What Happens if Donald Trump Fights the Election Results?
Stealing a Presidential election in America is difficult, but it has been done before.
By Eric Lach The New Yorker
On the night of November 7, 1876, as the results of the Presidential election between Samuel Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican governor of Ohio, began to come in, America, in its centennial year, was barely holding together. Reconstruction was faltering. The economic collapse that followed the Panic of 1873 had left millions out of work, and provoked strikes and labor unrest across the nation. The outgoing Republican Administration of Ulysses S. Grant had been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals. A few months earlier, Sioux warriors had defeated General George Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn. Hayes, whom Henry Adams described as a “third-rate nonentity,” had earned the Republican nomination, in large part, by being the one candidate all factions of the Party could agree on. Tilden and the Democrats seemed poised for an easy victory. As the historian Eric Foner writes in “Reconstruction,” his history of the period, “political corruption and the depression became Tilden’s watchwords; issues many Republicans feared would suffice to carry the election.”
Before Election Day was over, it was clear
that Tilden, who, in his previous career as a Gilded Age corporate lawyer and
reorganizer of bankrupt railroad lines, had earned the nickname the Great
Forecloser, would comfortably win the popular vote. He needed only a single
vote in the Electoral College to put him over the top, and results were outstanding
in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where white citizens routinely used
violence, intimidation, and fraud to keep their Black neighbors, most of whom
were loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, from voting. With the
prospect of Democrats taking the White House through disenfranchisement at
hand, Republicans moved to steal the election outright. “With your state sure
for Hayes, he is elected,” Party leaders said in an Election Night telegram to
their cronies in the three Southern states. “Hold your state.”
In Florida, the two Republicans on the
three-person election board—Samuel McLin, the Florida secretary of state, and
Clayton Cowgill, the state comptroller—systematically approved and rejected
results, district by district, to swing the election in their party’s favor.
“If the canvassing board had simply accepted all the local returns, Tilden
would have prevailed by 94 votes,” Edward Foley, an election-law professor at
Ohio State University, writes in “Ballot Battles,” a
survey of disputed American elections. “In its decisive 2–1 rulings, however,
the board selectively invalidated Tilden-favoring returns because of
technicalities, while refusing to invalidate Hayes-favoring returns despite
clear evidence of actual fraud.” In this way, a narrow Tilden lead was
transformed into a narrow Hayes lead. Similar events unfolded in South Carolina
and Louisiana. “The result was manufactured by a deliberate manipulation of the
count,” Foley writes.
Democrats were outraged. What ensued is a
mostly forgotten episode of American misgovernment that has lately been
haunting Foley and other academics, as well as a loose network of bipartisan
ex-officials, activists, and think-tank types, who are now contemplating the
potential for a disputed election in the present day, at our own fraught
political moment. The three Southern states in 1876 each sent Congress two
pieces of paper, one from Republican electors certifying that Hayes had won the
election, the other from Democratic electors certifying that Tilden had. The
crisis these pieces of paper provoked, as Congress tried to reconcile their
competing claims, pushed America’s constitutional order to its breaking
point—or perhaps, looked at from another angle, it was a reflection of an order
that had already broken down.
The Twelfth Amendment, which lays out the
procedure for electing the President and Vice-President, says nothing about
what Congress should do in the event that states send competing election
certificates. Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats controlled the
House. The two chambers established a commission to try to break the impasse.
The dispute went on for months. (Back then, Administrations were inaugurated in
March.) With Inauguration just days away and the prospect looming of a country
with two people claiming the Presidency and no actual President, House Speaker
Samuel Randall presided over a debate described decades later in a history of
the crisis as “probably the stormiest ever witnessed in any House of
Representatives.” Congressmen reached for their revolvers, and women in the
gallery, “fearing a free fight,” ducked out of the chamber.
The tension broke only after William Levy,
a Democratic representative from Louisiana who had been in on negotiations
between the Southern states and Hayes’s camp, finally signalled that a deal had
been struck. Tilden and the Democrats would concede the White House to
Republicans, allowing Hayes to effectively steal back the election. Rising to
speak in the House chamber, Levy called upon his fellow-Democrats “to join me
in the course which I feel called upon and justified in pursuing.” The price
that Democrats exacted from Republicans, though, was incalculably high: the
drawdown of federal troops in the Southern states, the end of Reconstruction,
and the consignment of Black citizens to a century of violent repression. “The
negro will disappear from the field of national politics,” The Nation wrote
at the time. “Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do
with him.”
