29.09.2022

The Blob closes in

Trump is a con artist with a transactional approach to the law. However, argues Daniel Lazare, Democrat attempts to prosecute him are political warfare by other means

Donald Trump spent much of his presidency battling the so-called ‘Blob’ - the myriad foreign-policy ‘experts’ who fill think tanks, like the Atlantic Council and the Heritage Foundation, and endlessly bray for war. But now he finds himself battling an entity that is even more vast and formless: the US legal establishment.

A half dozen public prosecutors are currently battling for the honour of who can take the ex-president down first. In New York, the fiercely ambitious Letitia James, who sailed into Trump as “illegitimate” and “an embarrassment”, while running for state attorney general in 2018, has filed a lawsuit accusing him of a wide range of phony business practices. In Manhattan, the local district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is about to bring the Trump Organization - although not Trump himself - to trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion. In Washington, US attorney general Merrick Garland is investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 Capitol Hill uprising. In Atlanta, a district attorney named Fani Willis is investigating whether he tried to alter the 2020 election by telling a top Georgia official, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” - the amount needed to carry the state and put his candidacy over the top. And in Palm Beach, Florida, the FBI is looking into whether he violated the Espionage Act by moving secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate.

So many prosecutors at so many levels of government in so many different locales - is it a sign that Trump’s tendency to play fast and loose with the law is finally catching up with him? Or, considering that the swarm consists entirely of Democrats, is it a case of never-Trumpers using the legal system in a no-less-unscrupulous fashion to wage political warfare by other means?

The answer is both. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Trump is a con artist with what the New York Times describes as a “transactional” approach to the law - meaning that he regards the legal process as his personal weapon for use against business rivals, clients pleading to be paid, or anyone else he wants to destroy.¹ On the other, the political animus underlying the full-court press is as obvious as the perpetual tan on Trump’s face. One would have to be a world-class naïf to deny it. The New York Times, for instance, is shocked - shocked - that anyone would misuse the legal system in this way. Yet for decades the ruling class could not get enough of such antics.

The art of the deal - the mammoth 1987 bestseller that made Trump a household name - is a case in point. The book was not something that Trump dashed off on weekends. Rather, publisher Si Newhouse - the billionaire owner of Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and the New Yorker - asked him to write it after a Trump cover story sold unusually well. Since Trump is incapable of composing anything longer than a tweet, Newhouse then brought in a financially hard-pressed journalist named Tony Schwartz to ‘ghost’ it for him. Howard Kaminsky - the ex-chief of Random House, who later told a reporter that “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us” - therefore lied when he listed Trump as author. When a repentant Schwartz confessed to the same journalist that his role was nothing more than “put[ting] lipstick on a pig”, he lied as well, since he had been careful to stay mum as long as the royalties kept flowing.²

The same goes for Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate that owns Random House. It made a fortune during World War II by printing cheap editions for the Wehrmacht, only to pass itself off as a heroic member of the anti-Nazi resistance after VE Day.³ It lied too. Ditto the NYT, which now pontificates against Trump on a daily basis despite touting The art of the deal when it came out as a must-read, “because Mr Trump is one of those Great Characters who help to define New York’s peculiar urban style”. “The man has flair,” the NYT added, “and New Yorkers will forgive anything if you have flair.”⁴

And ditto top Democrats who were so impressed with Trump’s domination of the bestseller lists that they tried to recruit him to head a major fundraising gala. “He’s young, dynamic, successful,” enthused a Democratic congressman named Beryl Anthony. “The message Trump has been preaching is a Democratic message.” A spokesman for John Kerry - subsequently Barack Obama’s secretary of state and now Joe Biden’s wing man on global warming - said that the then-Massachusetts senator “sees Trump as an independent thinker who can put this thing together”.⁵

Democrats, Nazi profiteers, America’s top newspaper, etc - all helped pump up the Trump myth that they are now earnestly trying to deflate. A few cranky leftists objected to the Trump personality cult, but they were so effectively marginalised during the boss-worshipping ‘Age of Reagan’ that no-one noticed. The ruling class’s love affair with the bad boy from New York’s outer borough of Queens went on for decades and did not fully wear off until Trump refused to toe the Blob line on eternal enmity toward Russia - at which point the elite proclaimed him public enemy number one.

