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TRUMP WISHES HIS TRIAL WERE RIGGED  
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Adam Serwer
May 31, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Trump is not angry because the Manhattan trial that convicted him
was rigged; he is angry because it wasn’t. _

,

 

Shortly after becoming the first former American president to be
convicted as a felon, Donald Trump told reporters outside a Manhattan
courthouse that the verdict was a “disgrace,” a “rigged trial by
a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe
something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what
he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go
against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In
every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or
rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged
enough to give him the results he seeks.

Trump’s attorneys did not offer much in the way of a defense during
the trial
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relying instead on a “haphazard cacophony of denials and personal
attacks,” as the former prosecutor Renato Mariotti put it in _The
New York Times_. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged
Trump with falsifying business records
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an attempt to cover up a sexual encounter with the adult-film actor
Stormy Daniels
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in order to prevent news of the incident from breaking during the
final, crucial weeks of the 2016 election. As my colleague David A.
Graham writes
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the payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former Trump operative
turned prosecution witness, who paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence.
The defense failed to convince the jury that Cohen was not a credible
witness to Trump’s crimes despite a past record of dishonesty
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Instead, Trump and his allies spent most of their efforts putting the
trial on trial, attacking the presiding judge and the process itself
in bombastic press conferences outside the courtroom. Trump was far
from being unfairly treated—anyone else engaging in such behavior
would have been jailed for contempt; rather, Justice Juan Merchan bent
over backwards to overlook his antics. Trump violated gag orders
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attacking witnesses and attempting to intimidate
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during testimony that
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times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex,” and attacked the
judge’s daughter
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a “Rabid Trump Hater
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Yet Merchan told Trump
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“The last thing I want to do is put you in jail.” In this trial
and others, Trump has received special treatment
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because he is an important political figure.

Many political writers originally reacted with disdain
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Bragg’s charges, treating them as a sideshow to the much more
serious state and federal charges regarding Trump’s alleged theft of
classified records and unlawful attempt to seize power after losing
the 2020 election. It is true that compared with potentially exposing
nuclear secrets
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foreign spies and attempting to end American democracy, trying to
cover up his encounter with Daniels seems like a much less serious
crime. But that cover-up, prosecutors said, was also an attempt to
influence an election, and the jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts
relatively quickly, after two days of deliberation—a sign of the
strength of Bragg’s case and a smoothly run trial. Not every jury
gets it right, and not every trial is fair. But few of the Republican
objections even contest that Trump did the things he was convicted of
doing; they simply amount to demands that Trump be able to commit
crimes with impunity, because anything less would be political
persecution.

Republican lawmakers have settled on rhetoric attacking the trial
itself, alleging that, as House Speaker Mike Johnson said
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“Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing
party on ridiculous charges.” That is not what happened. The
document-falsification charges Trump faced
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common
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New York, even if the theory that they could be upped to felonies
because of their connection to an attempt to influence a federal
election was novel
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Trump was convicted, as the Constitution demands, by a jury of his
peers in the city where his crimes were committed, in a process Thomas
Jefferson described as “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man,
by which a government can be held to the principles of its
constitution.” The American Founders considered trial by jury one of
the core ideals of the American Revolution, in part because royal
judges were considered too beholden to the King.

Republicans are attacking the New York trial because that court was
seen as insufficiently beholden to _their_ king. That prosecution
proceeded relatively smoothly because right-wing judges lacked the
ability to sabotage or delay the process. My colleague David Frum
wrote
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“it says something dark about the American legal system that it
cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état.” But the
culprit here is not “the American legal system.” Trials for the
more serious federal charges against Trump have been delayed by a
sustained attack on the rule of law carried out by right-wing legal
activists embedded in the judiciary who are committed to postponing
any trial long enough for Trump to potentially win an election and
then dismiss the charges himself. Put simply, Trump is unlikely to be
tried for these more serious charges not because of vague problems
with the American legal system, but because a lot of federal judges
are Republicans who want the leader of their party to get away with
committing federal crimes.