The Hayes-Tilden crisis was resolved,
Foley told me recently, “at the expense of America’s commitment to its own citizens.”
Unlike the 2000 election, between George Bush and Al Gore, where the dispute
was contained in the courts, the 1876 dispute spilled out into the broader
political system, and its outcome was openly determined by a naked struggle for
power between the two ruling parties. “Because many of us have a living memory
of 2000, we think that any election dispute is going to look like 2000,” he
said. “Where, in fact, I think that kind of gives us a false sense of what
might happen. I think there are now conditions in place that may cause this
year’s election to be more like 1876.”
It has been difficult, throughout Donald
Trump’s Presidency, to immediately know which of his declarations
represent constitutional danger and which are merely attention-seeking bluster.
“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election,” Trump told Fox News’s
Chris Wallace during a recent White House interview. When Wallace asked if the
President was suggesting that he might not accept the results, Trump, with
hands raised, replied, “I have to see. I’m not going to just say yes.” The
President’s intermittent musings about postponing the November election have so
reliably set off rounds of breathless news coverage that Marc Elias, one of the
Democratic Party’s go-to election lawyers, was compelled to write a blog post in
March titled “No, Trump Cannot Move the General Election.” Similarly, in
response to the persistent speculation that an electorally defeated Trump would
spend Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day holed up in the Lincoln Bedroom like Tony
Montana at the end of “Scarface,” the Biden campaign in July issued a pithy
statement saying, “the United States government is perfectly capable of
escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
But Trump’s threats about rejecting the
results come November are not idle. In 2016, Trump disputed the results of an
election he won, ludicrously claiming that his popular-vote shortfall was the
result of illegitimate ballots cast by millions of undocumented immigrants.
Four years later, the President is at the head of a concerted effort to
undermine public confidence in the upcoming election. Trump has denounced
efforts to expand the mail-voting systems that will allow millions of people to
cast their ballots safely in this pandemic year. He has ignored calls to
provide election administrators with much-needed additional funding to safeguard
voters, staff, volunteers, and the vote-counting process. And he has overseen
the crippling of the U.S. Postal Service at
a time when its work will be critical to the success of the election. “It’s
just a question of overload,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the
University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks,
Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy,” said. “We have
problems with voting machines; we have problems with incompetent election
officials. There is foreign interference. Layer on top of that the covid-19 crisis. Layer on top of that a
President who is a norm breaker.”
In June, the Transition Integrity Project, a newly formed group devoted to evaluating how a disputed election might unfold, hosted a series of “war games” to play out various scenarios for what might happen on and after November 3rd. Zoe Hudson, a former Open Society Foundation analyst who serves as the director of the project, told me that the idea was to “socialize” potential risks. “Surprise doesn’t work for us,” she said. “We really need people to understand that this will be an unusual election year.”
More than a hundred people participated,
most of them prominent names in academia, politics, and the media—Foley was
there, as were the former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta,
former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and former Republican National
Committee Chairman Michael Steele. Participants assumed roles as members of the
Trump or Biden campaigns, state officials, and the media. The games, which were
played under the Chatham House rule—participants are allowed to discuss what
happened as long as they don’t reveal who in the room said or did
what—proceeded by turns, with certain developments determined by dice rolls.
“One of the big takeaways on all sides is that what you have here potentially
is a situation where neither side accepts a loss,” Adam Jentleson, a former
aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who participated in the war games,
told me. “And that’s a very difficult circle to square.”
While Americans have grown accustomed to
Election Nights that unfold like Super Bowls—tune in at 5 p.m. for the pregame and turn off
the set at midnight after one side or the other hoists the trophy—the surge in
absentee voting brought on by the coronavirus pandemic will likely frustrate
that expectation this year. Counting absentee ballots is a slow, laborious
process, and, in a number of states, the counting cannot begin until the election
is over. In primary elections this spring and summer, states without past
experience counting large numbers of absentee ballots have struggled to process
them. In New York, the state Board of Elections took six weeks to declare Representative
Carolyn Maloney the winner of the congressional Democratic primary in the
state’s Twelfth District. Her challenger in the race, Suraj Patel, filed a
lawsuit, citing a number of issues with the count, including thousands of
mail-in ballots being disqualified and tens of thousands being sent out too
late for voters to realistically return on time. Maloney suggested that Patel
was playing into Trump’s hands by questioning the legitimacy of an election.
Patel and his campaign understandably bristled at the charge. Count every vote,
they have insisted. Address the problems now so that they don’t plague us in
November.
