This might be the moment where the former president starts to lose.
Mr. Trump is surrounded by disparate legal actions of varying importance by disconnected individuals. But if we step back and think about the meaning of this period, are we trying to move on from the Trump era, to put it behind us, or to understand what went wrong? |
 | | Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times |
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If one of the cases against Donald Trump goes to trial, it's going to be something we really live through — descriptions of testimony, spectacles outside courthouses, theories about how a trial's developments or existence affects the 2024 presidential campaign. |
This week, I wrote about the avalanche of legal proceedings against Trump — which range from civil to criminal at this point — and what kind of cultural meaning and effect they might be having in American society. For instance, in retrospect, the Jan. 6 committee hearings last year presented an account of the period after the 2020 election to a much wider audience, re-centering the country's attention on how bad the riot really was — a kind of project focused on truth and history. |
For my piece, I spoke with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, about her experience on that committee. We also talked a little about the prospect of a failed Trump prosecution over the events of Jan. 6. Generally, many Americans, including some Republicans, view the riot at the Capitol as a dark, bad time. That's a rare kind of consensus in American life at this point. If a prosecution failed, however, would that transform the riot into a 50-50 issue? |
Lofgren's immediate reaction was that the issue was already "polarized anyhow." But, she said, if a prosecutor feels there's evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime, most people would say that person shouldn't be exempt from prosecution because of a former title. On the other hand, if there were an acquittal, "People who were highly critical of the ex-president would — probably — have a little less confidence in the judicial system," she said. "People who are convinced that the president is, to use his words, the victim of a witch hunt, might gain confidence in the judicial system." To her, prosecutors just need to be prosecutors, not politicians, and "let the politics wind up where they land." |
This bit of our conversation isn't in the piece, but I thought it was a fairly interesting answer about the kind of meaning that might come out of this process. |
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