Shortly after sunset in Atlanta Monday night, Donald Trump was indicted for the fourth time in the way Ernest Hemingway described how a figure in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
The result is a looming confrontation between a mere county district attorney and a formidable former president of the United States in a case that both sides will argue has the future of the country’s democracy at stake.
For months, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has toiled quietly, deliberately and indefatigably, pressing her case that Mr. Trump allegedly violated state law and American values in trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. The work was gradual but, like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, came to a mid-evening climax suddenly.
This time the indictment came in 10 parts in state court, significant in three dimensions.
The first is because Georgia is the site of perhaps the most visible and consequential effort of the former president to change the results of the 2020 presidential election; it is where Mr. Trump tried to badger the secretary of state Brad Raffensperger into finding enough votes to deliver the state to him.
The second is because a state legal process makes it impossible for a newly elected Republican president, whether Mr. Trump or one of the other GOP candidates who have promised to pardon the former president, to sweep away a conviction.
And, finally, the indictment of 18 people beyond Mr. Trump demonstrates that Ms. Willis’s prosecution is not only aimed at the former president, suggesting she will argue in court that the effort to overturn the Georgia election was a massive illegal conspiracy that included, among others, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. In all, the indictment included 41 charges in legal action that will be prosecuted under racketeering law, carrying a minimum mandatory sentence of five years in prison for those found guilty.
Much was unknown Monday evening, but this was apparent: Combined with the federal indictment from special counsel Jack Smith, there can be no ambiguity about the serious legal challenge that Mr. Trump faces. It also is clear that Mr. Trump, planning a lengthy campaign for president, will find himself spending more time with lawyers than with voters, and more time in courtrooms than in coffee shops in Iowa and town meetings in New Hampshire, the sites of the early tests, now scheduled for January.
And much will be unknown even after the indictment document is examined, analyzed and transformed into a vital element in the 2024 campaign: Will this new indictment erode Mr. Trump’s support, now overwhelming, in the drive for his second term? Or will it serve merely to consolidate his support among his base, or even to persuade some Trump leaners to tumble into his column as the march of caucuses and primaries proceeds?
Almost seven in 10 Republicans do not believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected, according to several polls. An AP-NORC poll taken in June found that only 44 per cent of Americans believe next year’s election would be counted accurately. According to the CBS Poll conducted by YouGov, almost the same percentage of Americans believe that the indictments of Mr. Trump were designed to try to stop the Trump campaign (59 per cent) as the rate who believe the indictments and investigations are upholding the rule of law (57 per cent).
“Everything seems set in stone, but there’s always the chance that this may be the one that makes a difference,” said Victor Menaldo, a University of Washington political scientist. “For those who have turned against him, there’s no change. That cake has been baked. But this is way more tangible and far less theoretical than the other charges, and I don’t see a way out for him on this one. There is no ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card for him in these charges and in a state proceeding.”
No one will dispute that this case is an important element in the election. The reactions were slow in coming Monday night; the details of the indictment were not swiftly released to a country accustomed to instant-gratification details of the news. But their reactions were predictable nonetheless – and were foreshadowed before the indictment was unsealed when Mr. Trump called Ms. Willis’s team “rabid left-wing prosecutors,” arguing, “They want me BEHIND BARS for the rest of my life as an innocent man and will do anything in their power to get their way. I still cannot believe that this is happening in the United States of America.”
The Trump team will claim that this indictment is piling on, that it is yet another example of the determination of Democrats to damage Mr. Trump’s campaign, and that it is evidence of the corruption of American civic life. Mr. Trump’s opponents will react with constrained glee – as George H.W. Bush said after the fall of the Communist bloc in 1989: no gloating allowed – but will argue that it is evidence of the legal system assuring that American civic life not be corrupted.
This, with the possible exception of the rush to Southern secession that led to the 1861-1865 Civil War, is perhaps the greatest challenge to the country’s 236-year-old Constitution. Two years after it was drafted, one of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, wrote to Charles Carroll, one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. “Our grand machine has at length begun to work,” Franklin wrote on May 25, 1789. “I pray God to bless and guide its operations. If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair … for producing that effect. But after all, much depends upon the people who are to be governed.”
In months to come, Mr. Trump will not be the only American on trial.
David Shribman