Irrespective of how the Manhattan district attorney's case turns out, the American justice system will have scored a victory. The grand jury understood that Donald Trump is a crook, and so they indicted him. The sacred principle of no man being above the law was upheld.
Where justice failed the nation was in its consternating delays. Take, by way of comparison, the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, the prominent fraudster and CEO of the cryptocurrency firm FTX. In November 2022 his highly complex house of financial cards collapsed. But just one month later a New York City federal court indicted him on eight criminal charges (four more have since been added) of wire, commodities and securities fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations.
Trump left the White House and thus lost his immunity from prosecution 800 days ago. While Bankman's criminal charges involve byzantine financial escapades that required the herculean efforts of forensic accountants, Trump's crimes are straightforward, conspicuous and all on the public record. Yet Bankman was pinched in only a month, and Trump remained an unindicted citizen for more than two years.
Was this because democratic countries are aghast at the notion of ever prosecuting a former chief executive and so, simply, they don't? Then tell that to Israel, where its current prime minister is in hot criminal water, and a former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spent a year in lockup. Other indicted leaders include Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, France's Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, South Korea's Park Geun-hye and, in Taiwan, former president Chen Shui-bian. If anything, the United States has joined the norm.
This is not to deny that Trump's indictment is a thundering peculiarity in the disposition of American jurisprudence. Never before has a former U.S. president been indicted; Nixon came close but escaped via Ford's presidential apoplexy over the mere thought of a criminal trial. But who was it, in this century, who compelled American justice to indict? It wasn't District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and it won't be Georgia's District Attorney Fani Willis, nor will it be the Justice Department's Special Counsel Jack Smith. No, Trump pulled off a chain of indictable corruption all on his own.
Still, the belatedness rankles. And the authors of America's founding document would agree. "While the indictment of Mr. Trump takes the country into uncharted waters," writes the Times's Peter Baker, "the authors of the Constitution might have been surprised only that it took so long." In Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution they "explicitly contemplated the prospect of [presidents] being charged after leaving office."
We may think of 18th-century America as being more "innocent" than its 21st-century edition, but the founders were all too aware of, and sensitive to, man's corruptibility. Says constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt, "The framers would have been horrified at the possibility of a president ever being above the law while in office or after leaving it." One of their chief worries was the very breed of criminal demagogue that Trump was, and is. Had he been America's first president, indictments would have come down on 5 March 1797.
Another valid concern about the Manhattan case is that it is, well, a Manhattan case. This, continues Baker, may "[open] the door to prosecutors around the country taking it upon themselves to go after a president." That a local prosecutor — not the U.S. attorney general — was the first to indict a former president could well establish a rancid, politically motivated precedent. And you can be sure that in any dealings deemed rancid and politically motivated, Republican prosecutors seeking to please the base will be lined up with daggers out, once President Biden leaves office.
I am among the many who preferred that the Justice Department would go first, or alone, in holding Trump criminally responsible, and for much more serious felonies. Bragg's case involves the somewhat common practice of cooking the books and probably — the indictment has not yet been unsealed — the legally dubious charge of a campaign finance violation. These, it scarcely need be said, pale when juxtaposed with inciting an insurrection, attempting to overturn a democratic election, obstructing justice and possible espionage.
That notwithstanding, Donald Trump is finally facing what he has always feared most: accountability. Although the Manhattan case is a trifle shaky, impending federal charges rest on the law's terra firma. But however the district attorney's court case plays out, Trump's day of indictment was a good day for the United States.