It’s one thing for an election dispute to
play out in a little-noticed congressional primary. When similar disputes broke
out in the Transition Integrity Project’s games, with the future of the entire
country on the line, the effect was pure mayhem. In the first scenario, the
results from three states—North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida—remained too
close to call for more than a week. On Election Night, Trump’s campaign called
on Biden to concede, citing in-person-voting returns, which looked good for the
President. But as the absentee ballots in these states were counted, the
numbers swung toward Biden. This was “blue shift,” a phenomenon observed by
Foley and other academics in recent elections, wherein in-person-vote totals
have tended to skew Republican, while absentee voting has skewed Democratic.
Blue shift is what kept the Democratic House wave in 2018 from being
immediately apparent on Election Night—the mail votes cast in California that
fall took weeks to count, an outcome that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a
Republican, described at the time as “bizarre.” This year, with Trump
explicitly making mail voting a partisan issue, the blue shift is likely to be
especially pronounced. And Trump is, in turn, expected to denounce this easily
explainable phenomenon as nefarious.
As the votes were being tallied in the game, Trump pounced. The team playing as his campaign called on the Justice Department to use federal agents to “secure” voting sites and tried to enlist state Republican officials to stop the further counting of absentee ballots. The Biden team, in response, called for every vote to be counted and urged its supporters to attend rallies calling for the same. During subsequent turns, Trump tried to federalize the National Guard, and both parties sought to block or overturn results in key states. Eventually, North Carolina was declared for Biden and Florida was declared for Trump, leaving Michigan as the deciding state—there, a “rogue individual” destroyed ballots believed to be favorable to Biden, leaving Trump with a narrow lead. Michigan’s Republican-led legislature certified Trump’s victory, but the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, refused to accept the result, citing the sabotage, and sent a separate certification to Congress.
It was 1876 all over again. Both campaigns
called for their supporters to take to the streets. Trump invoked the Insurrection Act. Republicans in Congress
declared that Vice-President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, was
entitled to choose which certification from Michigan to accept as legitimate.
Democrats, of course, rejected that argument. “There was no clear resolution of
the conflict in the January 6 joint session of Congress,” the game summary
reads. “The partisans on both sides were still claiming victory, leading to the
problem of two claims to Commander-in-Chief power (including access to the
nuclear codes) at noon on January 20.” The game ended there.
Another scenario, in which Trump won a
clear victory in the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote by an
even wider margin than in 2016, also ended in chaos. Biden withdrew his
Election Night concession and asked the Democratic governors in Wisconsin,
Michigan, and North Carolina for recounts. The governors in Wisconsin and
Michigan took the 1876 course again, sending a slate of electors to Congress
that conflicted with those sent by their states’ Republican-controlled
legislatures. Republicans, unsuccessfully, tried to cajole moderate Democrats
to break from their party and back Trump’s victory. “At the end of the first
turn,” the summary reads, “the country was in the midst of a full-blown
constitutional crisis.” Congress, once again, failed to resolve the standoff
before Inauguration Day. “It was unclear what the military would do in this
situation,” the transcript says. According to the Times, near the
end of this scenario,
Podesta, the former Clinton campaign chairman, called on California, Oregon,
and Washington to secede from the Union.
Even a scenario that led to a peaceful
transfer of power was, at certain moments, politically perilous. In one game,
Biden won the election by a narrow but clear margin. Trump’s campaign persuaded
the Republican-controlled legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania to send Congress
conflicting election certifications. Attorney General William Barr announced
that the Justice Department would begin investigating “voter fraud” and took
steps to stop ballot counting. But, as the game went on, Senator Mitt Romney
convinced three of his fellow Republican senators to break ranks and support
Biden. A dice roll determined that four million people would participate in
pro-Biden street demonstrations. The Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed resigning
in protest at Trump’s increasingly desperate behavior, and those discussions
were leaked to the press. As power began to slip away from the President,
right-wing media turned increasingly toxic, and his Administration devolved
into a frenzy of document destruction and corrupt pardonings. Biden called on
the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to investigate foreign
interference in the election and announced that moderate Republicans, including
the governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, would serve in his Cabinet. The
game ended with the Democratic Party beginning to investigate Trump and his
family.
