His style is now more than well known. Donald Trump only sees politics as a confrontation with the enemy.
When he broke out as the Republican candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton was given the role of evil incarnate. He then claimed that the Democrat should be disqualified from the presidential race because of emails from her time as secretary of state that were deleted and that, according to Trump, contained vulnerable information if they fell into the hands of enemies.
“We cannot have someone in the Oval Office who does not understand the meaning of the words confidential or classified,” he said in one of his campaign events. Instantly the cry of “imprison her” appeared, which he also chanted and applauded while displaying a vigilante smile.
Paradoxes brought by the passage of time. Trump will “turn himself in†on Tuesday and appear before a Miami judge charged with 37 charges, making him the first president or former president to face a federal criminal indictment, and precisely for taking highly classified documents that put security at serious risk national and that of the allies.
A possible conviction for just one of the most serious crimes, such as violating the Espionage Act, would see him jailed for up to 20 years, a sort of life sentence for a man who turns 77 on Wednesday, June 14.
In addition to the charges in Manhattan for the alleged payment to silence a porn actress. This other matter, of much greater criminal relevance, may represent a challenge never before faced. Since the case will most likely not be resolved before November 2024, if Trump wins the Republican primaries he will not only be chasing the White House, he will be fighting to stay out of jail. If he were to become president again, he would drop the investigation against him at once, despite the relevance and amount of accumulated evidence portraying his disregard for his duties as commander-in-chief.
Even The New York Post, a far-right tabloid, mocked him yesterday Saturday with a full-page headline that said “Chamber of Secrets”. They illustrated it with the photo, including in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment, showing a stack of boxes stored in a bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. There, or in a shower or in the ballroom of his club, there could be papers about nuclear weapons or plans to attack Iran.
Hillary Clinton was investigated by the FBI for over a year and they did not find that she systematically or deliberately misused secrets. Clinton was on the prowl and released a tweet on Friday that rattled the right. He was wearing a cap that read: “But his mails”. He played with sarcasm to raise funds for pro-democracy groups.
And that is precisely what is at stake. The reaction of the former president and that of his loyalists, such as the speaker of the lower house, Kevin McCarthy, agree in the strategy that the security forces and justice have been hijacked by the President Joe Biden and the Democrats to eliminate the main rival at the polls.
Trump sent from his Truth Social network an attack against Smith, whom he called a “deranged lunaticâ€, of being in the hands of Biden or a “psychopath†who should not be involved in the investigation of any affair “ unless you see Biden as a criminal, which he isâ€.
One of his arguments is that Biden took documents with him, but he does not say that he returned them as soon as they were asked for them and did not consider “hiding” or “destroying” them as he did, the document of accusation Biden’s case remains pending while Vice President Mike Pence was acquitted this week.
After posting a parody on his network in which he ran over Biden with a golf cart, Trump traveled to Columbus, Georgia, on Saturday, his first public appearance since the impeachment. In this meeting he stated that “the baseless and ridiculous accusation, formulated by the department of injustice, will go down in history as one of the most horrible abuses of power”. Faced with the fervor of the audience, he referred to “a travesty of justice” and that “Biden is trying to put his political rival in prison”, which, he clarified, “is what they did in Stalinist Russia or the Communist China, there is no differenceâ€.
He proclaimed his innocence and that this was all a false accusation by a prosecutor who hates him. “No one can believe that this is happening in America.” And he still stressed that “the most protected criminal is the dishonest Joe Biden”.
In this line and in an exercise of political double standards and forgetting what he proclaimed about Clinton’s emails, McCarthy assured that the impeachment against Trump “will break this nation because “it goes against the core of equal justice for everyone, which it is not seen today”. Thinking of Hillary or Hunter Biden, the president’s son, Republican lawmaker Andy Biggs asked to dismantle the FBI after the indictment of Trump. “We have reached the stage of war”.
Ron DeSantis, aspirant for the presidency, is at that crossroads where he wants to mark differences with the former president, but without spoiling his bases, which he wants to conquer. “The use of federal law is a mortal threat to a free society”, while Pence, also in the electoral struggle, equated the imputation with what “the leaders of third world nations” do. He forgot that France convicted a former president or that Israel is investigating its prime minister.
There were also Republicans who recognized that the accusation is not unfounded. “The indictment is devastating,” declared John Bolton, a former adviser in the Trump administration. Chris Christie, another conservative aspirant in 2024, remarked that prosecutor Smith has documented very clear evidence and asked himself: “Is this the behavior we want from someone who wants to be president?”
This is the big question.
