Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕
Trump’s indictment for trying to reverse his 2020 loss brought back the sheer insanity of the end of his presidency: the DOJ and Pentagon were decapitated and stuffed with his cronies. Per the indictment, at least one Trump crony was willing to act on talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to put down the protests which would have erupted had Trump succeeded in stealing the election.
That in itself is a stunning appeal to violence, but it’s a part of the coup attempt which is revealing in a different way. Trump’s attempt to keep a grip on power was intensely legalistic; from the arguments in court to the fake electors scheme to Jeff Clark’s above mention of the Insurrection Act, it all relied on sequential, discrete legal justifications to achieve an illegal result.
It’s no accident that all of the co-conspirators described but not named in the indictment appear to have been conservative attorneys. Ken Chesebro, the Trump attorney who is largely responsible for devising the fake electors scheme AKA co-conspirator 5, genuinely believed when I met him last year that, as he put it, “this is what lawyers do.” In his mind, he was simply advocating on his client’s behalf, developing esoteric legal theories which could help his client resolve a dispute he had with the handling of the 2020 election.
I’m not trying to get into what may or may not be moral degeneracy in the legal profession. Rather, the intense focus on maintaining a facade of legality comes from at least a few factors (I won’t pretend to identify them all).
Part of it is the sheer absurdity and audacity of what they were trying to do: reverse an election result. You need to act as if everything you’re doing is part of some hidebound legal process to overcome that. There’s also the necessity of it. Things were crazy, but not so crazy that violence alone would have worked (though John Eastman allegedly entertained the idea of resolving the election “in the streets”). You needed a legal process because Trump was trying to get the country away from the nation of laws that, at the time of his coup attempt, we still inhabited.
But there’s a broader reason here, too, which stems from the role that questions about the rule of law played in our politics in the years before the Trump administration. There were burgeoning protests against police brutality and unjust treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system. Mass disillusionment with how the criminal justice system treated the little guy was paralleled by how it failed when it came to addressing criminality at the top, with the Obama administration failing to prosecute any executive responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. I’ll admit that the cynicism which the above engendered led me astray: I didn’t think DOJ would have the juice to bring charges against Trump. I was wrong.
But the lack of accountability there (created by or contributing to the above, you decide) did make it at least more plausible that all of these attorneys and politicians could wrap arguments that were only about the raw exercise of power against the result of the 2020 election in legal language. It’s part of what’s so important about the Trump indictment this week. Calling their bluff, not only on the idea that you can manufacture any dispute and demand that everyone treat it as legitimate, but on the idea that it’s foolish to believe that the rule of law and equality before it still exists. And matters.
More on other news below. Let’s dig in.
