(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Donald Trump's indictment by a Manhattan grand jury on March 30 is another grim marker of American civic decline that could lead to any number of outcomes—none of them good. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged the former president with falsifying business records to conceal hush money paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels, sources told Bloomberg News. Anticipating his indictment, Trump had already taken to social media to urge his supporters to conduct protests and warned of “potential death and destruction” if he was charged, moves that echoed his call to arms in the days before the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. With Trump's arrest apparently imminent, the country is rocketing forward into a new, explosive and even more bitterly divided partisan era.
Trump's latest controversy is unprecedented in American history, yet at the same time wearyingly familiar. Joe Biden may be president, but Trump still dominates headlines and shapes US politics. While he may no longer occupy the White House, his indictment guarantees he isn't going away. This alone marks Trump as different from earlier presidents, who have traditionally withdrawn from public life after losing reelection.
Trump still faces the potential of additional prosecutions for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack and obstructing the certification of the Electoral College votes; for his actions to try to overturn the election results in Georgia; as well as for his handling of classified documents, which led to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August. The former president has dismissed them all as partisan witch hunts.
More than his refusal to step back from the public stage, it's Trump's impunity in the face of criminal charges that represents the real break from historical norms. In the past, presidents and presidential hopefuls have always put country before party. Richard Nixon resigned from office rather than be impeached for the Watergate scandal. Gerald Ford pardoned him so that America's “long national nightmare” might come to an end. Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential race to George W. Bush, even as the Florida recount remained incomplete, because he believed it was the best thing for the country. To Trump and his allies, such thinking is passé. “The political elites and powerbrokers have weaponized government to try and stop him. They will fail,” Taylor Budowich, the CEO of Make America Great Again Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, said in a statement. “He will be reelected in the greatest landslide in American history.”
American politics has always had its rogues and demagogues, from charismatic populists such as Huey Long and Ross Perot to paranoid anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy. In the past, however, they were peripheral figures. Trump's historic upset in the 2016 presidential election changed that, putting one of them into the White House and ushering in a contentious new era in American politics. Already twice impeached, Trump is now the first US president to be charged with a crime.
But his current situation is no new spin on American exceptionalism. The indicted political leader with a popular following and ambitions for high office is a well-established international archetype. In 2013, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and served prison time, but he returned to win a Senate seat in last year's general election. In 2017, Brazil's former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was convicted on money laundering and corruption charges and imprisoned, only to have the trial later nullified by the country's Supreme Federal Court. Last year, Lula was elected president once again. Israel's longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also mounted a stunning comeback last year, even as he faced felony corruption charges. Should Trump be convicted, there's even a precedent for him to seek the White House from jail—though he'd surely hope to carry more than the 3.4% of the vote that Eugene Debs won in the 1920 presidential race while imprisoned in Atlanta on sedition charges.
Trump's indictment is certain to hasten Americans' declining faith in major US institutions. In recent years, this trend has eroded public confidence in the criminal justice system in particular, which has seen a sharp drop in support. Last year, Gallup found that only 14% of respondents had a “great deal” of faith in the criminal justice system, down from 20% two years earlier. Only two institutions—television news and Congress—engender a lower level of public trust.
Trump himself, of course, is a major reason why public trust has collapsed. On March 23, his campaign blasted out an email to supporters claiming his prosecution is politically motivated. “The Left's total ABUSE of our justice system is a complete DISGRACE,” the email thundered. “But what you're seeing is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage the Deep State is doing to our country.” Other Republicans have amplified this partisan message. On March 25, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called the investigation “an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump” and said he would direct House committees to look into the prosecution.
Even before the indictment, those Republican attacks elicited a sharp rebuke from Bragg's office. The Democrat's general counsel called the House Republicans' request for information in the case “an unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution” that appears to be “solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators.” That Trump reportedly directed this action, the general counsel added, made it not “a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry.”
But questions about the validity of Bragg's case are hardly limited to partisan Republicans. Legal experts stress that charges arising under federal law must be brought by federal prosecutors—something Bragg is not. Bringing state felony charges against Trump is a tricky affair. Falsification of business records is usually treated as a misdemeanor; for the charge to rise to a felony, prosecutors have the added burden of proving that it was committed in the service of another crime.