Sceptical

So who is the con artist here? The more the liberal elites try to shut down Trump, the more they expose their own essential fraudulence. Thanks to liberal ineptitude, Trump has survived two impeachments plus a Russiagate investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller that was so incompetent, it wound up embarrassing the Democrats more than the opposing party. After repeatedly failing to pin him down in the past, why should Dems do any better this time around?

Take the lawsuit that Letitia James filed last week. She will undoubtedly face problems due to her errant politicisation of what is supposedly a neutral legal investigation. But she will face another problem as well: ie, the uncomfortable fact that her crusade is basically a repeat of an earlier inquiry by the Manhattan DA that ended up falling flat. After months of snooping, Bragg opted to drop the case for one simple reason: while he could prove that Trump had inflated property values in order to obtain financing, he could not prove that anyone had suffered as a consequence. Not only did banks make money off the loans, but they promptly lent him more in the hope of raking in additional profits. Needless to say, Trump is not the only New York real-estate mogul who engages in hype.⁶

Or take the Garland investigation in Washington. One cannot help but be sceptical that the US attorney general will be able to uncover anything about Trump’s role in the Capitol Hill insurrection that did not come out during the post-riot impeachment proceedings. To be sure, this summer’s televised Democratic hearings yielded up one nugget - a sensational account about Trump trying to wrestle away the steering wheel from a secret service agent who refused to drive him to the riot scene. But not only was the story third-hand: it was swiftly and convincingly debunked by the secret service itself. The ultimate effect was thus nil.⁷ There is no reason to think that Garland will do any better.

Fani Willis’s investigation in Atlanta faces obvious difficulties, since she will have to do more than prove that Trump pressed a Georgia election official for a recount. To prove fraud, rather she will have to show beyond reasonable doubt that he did so knowing that he had lost. Yet Trump’s own statement in the now-infamous January 2021 phone call - “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state” - indicates the opposite, which is that he sincerely believed that massive voter fraud had taken place.

Finally, there are all those classified documents at Trump’s Mar‑a-Lago retreat. In an important article in The Guardian - yes, The Guardian occasionally publishes pieces that are not completely meretricious - Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation pointed out that the Espionage Act, which the US department of justice is using against Trump, is the same act that it is using against Julian Assange and it has used against other journalists as well. “[T]he US government has a huge overclassification addiction,” he writes, while “the justice department takes the position that everything leaked to journalists is highly sensitive and top secret and that any leaks put lives at risk.” Hence his conclusion: “excuse me if I’m a bit sceptical of the justice department’s explosive hints and leaks about what was potentially in the documents Trump had in his Dr Evil lair.”⁸

Yes, everything the CIA does is classified - torture, assassination, you name it. Indeed, Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, says he once received a ‘Merry Christmas’ email that was marked top secret!⁹ Declassification is not impossible, but the process is so long and cumbersome that the top-secret mountain continues to grow and grow. So, while Trump clearly went overboard in telling Fox News, “If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify … even by thinking about it,” the lapse is perhaps understandable under the circumstances.

Even if the FBI finds a document that is truly incriminating, moreover, Merrick Garland will face the question of how to prosecute a Republican presidential candidate whom his boss, Joe Biden, may well face in 2024. It is a problem made even more nightmarish by the fact that Biden is among those pushing him to indict.¹⁰

If he forges ahead, it is a sure bet that a Republican administration will respond in kind by filing criminal charges against Biden as soon as it takes power. Like something out of One hundred years of solitude, each new president will celebrate Inauguration Day by tossing his or her predecessor in jail or putting him before a firing squad. It is too bad that Gabriel García Márquez has departed the scene because his descriptive powers have never been more urgently required.

Like everything else on the American political scene, the anti-Trump legal offensive depends on the all-important mid-term elections that are now less than five weeks away. Despite recent signs of weakness, Republicans still have a 69% chance of taking over the House of Representatives on November 8, according to Nate Silver’s widely read - if only spottily accurate - FiveThirtyEight website.¹¹ If so, their first order of business will be to impeach Biden on corruption charges, based on his son Hunter’s famous laptop. The goal is clear: roast him slowly over an open flame - and maybe Garland as well, if he tries to take their lider máximo to court. They want to cripple the White House and throw the entire prosecutorial apparatus into chaos.

None of which is to suggest that Donald Trump is above the law. But the problem remains - how can the Biden administration go after him when the legal structure is in crisis?