Life is a dream, Calderón de la Barca proclaimed. This is known by the former president of the United States suspected of betraying his country, although he has no idea of ??that literary summit given his little interest in reading.
Donald Trump returned to Washington this Thursday, but not as he dreamed. In his imagination he glimpses January 2025 and sees himself entering triumphantly, like an emperor who has returned from fighting against the infidels. He already hears himself in the White House inauguration speech, with the Mall full of those loyal to his cause, proclaiming revenge against all those “enemies” who dared to impeach him in court.
You will have to wait. This time he arrived in the country’s capital as a criminal to be arrested, fingerprinted and brought before Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya (the case will be supervised by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan). He is accused of conspiring to annul the result of the 2020 elections and perpetuate himself in power, something unprecedented throughout the existence of the United States.
“Not guilty,” he stated. The same thing he argued in April in New York, prosecuted for bribing a porn actress to keep quiet, and in Miami, accused of stealing highly classified secrets. In total, he already accumulates 78 charges, “561 in jail”, according to his calculations.
The surroundings of the E. Barrett Prettyman judicial building, where more than 1,000 insurgents have already passed through the invasion of the Capitol, had a special security deployment. There were no incidents and, as another occurred in his other two appearances, the support of his followers fell very short for his taste in terms of masses.
Following his usual conduct, the defendant heated up the atmosphere with a message on his social network shortly before leaving his mansion in Bedminster (New Jersey) towards his nightmare.
“I am going to Washington to be arrested for having contested a corrupt, rigged and stolen election,” he proclaimed. “It’s a great honor because I’m being arrested for you,” he insisted in homeland-saving style.
In the courtroom he was just four meters from prosecutor Jack Smith, his nemesis. “Have you taken any drugs today?” the judge asked. “No,” he replied, “the former president.
Once he pleaded not guilty, after the judge read all four counts to him, prosecutor Thomas P. Windom indicated that they were not opposed to his release, as long as he did not communicate with witnesses.
The magistrate then advised the defendant that if he violates the conditions of release, he could be arrested and the current agreement would be revoked, and face trial in detention, as well as receive a longer sentence. The next hearing will be on the 28th. Trump has to appear in Florida three days before.
“It is a sad day for America. This is a political persecution, of a person who leads, in a substantial way, the Republican primaries and who surpasses Biden by far. If you can’t beat your rival, you prosecute him. We cannot allow this to happen in this country, ”he reiterated once more before boarding the plane, back to Bedminster.
This case against the right to vote is different from the others and not only because of its magnitude. Trump insists without evidence that the hand of President Biden is behind it to eliminate him in the 2024 race. But the prosecutor’s brief is made up of information and confessions from within the Trump government, from allies such as Vice President Mike Pence.
These testimonies reinforce the story that Trump was more than aware of his defeat and that he concocted a web of lies about a non-existent electoral theft, which he repeated incessantly to make them seem true.
Pence, who did not want to participate in the bipartisan congressional commission to investigate the failed coup of January 6, 2021, emerges as one of the main prosecution witnesses. His name or his rank appear more than 100 times in the 45 pages drawn up by the prosecutor. He even handed over the notes he took in the meetings he then held with his boss, when he refused to comply with Trump’s unconstitutional order to prevent, as president of the Senate, the confirmation of Biden’s victory that unfortunate January 6.
Despite the fact that Smith keeps evidence, behind his writing the collaboration of other members of the government team is palpable. Bill Barr, who resigned in December 2020 as secretary of the Justice Department after informing Trump that they had found no irregularities in the recount, declined to confirm on CNN whether he has given a statement. However, he implied that he did.
It is also surprising that among the six co-conspirators, whose indictment has been postponed in order to expedite the trial against Trump, does not include Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff and who is known to have actively participated in the conspiracy meetings. Not a few lawyers deduce that Meadows has been able to cooperate in exchange for impunity or good treatment.
The insistence in Trump’s message that there was cheating emerges as the crux of the matter. As in the Calderonian drama, Trump always wanted to configure his life in his own way, without letting himself be carried away by fate.
His lack of attachment to the truth is already more than in the public domain and that lies have always been part of his manual for adapting reality to his needs. Throughout his career in business and politics, falsehoods and manipulations have been his common currency, from assuring that his family was of Swedish and not German origin, when he wanted to rent apartments to Jewish tenants, or when he triumphed among the extreme right with the more than unfounded claim that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Africa.
Finding himself surrounded, Trump has always appealed to the first amendment of the Constitution, which establishes freedom of expression. And this is the key argument of his defense, stressed John Lauro, one of his lawyers. He stressed that the accusers must show that he was not telling the truth when talking about the manipulation. “As president he could talk about these issues,” he remarked. He added that, in addition, he had the advice of legal experts.
Among many other analysts, Barr countered that Trump knew he had lost. “As the indictment says, the right to the first amendment is not attacked and the president could say what he wanted, even that the elections had been stolen, even if he knew they had not, but all this does not protect you from a conspiracy,” stressed.
Other jurists influenced their skepticism in this defense theory. Freedom of expression ends as soon as words show signs of criminality, and even more so when spoken in private.
Trump pursues two other goals. He will remove the trial from Washington, Democratic territory, and delay the cases until after the elections. If he wins, he will file them or forgive himself.
Sheltered under an umbrella, before leaving with his plane for his New Jersey paradise, the former president commented that the federal capital was in decline, with battered buildings and graffiti, as if he had had time to do one of his real estate analyses. “This is not the place I left,” he commented grimly. He sounded cynical. The day he left through the back door of the White House, that January 20, 2021, Washington was occupied by the National Guard. There was fear that the fascist hordes, encouraged by Trump himself, would repeat the wrongdoing and try to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden.
