The Beginning

Some people believe that the Manhattan D.A.'s case against Donald Trump is small potatoes. Michelle Goldberg disagrees:

It is a mistake to treat this indictment — which, according to The New York Times, includes more than two dozen counts — as tangential to Trump’s other misdeeds. The conduct at issue in this case is directly tied to the 2016 election and the question of whether Trump cheated to win it.

Most of the legal trouble that Trump has faced since entering politics has stemmed from his willingness to skirt the law and, at times, betray the country in his drive to get and keep power. Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation didn’t prove that he engaged in a criminal conspiracy, but it did show that his campaign both “welcomed” and received Russian help in his first bid for president. Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019, was about his attempt to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Joe Biden, the rival he most feared.

Trump is under criminal investigation in Georgia and Washington, D.C., for his attempts to subvert the outcome in the 2020 race. Each time he failed to face consequences for breaching rules meant to safeguard America’s electoral system, he escalated his behavior, to the point of attempting a coup. Escaping conviction in his second impeachment, for trying to overthrow the democratic system he was sworn to protect, he now treats Jan. 6 as something heroic, honoring rioters at his most recent campaign rally.

The Manhattan case is part of a pattern of anti-democratic behaviour:

As The Wall Street Journal reported, in addition to hearing about the payoff to the porn film star Stormy Daniels, the grand jury in New York heard extensive questioning about the payoff to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal. Both women were going to tell their stories before the 2016 election. Unlawful means were used to silence them, which is why Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, went to prison.

As Cohen told a judge while pleading guilty to campaign finance crimes, tax evasion and bank fraud in 2018, his payments to Daniels and McDougal were made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” David Pecker, the former C.E.O. of American Media, onetime parent company of the National Enquirer, said in a non-prosecution agreement with the Southern District of New York that he’d paid $150,000 to McDougal to “suppress the model’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

It should matter whether Trump broke the law in the service of securing his minority victory. Especially given all the evidence that he continued to defy the law in order to hold on to it.

All the other indictments which will drop are all about that pattern. The Manhattan case is only the first in a long tale of electoral crimes.

Image: MSNBC