These war games were hypothetical imaginings of extraordinary circumstances. But an election in a pandemic year with a President declaring in advance that the vote will be rigged are extraordinary circumstances. “One big takeaway is that leaders really need to know what exactly their powers are, and what the powers of others are, and think through some of these options in advance,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who helped convene the Transition Integrity Project, told me recently. “Because if things go bad, they’ll go bad very quickly, and people will have to make decisions in an hour, not in a week.”
The contours of the upcoming election are
already being fought over in the courts. Since the 2000 election, with its
hanging chads and butterfly ballots, America has seen an explosion of
election-related litigation, from an average of ninety-four lawsuits a year to
an average of two hundred and seventy a year, according to an analysis by
Hasen, the author of “Election Meltdown.” This year, there have already been
some two hundred election lawsuits filed over covid-19-related issues alone. In May,
the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee doubled their
legal budget, to twenty million dollars. “Bush v. Gore exposed shortcomings in
our system in a very visible way,” Rebecca Green, an election-law professor at
William & Mary Law School, said. “And so people started pushing back and
testing it.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Green said. “We do disputed
elections in this country. We have processes in place. We have law. It’s not
the Wild West where we’re left without direction on how this should unfold.”
She added, “I really worry about public confidence being undermined by this
constant drumbeat of meltdown.”
The biggest cases so far have centered on
mail voting. At the state level, efforts to address this year’s unprecedented
voting challenges have largely been bipartisan efforts—as many as forty-five states will
allow voters to mail in their ballots for the November election. But in the
courts, the two parties’ overarching national positions come down to this:
Democrats are trying to make voting by mail as easy as possible, and
Republicans are fighting to prevent that. Caught in the middle are election
administrators, the local officials tasked with organizing and processing our
voting systems. The Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. has estimated that
administrators would need an additional four billion dollars in funding to
safeguard the vote during the pandemic. In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act,
Congress allocated four hundred million dollars for election preparations. The
shortfall will likely mean, in many cases, fewer polling places, longer lines,
and slower processing of absentee ballots. Administrators have also reported
trouble recruiting volunteers—the battalion of retirees that normally mind our
polls and count our ballots—because many of them are wary of exposure to the
virus. In normal years, election administrators and the volunteers they rely on
are prone to mistakes. This year, all these issues make slow counts and
frustrated voters even more likely—and create the conditions for one side or
the other to dispute the outcome.
Of course, Trump has increased the chances
for such a dispute by undermining public trust in the system itself. Nowhere
has this dynamic been more insidious than with the Postal Service. Conservatives have been
targeting the agency for cuts for years, and recent Trump Administration
decisions—spearheaded by the new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who is a
major Trump donor—have caused a mail slowdown around the country. Those efforts
have collided with an election that will rely on the Postal Service more than
any in American history. Trump has made the connection explicit. “They want
three and a half billion dollars for something that’ll turn out to be
fraudulent,” he said earlier this month, about the Democrats’ position in the
latest round of negotiations over pandemic relief. “They need that money in
order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and
millions of ballots.” The fear and distrust that Trump has sown has meant that,
when the Postal Service recently sent a letter to
states warning that some of their absentee-ballot application and filing
deadlines were “incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards” and
too close to Election Day to guarantee timely delivery—a concern that
independent election experts have raised for years—state officials grew worried
that the federal government was preëmptively preparing to blame them for
problems in November. “I think that many people were surprised by the tone of
the letter,” Tammy Patrick, an adviser at the Democracy Fund who previously
served as an election administrator in Maricopa County, Arizona, said. “I have
never seen the Postal Service throw a customer under the bus before—and
certainly not when the votes of American citizens are on the line.” (On Friday,
DeJoy is scheduled to appear at hearings before congressional Democrats.)
After Election Day, the lawsuits are
expected to shift to questions about ballot counting. Absentee ballots present
bureaucratic problems in ways that in-person voting doesn’t. Even in normal
election years, a large number of absentee ballots are disqualified. The
reasons range from signature matching, a notoriously unreliable process, to
disputes over “voter intent,” where individual ballots are evaluated for stray
markings, and ballots that arrive after the deadline. “In a lot of cases, the
law does give judges leeway,” Green said. “And the unenviable place where they
end up is, do I stretch the law to enfranchise as many people as I can, or do I
read the law strictly and end up disenfranchising people?” Already this year,
the disqualification rate seen in some states during the primaries has been
alarming. “The biggest potential disaster is that one candidate wins because so
many votes are thrown out,” Hasen told me. “More votes are lost to incompetence
than anything else.”
