The BDN Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, and does not set policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Donald Trump and his campaign seem to have mixed up Nazis and Isaac Newton in response to the former president’s most recent federal indictment.
“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the Trump campaign said in a statement in response to his indictment this week on charges of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction and attempted obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against the right to vote. These charges relate to Trump’s efforts to contest and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost.
We missed the part in history lessons, documentaries and survivor accounts (including from family) where the horrors of Nazi Germany that eventually spread across Europe were defined by people facing consequences for their actions. That’s probably because the Trump team’s evocation of Nazism is both despicably cynical and ahistorical.
The many victims of Nazi Germany, including but not limited to millions of Jewish people, faced brutal persecution – often death – for their identities. Trump is simply facing prosecution for alleged crimes.
A powerful person facing unprecedented consequences for their unprecedented actions doesn’t evoke Nazism; it evokes Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, even for presidents and former presidents.
Trump is presumed innocent unless proven guilty, in each of his current criminal proceedings. He pleaded not guilty to the most recent charges on Thursday. He has the right to a speedy and public trial, and to mount a defense both in court and in public. He has the right to be wrong in his public comments. But as this most recent indictment emphasizes, he is not being charged with being wrong, he is charged with orchestrating a criminal conspiracy related to trying to overturn an election that he lost.
“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the indictment states. “He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.”
Yet again, we won’t presume the outcome of these newest proceedings. It falls to prosecutors to try to prove and a jury to decide whether Trump’s actions, already well-documented, meet the level of criminality being alleged. But once more, we know enough to say that a person’s office or former office does not shield them from accountability for their actions. And the initiation of this accountability does not make the U.S. a dictatorship. Quite the opposite, in fact. That is what happens under the rule of law in a functioning democracy.
We’ve never been big cheerleaders of Bill Barr, Trump’s former attorney general. In fact, we’ve found him downright Orwellian in the past. His perspective on the most recent incident of his former boss, however, is still instructive — not only because it provides insight into Trump’s state of mind from someone often in the room with him, but also because Barr led the Department of Justice that Trump and his allies have now made a constant target of criticism during the Biden administration.
“There was very grave wrongdoing here, and I think it’s reasonable to say that it falls within the obstruction of a proceeding,” Barr told PBS on Aug. 3 about Trump’s actions. “That’s not weaponization. That’s enforcement of the law.”
In addition to saying he personally would have considered not bringing these charges, Barr also acknowledged that making the case could perhaps be difficult to prove. That very well could prove true, but it certainly doesn’t make the indictment or the investigation a “witch hunt” worthy of Nazi Germany as Trump has insisted.
Like Barr, Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence was non-committal on whether he thought prosecutors would be able to make the criminal case. But Pence, who admirably resisted Trump’s repeated attempts to distort the process for counting electoral votes, made a strong moral case against Trump’s current effort to reclaim the presidency.
“Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States,” Pence, one of Trump’s current primary opponents, said in an Aug. 1 statement.
With many legal questions still unresolved and eventually heading before juries, Pence’s point should already be obvious to the nationwide jury of voters.
