The “core vote” is enough to guarantee that Trump will get the party’s nomination for president again, but in the real election 15 months from now Democrats and “independents” vote too. In that race, Trump and Biden are running neck and neck.
Given Trump’s enormous self-confidence, that was enough to convince him that he would never spend time in jail — until this week and the Georgia indictments. Only 13 more criminal charges (for a total of 91) — but Georgia is different.
The New York cases are weak and Trump isn’t worried. If the federal indictments in Washington and Florida haven’t yet gone to trial, winning the presidency again he can just order his Attorney General to cancel them. If he has been found guilty already, he can use his presidential powers to pardon himself. But there’s nothing he can do about the indictments in Georgia.
Not only can he not pardon himself for any convictions in Georgia (the president can only pardon federal offences), but convictions are far more likely in the Georgia courts, for several reasons.
One is that in Georgia Trump has been charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law (RICO), which was originally designed to arraign Mafia and other underworld bosses who gave the orders but did not commit the crimes personally. Many states (and the federal government) have RICO laws, but Georgia’s is particularly broad.
Another difference is the fact that 18 other people have been indicted for helping Trump to commit the crimes he is charged with. They include Trump’s former lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and John Eastman, the law professor who made up bogus legal theories to justify Trump’s actions. Another 14 people are included in the indictment, most of them ordinary people who were drawn into Trump’s scheme to overthrow the election outcome in Georgia, and a further 30 named but unindicted co-conspirators.
Trump will doubtless pay their legal expenses and get them good lawyers, but a lot of them will be very frightened and open to a plea bargain. The whole point of going after the “little fish” is to shake loose further evidence of Trump’s direct involvement in the plot, and it’s likely to work.
Finally, the trial will be televised. Normally that would work well for a TV pro like Trump, but he will be very uncomfortable on a stage which he does not control. The spectacle will shrink him in the public’s eyes even if he isn’t found guilty, but he’s more likely to be convicted — and then it gets really interesting.
If there’s a conviction before the election (improbable), then it would probably scuttle Trump’s chances of regaining the presidency, and he would really go to jail once the appeals ran out.
If he was safely in the White House before he was convicted, then there would be a convicted criminal running the country, which was a contingency overlooked by the authors of the Constitution. But it’s doubtful that Georgia could “extradite” him. Civil war? Probably not. Political paralysis? Certainly. For how long, and with what effects? Nobody knows.
Down here in the weeds, speculating about possible futures, it’s easy to forget that all this is due to an actual coup attempt by the outgoing US president. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” a Roman lawyer of classical times would have said. I would say that justice must be done so the heavens don’t fall.
■ Gwynne Dyer’s latest book is ‘The Shortest History of War’.
