America Has Lost Face Permanently. We’re Not Coming Back From This

Yesterday was an amazing day in American history. A former American president was indicted for attempting to overthrow the government. This is a first in our history and as retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig put it, “These events … will forever scar and stain the United States in the eyes of the world,” he wrote on Wednesday. He lamented that a criminal trial of a former president for trying to overturn an election should ever be necessary. “Never again will the world be inspired by America’s democracy in the way that it has been inspired since America’s founding almost 250 years ago.” The Shining City On the Hill is not so shining anymore. It might have been a classy neighborhood at one point but now it’s pretty run down.

New Republic writer Nick Cattogio has the best take on the reality of this situation that I’ve read so far.

As the (ugh) lawyer in the family, I’m supposed to know. I didn’t, because no one does. The idea of American voters handing presidential power to an inmate is so darkly absurd that the Founders didn’t think to address it.

And the crisis wouldn’t stop there. Trump might appoint Sidney Powell Acting Attorney General and maybe Rudy Giuliani Acting Secretary of State  The permutations are endless. The man is insane. Every single time he takes to his social media platform, he cranks out something 1) insulting 2) irrational 3) delusional 4) all of the above. Yet, purportedly, if we trust the polls, he could be running the government once again.

What keeps me sane is the thought that seven million more Americans voted for Joe Biden than for Trump in 2020. I have to believe that those same people will go to the ballot box and do the same thing. I have to believe we’ll dodge the bullet — at least for now.

David Frum of the Atlantic has a theory on how Trump could attempt to self-pardon and what would happen to us then. He starts out with the cheery notion that if Trump, through a fluke of the electoral college, got back in power, he would probably be headed straight for another impeachment. Swell.

Both his supporters and and his opponents assume that former President Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy will go away if he can win the 2024 presidential election. That’s a big mistake. A Trump election in 2024 would settle nothing. It would generate a nation-shaking crisis of presidential legitimacy. Trump in 2024 means chaos—and almost certainly another impeachment.

Trump’s proliferating criminal exposures have arisen in two different federal jurisdictions—Florida and the District of Columbia—and in two different state jurisdictions, New York and Georgia. More may follow.

As president, Trump would have no power of his own to quash directly any of these proceedings. He would have to act through others. For example, the most nearly unilateral thing that Trump could try would be a presidential self-pardon. Is that legal? Trump has asserted that it is. Only the Supreme Court can deliver a final verdict, which presents a significant risk to Trump, because the Court might say no. Self-pardon defies the history and logic of the presidential-pardon power. Would a Supreme Court struggling with legitimacy issues of its own take such a serious risk with its reputation to protect Trump from justice?

Trump has one way he might avert the hazard of the Supreme Court ruling against him. He could order his attorney general to order the special counsel not to bring a case against his self-pardon, and then order the Department of Justice to argue in court that nobody but the special counsel has standing to bring a case.

Then things get complicated. Would the attorney general do it? Would the special counsel submit? Would the professionals in the Department of Justice stay in their jobs? And what would happen in Congress and in the country?

Is your head spinning yet?

As the absurdity of this situation would play out, it’s probable that within a couple of days of an attempt at self-pardoning, Trump wouldn’t have a Department of Justice. There would be mass resignations, and probably no way to confirm replacement senior officials in the U.S. Senate. (The first Trump administration repeatedly relied on acting appointees rather than on Senate-confirmed officials, but a second administration intentionally bypassing the Senate in order to shut down the courts would invite a constitutional crisis all of its own.)

You can see our way of life melting down in real time if this maniac gets back in office and tries to escalate his fraud, by self-pardon.

Trump’s other routes to the same destination run into the same problems. Trump could try a more indirect maneuver to shut down the federal indictments: Order Special Counsel Jack Smith to stand down, and fire him if he refuses. That approach bypasses the courts, but it depends even more heavily on finding a compliant attorney general to cancel the indictment, and on the acquiescence of Congress in what would look like an outright nullification of federal law enforcement. The federal Department of Justice would dissolve. The state cases would continue regardless. Trump scandals would be the only order of business in Congress.

Trump himself may not care: He was neither chastened nor deterred even by impeachment. But Trump leads a minority faction in the country, and the kind of permanent crisis a second presidential term would generate would invite a 2026 Democratic congressional landslide big enough to jolt even a Trump-led GOP.

Let us pause here a minute. We’re clearly looking at doomsday scenarios here and well we should. Forewarned is forearmed. But let us remember that in 2018, the American people spoke and the GOP lost ground. And then in 2020, the GOP lost the White House, the Senate and the House. And then in 2022, the year of the red tsunami, the GOP regained the House by a slim margin, forget the 40-plus seat rout they depended on. And the Democrats were able to flip a staunchly red seat, in Pennsylvania, to the blue column.

So my purpose here is not to be the prophetess of doom and anticipate Trump coming back. Au contraire. I think he may get trounced worse in 2024 than he did in 2020. Certainly that’s my prayer. My purpose is to take a time machine to the future and glimpse what a second Trump term would look like. And it behooves the media to get these images out to the world, too,  so that people can know how the wheels of government are going to seize up and overheat, until they explode if Trump goes back to the White House.

Trump may imagine that he’s got a one-and-done fight on his hands: Strike hard, strike fast, then settle back to enjoy the corrupt perquisites of lawless power. If so, he and his followers are deluding themselves. The entire term would be consumed by the battle over Trump’s project to use the power of the presidency to protect himself from the consequences of his alleged crimes.

That’s how it would be. And here is undeniable fact: IF the worse would happen and Trump got back in, it would be like he did it the first time. It would be through a quirk in the electoral college, through 77,000 votes or less in three states — or something along those lines. It would not be by a decisive margin, like Biden enjoyed in 2020. It would be by the skin of his teeth and his life would not be easy, especially if the Senate stayed in Democratic hands and the House was restored to the Democrats. Then he would face gridlock.

But there’s an even more basic idea to consider, as we game Trump scenarios and try to figure out which one will happen. Look at the fact that we’re even having this conversation. Look at the fact that yesterday the United States had its credit rating lowered and that was because of January 6 and all the madness with the debt ceiling bickering, over and over. We are an unstable country right now and the adults in the world, the money lenders in any event, are sick of our shenanigans and political theater. They want to deal with serious adults, not factions at each other’s throats.

Nick Cattogio said that the fact “that we’re this far down the road of civic disintegration and seemingly prepared to go much further is cause for despair even if we don’t go quite far enough to elect Trump president again.”

“We’re not coming all the way back from this.”

He might be right. This country is not what it used to be. The moral underpinnings have been shaken and they get more eroded by the day. If this wasn’t true, we would never have seen Trump elected in the first place. Something went very wrong and as Barack Obama said, “Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the symptom.”

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