The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has, as _The_ _New York
Times _reported
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“effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that
once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is
facing.” She “has largely accomplished this by granting a serious
hearing to almost every issue—no matter how far-fetched—that Mr.
Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former
president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.”

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, of which fully a third of
the justices are Trump appointees, has also gone along with Trump’s
legal strategy of delaying a trial as long as possible. “In recent
years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with
criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment,” the law
professor Aziz Huq wr
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in February, noting that “a general hostility to foot-dragging in
criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.” Not so
with Trump.

“The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity
appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully
pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the
Department of Justice and thus could quash the prosecution
altogether,” Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman wrote in _The
Atlantic_ in March
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“The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when
the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity.”

Trump’s legal theory that former presidents are immune to
prosecution for crimes committed while in office unless impeached for
those crimes is so laughably broad that it would allow a president to
assassinate a political rival and then avoid impeachment by
threatening to slaughter every lawmaker in Congress. Yet the
right-wing justices, sworn to uphold a constitutional order in which
no one is above the law, seemed strangely intrigued by this assertion
of imperial power during oral arguments earlier this month. Justice
Samuel Alito, who has not denied that a flag supporting Trump’s
attempted coup
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flying outside his house just days after it happened, wondered out
loud
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prosecuting former presidents who try to overthrow democracy might
harm democracy.

The right-wing justices are acting like Republican politicians who
believe they are obligated to delay the trial of their party leader as
long as possible and potentially prevent it from happening. This is
not simply my jaded assessment. Today, Speaker Johnson told Fox News,
“I think that the Justices on the Court—I know many of them
personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are.
So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Even if the justices reject Trump’s absurd legal theories, their
dawdling may still prevent a trial from taking place before November.
This gamesmanship by the justices on behalf of the party that
appointed them bears far more resemblance to a corrupt or rigged
process than a trial by a jury of one’s peers does. And that’s
precisely the issue: In a Manhattan courtroom, facing 12 ordinary
American citizens, Trump could not count on right-wing legal elites to
skew the proceeding in his favor. Trump is not angry because the
Manhattan trial that convicted him was rigged; he is angry because it
wasn’t.

One should take a moment to appreciate the absolute failure of the
Republican elite, who have repeatedly refused to hold Trump
accountable. Twice Trump was impeached by Congress for interfering in
American elections—once by trying to blackmail a foreign government
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falsely implicating his political rival in a crime, and once for
trying to keep himself in power
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schemes and violence
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Both times, Republican senators spared Trump the consequences by
acquitting him.

Whether they did so out of fear of Trump and his followers or because
they are on board with his authoritarian project
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the result is the same: The head of the GOP is a convicted criminal
who holds democracy in contempt and whose objective is seizing power
in order to keep himself out of prison. Republicans have only
themselves to blame for this outcome.

Read: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges
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As the writer Osita Nwanevu noted
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March, “The only people who've ever held Trump meaningfully
accountable over the last nine years have been ordinary Americans and
they've spent that entire time being lectured to and berated by elites
who've failed to do anything.” This is overbroad—Democrats
impeached him twice—but there is something to it nonetheless.
Republican senators voted to acquit twice knowing that Trump was
guilty. Most Republican politicians and conservative media figures
kissed Trump’s filthy ring rather than ruin their career or even
defend their family from his degrading insults. Right-wing jurists
have adapted their supposedly ironclad judicial philosophies
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fit Trumpist imperatives.

The 12 jurors who convicted Donald Trump will not have taxpayer-funded
bodyguards for the rest of their life. They are not protected by
reverence for their office or by their connections to power or money.
They surely understood that by convicting Trump, they could be subject
to harassment and violence, much as others
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have refused to do Trump’s bidding have been.

Yet those 12 random New Yorkers showed more courage in convicting
Donald Trump, knowing that they could be hounded for doing so, than
nearly the entire conservative elite has in the past decade. Small
wonder that this same elite is so terrified of the possibility of
Trump facing another jury of his peers, an American institution that
has so far proved itself resistant to Trump’s corrupting influence.

_Adam Serwer [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic._

_Never miss a story from The Atlantic. Subscribe
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* Donald Trump
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* Alvin Bragg
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* hush money indictment
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