Rachana Desai Martin, who is leading the
Biden campaign’s voter-protection efforts, told me that the campaign’s energy
was currently focussed on voter education. “We want to make sure that we’re
doing everything we can to put out correct information about how to vote, and
that means both by mail and also in person, early and on Election Day,” Martin
said. (Hasen, for his part, recently made a recommendation on Twitter. “FLATTEN
THE ABSENTEE BALLOT CURVE,” he wrote. “If voting by mail request your
ballot as soon as you are able and return it as soon as you can.”) Outside
progressive groups, though, are preparing for all contingencies. Indivisible,
the Trump resistance group founded in the wake of the 2016 election, recently
paired up with Stand Up America and other progressive organizations to form
Protect the Results, which will strive to get millions of people into the
streets in the case of a disputed outcome. “We have to prepare for mobilization
immediately,” Ezra Levin, Indivisible’s co-founder, said in a recent interview.
American elections are always messy. The
Constitution does not guarantee candidates or voters the right to perfect
electoral outcomes. But even a President cannot overturn an election on his
own. An 1876-like scenario relies on lawmakers at the state level being willing
to potentially buck the will of the voters. In this way, the days after
November 3rd may offer an early clue about whether Trumpism will endure in the
Republican Party. How far will state lawmakers be willing to go to keep him in
office, or to back him up if he declares victory based on the vote totals
before the absentees are counted, or disputes the total counts after they are?
And if partisans at the state level kick the dispute up to Congress, as
happened in 1876, would congressional Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell,
follow their lead? “That’s the key question,” William Kristol, the former
editor of The Weekly Standard and a prominent Never Trump
Republican, said. (Kristol played Trump in two of the Transition Integrity
Project’s games.) Even if Trump can’t successfully fight an election outcome,
Kristol said, if the Republican Party goes along with his protests, they’d
potentially be associating themselves with “a false and dangerous stabbed-in-the-back
narrative” that could define the Party for years to come.
There are other nightmare scenarios. Foley, in particular, fears that counting delays will lead to states missing the December deadlines by which elections need to be certified to Congress. There are those who fear that Trump will exploit covid-19 to mandate emergency stay-at-home orders in Democratic-leaning cities in the final days or weeks of the campaign. There are others who point to a recently lapsed judicial-consent decree that, for decades, prevented the Republican Party from sending “poll watchers” out to intimidate voters in nonwhite neighborhoods. (“There is this real concern that officials who have been engaged in voter suppression as an electoral tactic can now weaponize covid to push that further,” Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who participated in the Transition Integrity Project, said. “Frankly, it’s all of a piece.”) And there are fears about the Portland or Lafayette Square-style deployment of federal agents across the country. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who sat in on two of the Transition Integrity Project’s games, told me that he couldn’t rule out Trump trying to drag the military into a postelection dispute. “That’s what worries me about this,” he said, “that anybody who told Trump that some action they were going to take was conducive to his retention of office would be told immediately, ‘Go do it.’ ”
As he has in other areas of American
self-government, Trump has revealed how much of our democracy rests on norms
rather than enforceable laws. Ultimately, the one norm that has been crucial to
the resolution of past disputes is the one that Trump is perhaps least likely
to observe: conceding defeat. In 1876, Tilden, from the start of the crisis,
was privately prepared to concede and ultimately did so. And while the Supreme
Court is popularly remembered as the decisive actor that handed the 2000
election to George W. Bush, it was Al Gore’s decision to concede, and to not
pursue additional legal options, that really ended matters. In November, if
Trump loses and refuses to concede, he may live up to one of his favorite
boasts. No one will have ever seen anything like it. When I asked the Trump
campaign what preparations it was making for the possibility of counts coming
in slowly, or being too close to call, on and after Election Day, Tim Murtaugh,
Trump’s campaign communications director, told me in an e-mailed statement, “We
don’t know what kind of shenanigans Democrats will try leading up to November.
If someone had asked George W. Bush and Al Gore this same question in 2000,
would they have been able to foresee the drawn out fight over Florida? The
central point remains clear: in a free and fair election, President Trump will
win.”
The Stunning Predictability of Steve
Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” Scam
By Eric Lach
On Sunday, after Steve Bannon appeared on Fox News, an image of his visage during the interview made the rounds on social media. While we in the audience were living through the multifaceted collapse of society, Bannon faced the camera with a mane of gray hair swept back, his face looking like a sunburned hunk of bologna, and a lighthouse rising behind him on some unidentified coast. “He looks INCREDIBLE,” my colleague Naomi Fry commented. Nearly four years have passed since Bannon, the former capo of Breitbart News and the intellectual godfather of contemporary American political extremism, helped bring an egomaniacal bigot to the White House. And now there he was on the screen, his multiple shirt collars unbuttoned and his eyes as unreadable as ever. If the look he was going for was “James Bond villain in retirement,” he was pulling it off.
