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Donald Trump announced this week that he has received a so-called target letter from special counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. This would seem to indicate that the former president could soon be indicted for a third time.
Trump has previously been indicted this year on charges in New York related to hush money payments to an adult movie actress, and on federal charges related to his handling of classified materials.
In a predictable fashion, with a response that has become so formulaic that artificial intelligence would have no trouble doing the job for him, Trump went on a tirade against investigators while styling himself a victim.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before, or even close,” he proclaimed on his social media platform.
At least in this small excerpt, he’s not wrong. He is in fact the first former president to be criminally indicted — whether it be once, twice or possibly a third time.
But where Trump sees a “witch hunt” by political enemies, we see the consequences of his own actions to try to overturn an election that he lost. He acted in an unprecedented way and now he’s facing unprecedented legal scrutiny. That’s not a scandal or a witch hunt — it’s basic cause and effect.
We’re not prejudging the outcome of this legal process; Trump hasn’t even been charged with anything in this case, at least not yet. But there is already plenty of evidence in the public domain that plainly shows how Trump worked to overturn an election that he lost, and that his own aides told him repeatedly that he lost.
No president has ever done what Trump did to undermine the peaceful transfer of power and faith in America’s system of electing its chief executive. Yes, members of Congress have objected to electoral votes before. Yes, candidates have challenged results in court. But no president has ever been such a sore loser, in such a self-centered, publicly damaging and potentially illegal way.
No other president has been caught on tape calling up a state’s top election official and asking them to “find” the amount of votes needed to flip unfavorable election results.
No other president has helped unleash a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol, been slow to urge people to go home and then basically celebrated it afterward.
No other president has weaponized ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 like Trump did (inspiring strong bipartisan action in Congress to address those ambiguities).
To be clear, it’s not illegal to be a sore loser. There is a legal process for challenging election results, and the question here is whether Trump acted within the bounds of that process or not.
If charges do materialize, prosecutors would need to prove in court that Trump actually broke the law (or laws). We can’t predict where this potential case will or won’t go from here. We can say quite confidently, however, that Trump’s own unprecedented actions are what have brought the country to this unprecedented and unfortunate point.