Then there is the matter of Bragg's standing in heavily Democratic New York City. Last year, two senior prosecutors in the district attorney's office quit after he halted their efforts to seek a Trump indictment. In February one of them, Mark Pomerantz, published a tell-all book criticizing Bragg's reluctance to bring an ambitious criminal fraud case that Pomerantz and his colleague Carey Dunne had been building against Trump. In a resignation letter leaked to the press last year, he pressured the DA by calling his unwillingness to bring charges “a grave failure of justice.”
On top of that, Bragg faces an eventual reelection race. His Democratic opponent in his last primary, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, recently became board chairman of a legal nonprofit founded by none other than Pomerantz and Dunne. “She ran for DA once before, and Pomerantz's criticism of Bragg is well-documented,” says Daniel Horwitz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA's office. “It does raise a question about whether there are multiple agendas at work here.”
Most Americans are already convinced that the prosecution of Trump is politically tinged. A March 21 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 54% of respondents—including 80% of Republicans—believed political factors are driving the criminal case against him. (That isn't the same thing as believing Trump is innocent: 70% of respondents, including half of Republicans, found his alleged behavior “believable.”)
Regardless of the outcome, Trump's indictment will undoubtedly shape the upcoming Republican presidential primaries—though exactly how it might alter the expected outcome of a Trump victory, and to whose benefit, is unknowable. Anything that increases the uncertainty of his nomination odds is good news for Ron DeSantis and the other GOP hopefuls looking to succeed him.
On the other hand, a primary race already set to revolve around Trump is now likely to make an even tighter orbit around the same sun, not least because Bragg's indictment may not be the last to land before Republicans choose their nominee. From Mike Pence to Nikki Haley to Ron DeSantis, the crowd of would-be Trump successors who've gingerly tip-toed toward the race—yearning to be recognized for their personal excellence, but too fearful of Trump to attack him directly—will now have an even harder time capturing the attention of Republican voters. A March 29 Fox News poll found Trump expanding his lead to 54%, followed by DeSantis at 24% and Pence at 6%.
“This is going to suck all the oxygen out of the race for the foreseeable future,” says Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “Every political reporter is racing to Manhattan instead of covering Mike Pence's big speech or Tim Scott's trip to Iowa. They'll stay in Manhattan for the arraignment. An indictment freezes the race and makes it all about Trump—again, just like when he was president. It's going to be hard for other candidates to make big moves when the focus is all on something else.”
Of course, there's no guarantee that Trump will survive the intense public scrutiny unscathed. The basic facts of the case don't flatter him and aren't seriously in dispute. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has already pleaded guilty and served prison time for his role in the payoff. And Cohen is now a witness for the prosecution.
But the contours of US politics and the nature of voters' polarization have both changed dramatically since the days when scandalized lawmakers resigned out of a sense of duty—or, failing that, a belief that they couldn't maintain the support necessary to carry on. Recently, a team of political scientists conducted a wide-ranging study of survey data to better understand how the major news events of the past few years have shifted voters' perceptions of the presidential candidates and their parties. In their book, , John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck concluded that polarization is now so deeply entrenched that it subsumes every big piece of news that comes along. Republicans and Democrats fit these events to their pre-existing worldview, resulting in little movement between the parties. The authors dub this phenomenon “political calcification.” There's every reason to expect it will apply to Trump's indictment, as well.
“People today are more wedded to their predispositions and attitudes than at any time since the New Deal,” says Vavreck, the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles. “So I'd be very surprised by a sudden change. Add in Trump's strong standing in Republican primary polls, and the data is telling us that people still have an affinity for him that an indictment isn't likely to shake.”
It's hard to imagine Trump receding from the center of controversy or the partisan anger that surrounds him ebbing anytime soon. In fact, Bragg's case has unavoidably exposed every major political fault line in American politics. On the Republican side, it has inflamed paranoia that “deep state” liberals are abusing their governmental powers to punish their political enemies; intensified the anguish non-MAGA conservatives feel about the GOP having a corrupt standard-bearer; and put the party at even greater risk of suffering another disappointment at the ballot box next year.
It has further exacerbated an intense hatred of Trump among Democrats; heightened skepticism about the Biden administration's impartiality; and weakened an already dwindling public trust in government. Above all, it has further degraded the social fabric of a nation that finds itself unable to move beyond the damaging, never-ending controversies of its last president—who could still be, in spite of everything, its next one.
About the only certainty is that Trump himself will offer no relief. It used to be the case that an indictment marked the swift end of nearly any political career. Now it just establishes the central plot line for the next election: Donald Trump versus everyone, with the future of the country hanging in the balance.  —
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