It has been asked, repeatedly, whether the
grifts of Donald Trump and the people around him would ever catch up with them.
On Thursday, they caught up to Bannon. Federal prosecutors in New York
announced that Bannon and three other men were being indicted for alleged fraud
and money laundering for their role in a scheme that, even in a Bond film,
might feel too on the nose. For the past two years, Bannon and his accomplices
ran an online fund-raising campaign called We Build the Wall, whose nominal
purpose was to raise the money for the monument to nativism that Trump had
promised to build on the southern border. Trump had also promised that Mexico
would pay for the wall. But, when those funds proved unforthcoming, and his
various attempts to strong-arm Congress into giving him the money mostly
failed, too, Bannon and his gang stepped forward to ask the very people who’d
been thrilled by the notion of a “big, beautiful wall” to shell out. According
to the government, the group raised more than twenty-five million dollars, and
promised “not to take a penny in salary or compensation.” Then they pocketed a
bunch of the money. Bannon allegedly routed more than a million dollars through
a nonprofit he controls. One of his co-defendants, Brian Kolfage, allegedly
used his share of the money to buy, among other things, a boat called
Warfighter. According to the Times’ Evan Hill, Kolfage sailed Warfighter in a pro-Trump boat
parade held in Destin, Florida, on July 4th. Happy birthday, America. Is there
a word in German for something that is at once extraordinary and shocking and
yet at the same time totally predictable and stupid?
The indictment raises questions about
other Trump allies as well. We Build the Wall’s board members included Kris
Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state; Erik Prince, the Blackwater
founder and a brother of Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos; David A. Clarke, Jr., the former sheriff of Milwaukee County,
Wisconsin; and Curt Schilling, the former major-league-baseball pitcher. The
indictment came out of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York. In June, Trump and his Attorney General, Bill
Barr, forced Geoffrey
Berman out of his job as the U.S. Attorney in that office, for reasons that
remain unclear, and despite Berman’s protests. It now needs to be asked whether
this case against a close Trump associate played a role in Berman’s ouster.
The notion that political and legal gravity does not apply to Trump has become a key aspect of the Trump mystique, something that even his opponents begrudgingly believe. “Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!” goes the classic Twitter joke. “*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily* Ah! Well. Nevertheless.” And maybe Trump will, in the end, avoid serious consequences, despite the instances of likely obstruction of justice found by the special counsel Robert Mueller, despite the various investigations into the Trump Organization swirling in New York State, and despite his long history of engaging in business and personal activities that raise all kinds of legal questions. Associates of his have been indicted before, from Michael Flynn to Michael Cohen to Rick Gates, without the damage touching Trump. Being President is great insulation.
But there has been recent evidence that
not every jam can be wriggled out of, even by Ol’ Donny. Trump has not been
able to browbeat and demagogue the coronavirus.
The bottom has fallen out of the American economy, a hundred and seventy
thousand Americans are dead, and the polls show that those still alive are
souring on the President and his party. This week, even before the Bannon news,
the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that detailed the
relationship between another former Trump campaign official, Paul Manafort, and
Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign. The report called Manafort—who,
in recent years, has faced a list of charges for his actions before, during,
and after the campaign that is too long to recite here—a “grave
counterintelligence threat.” And, according to news reports, the
leaders of the same Senate committee last year alerted federal prosecutors that
Bannon and Prince, as well as Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and the former
Trump campaign official Sam Clovis, may have misled them during testimony—a
potential federal crime. (Each has previously denied misleading investigators.)
On Thursday, as if to pile on the news, a federal judge once again rejected
Trump’s attempts to keep prosecutors in Manhattan from obtaining his tax
returns.
Four years ago, the Democratic National
Convention took place against the backdrop of an orchestrated political attack:
that week, the hacked e-mails of various Democratic Party figures were leaked
out to the world. This week, the Democratic Party is again hosting its Convention. The background news this time
is a drip, drip of Trumpworld corruption. Trump has spent his recent evenings
staying up late to watch his opponents, and to rage-tweet about them. Next week
it will be his turn on the live-streamed stage, at the Republican National
Convention. Steve Bannon probably won’t be watching from the seashore.
Eric Lach is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
