They could have come after him on obstruction of justice with respect to the Mueller report. Another one was his destruction of who knows how many presidential records, in clear violation of the Presidential Records Act. Remember that story? There was a range of unprosecuted potential campaign finance violations. He probably, let us say, pushed the limits of the law every single week he was in office. That’s who the man is.

That’s who he’s always been. He acts with complete impunity and disregard for the law, and he dares prosecutors and potential plaintiffs: Come at me, take your shot. And his lawyers just delay, delay, delay. His lawyers on these cases haven’t been geniuses. They’ve been pretty lousy. But they’ve taken every opportunity the system allows defense lawyers to seek delays.

Everybody blames Merrick Garland. And everybody isn’t wrong. Why it took the U.S. attorney general until November 2022 to appoint a special counsel on the January 6 case remains a mystery. If he’d moved a year earlier, would it have made a difference? I’m not saying he shouldn’t have, but the available evidence suggests to us that either: (1) Trump’s lawyers would still have been able to delay; (2) he’d have been convicted, but it wouldn’t have mattered, and indeed would have helped him make his case about what a martyr he was; and (3) he’d have been exonerated.

Trump was lucky. Insanely lucky. How did the classified documents case get assigned to the person who has to be the hackiest judge in that circuit, whose shamelessness in every single thing she did was just jaw-dropping? How did he get a Supreme Court that announced in February of an election year that it would hear arguments about presidential immunity, but then scheduled those arguments for late April, eight weeks later, and issued its ruling on July 1, nine weeks after that? Well, we know how he got that court—he appointed a third of it. But how they managed to make the nation wait for 17 weeks is still mind-blowing.

Of course, given how the court ruled, it wouldn’t have mattered. And now, we’re going to have a President Trump who is about to see criminal cases against him dismissed and civil cases potentially won on appeal, and who has been told by the Supreme Court that he can do pretty much anything he wants to do as president because as long as he dresses it up as an official act, it’s legal.

“It’s not illegal if the president does it,” Richard Nixon infamously told David Frost. Scorn and obloquy were heaped on Nixon, and properly so, for making that egregiously un-American statement. Well, now, thanks to Donald Trump and John Roberts and crew, it’s an American statement. And the only lesson Trump will learn from all this is that he can do anything. Which, alas, is the right lesson.