The Trump Non-Indictment: Three Dimensional Chess
A few afterthoughts on the spectacle - the debacle - of the week. Has the 2024 election been framed already?
As a practitioner of political congressional political campaigns - 35 elections, 25 states, over nearly three decades - my mission was always to frame the question that voters would take with them into the voting booth.
Yes, I know, in an era of early voting as much as 45 days before “election day” and the push to “vote from home,” that’s very quaint. But stay with me.
While partisans’ minds are made up early - about two-thirds of the electorate, give or take - there has always been a bevy of swing voters, especially self-identified independents, that made up almost a third of voters in 2022 and are a target-rich environment for campaigns. The Prime Objective of any campaign has always been to frame the question by which independent-minded voters decide.
The best framing in recent times came from Ronald Reagan in 1980. Forty-two years ago, with polls showing the race at a virtual dead heat, Reagan closed his October 28, 1980 debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter with this famous question: Are you better off than you were four years ago? I’ve teed it up here at the critical point. It’s worth a couple of minutes.
After years of gasoline and natural gas price spikes and shortages, double-digit inflation, and failures abroad, about 10 percent of largely undecided Americans flopped their support to Reagan the weekend before the election. He won in a landslide. Carter conceded almost three hours before polls closed on the west coast.
The reality is that external events often frame that question. Two years later, in October 1982, as the national unemployment rate hit double digits, Republicans lost 33 of the 54 US House seats they’d gained just two years previously. Reagan’s and the Federal Reserve Board’s successful efforts to squeeze double-digit inflation (interest rates on home mortgages exceeded 15% in 1980) came at a political price. But the economy rebounded, and Reagan would be rewarded with an even larger electoral majority two years later.
Given the historic “indictment” of a former President and current presidential candidate, has it already framed the 2024 election, even though it’s 17 months away?
The answer is probably no. Seventeen months until the 2024 general election is several lifetimes in politics - but it can’t be ruled out. It does beg the question. How do we gauge or judge this week’s historic indictment?
All me to suggest that this is a three-dimensional chess game: The legal, the political, and the historic. Let’s unpack these.
The legal I won’t pontificate about not being a lawyer, given the plethora of sound legal analysis across the spectrum. Note that leading anti-Trump Democratic superlawyers like Preet Bharara and Neal Katyal have remained silent since this week’s arraignment. That speaks volumes. Katyal is hanging his hat on another Trump investigation.
Here are the best breakdowns from former New York federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy and several others, including law professors Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz. The Epoch Times has the single best news summary of any I’ve seen. Check them out in that order.
The political is a wholly different dimension that deals with the future. How will this affect the 2024 election and politics, if not the culture, from now on?
We know that Trump’s campaign has raised more than $12 million in contributions since the indictment was announced last Friday. If Democrats were counting on an indictment curbing Trump’s political support, they must be disappointed. But I suspect they want him as the nominee since they perceive him as the easiest Republican to defeat in 2024.
That’s what Jimmy Carter’s campaign said about Ronald Reagan.
We also know that President Trump’s poll numbers have skyrocketed. He’s nearly even with his chief GOP primary challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the governor’s home state where DeSantis enjoys an 87 percent job approval.
However, I’m reminded of something the late US Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) once said at a retirement ceremony for one of my former staff in the Secretary of the Senate’s office. “Fame is a vapor. . . popularity is fleeting.”
Trump would be wise to remember that. So should former Ambassador to Germany and Acting Director of National Intelligence, the estimable Ric Grenell. He suggested that all current GOP candidates - Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley are the only two announced candidates - should drop out and endorse Trump NOW, given the criminalization of politics and the politicization of our legal system.
Clever, Mr. Ambassador, but that dog won’t hunt. Nor should it. That’s not how this works.
But grant the indictment’s effect this: Peggy Noonan’s framing of the 2016 election - the “protected” versus the “unprotected” - has come back to life. It is now the above-the-law elites against the rest of us. Except for this time, we have a two-tiered legal system clearly in evidence.
Other elements include Ramaswamy’s attack and focus on the “global citizenship,” ESG, and critical race theory elements of our degrading culture. But given the importance of a just legal system to a functioning society, cultural issues may take a back seat. When corruption creeps into a justice system, we really have descended into “banana republic” status. Just take a serious look at Mexico and its neighbors to the south.
Will that hold until November 2024, or even the Iowa caucuses early next year? We don’t know. There are two more Trump investigations and many other issues to emerge. There are debates in August among the announced GOP candidates, a number that is likely to grow beyond Haley and Ramaswamy. But make no mistake, our two-tiered system of justice and the criminalization of politics will be a top issue among GOP primary voters and probably many others well into the election season.
The last dimension is historical. How does this indictment affect our nation, its founding documents, and the functioning of our democratic republic?
Here, the news is more ominous. The indictment appears to be an attack on - a violation of - the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. But don’t take my word for it. From the Epoch Times:
The vagueness in the charging documents may also be a breach of Trump’s Constitutional right to due process, according to Mike Davis, founder of Article III Project, a conservative judicial advocacy group, told The Epoch Times.
“Bragg brought the first indictment of a former president and didn’t even allege the legal basis for his invasion,” said Davis, who clerked under U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“It should be dispositive, meaning under the 14th Amendment to our U.S. Constitution, Americans have the right to due process of law—and due process includes fair notice of the allegations against you so you can defend yourself in court.”
“Alvin Bragg got up in front of the TV cameras yesterday and bragged that he didn’t need to include the legal basis in his indictment,” Davis added. At the Tuesday press conference, Bragg said that “the indictment doesn’t specify [the other crime] because the law does not so require.”
But to Davis, this is “a clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, regardless of what Democrat judges and prosecutors in New York think.”
Imagine being indicted in court without the prosecutor disclosing the crime you allegedly violated. That’s what happened to Donald Trump.
That’s star chamber-level corruption, the kind our framers won independence against some 240 years ago.
As I mentioned in a previous post, former US Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson admonished prosecutors nearly 80 years ago to prosecute crimes, not people. Sadly, too many Democrats seem to have embraced the philosophy of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet secret police: “Show me the man, and I’ll find the crime.”
While using politically-motivated indictments and prosecutions may have worked before, especially when special prosecutor Lawrence Welsh indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger just before the 1992 presidential election - millions of Americans are now on to the schemes of the anti-democratic left.
Americans know that this has been going on for a while. Aside from the Weinberger issue, the phony Trump-Russia collusion hoax is Example 1. There are others.
Can our legal system be rescued from this prosecutorial and law enforcement abuse? We are about to find out, and it crosses all our three-dimensional chess game boards.