Meyerson on TAP: The Donald’s Possible Defenses

“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest,” England’s King Henry II is said to have said back in the 1100s, referring to his political opponent Archbishop Thomas Becket, whom Henry’s followers promptly bumped off. In the ensuing roughly 850 years, Henry has generally been held responsible for the murder, even as no one has questioned his right to speech per se.

That’s an unfortunate precedent (originalists take note) for Donald Trump, who sought to politically wipe out no mere priest but a decisive majority of the American electorate, the Electoral College, and the Constitution’s process for designating a president. As Special Counsel Jack Smith made clear in his indictment of Trump, Trump was being charged not for his speech per se, but for directing his followers to create bogus slates of electors, for suggesting (à la Henry) to Georgia’s secretary of state that he “find” (i.e., create) just enough votes to flip that state into his column, for telling Republican state legislative leaders to illegally override the outcome of the election in their states by having the legislature award him the state’s electoral votes, and for repeatedly telling his vice president to fraudulently anoint him as the election’s actual victor. To argue that effectively soliciting and commissioning these fraudulent deeds was permitted by the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech is to argue that a mob boss who commissions a hit isn’t culpable for the hit men’s whackings.

Yet that’s the argument that Trump’s defenders, most particularly his lead attorney John Lauro, are making.

And if that doesn’t work, they have a fallback: Trump really believed he had won, so any of the illegal acts he commissioned weren’t really illegal because, well, he believed he’d won. Generally, of course, strongly held beliefs do not constitute grounds for exoneration from criminal acts, as numerous convicted felons could attest. Still, in the absence of better defenses, the Trumpians are pushing this line for all it’s worth. As Lauro said on Fox News: “I would like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations [of voter fraud] were false.”

Now, there’s a defense that demonstrates Trump’s bona fides to hold the most powerful office on the planet. Despite hearing from his top campaign aides, his Justice Department (starting with Attorney General Bill Barr), and the 61 federal judges, many of them his own appointees, who dismissed allegations of voter fraud since they had no substance whatever, Trump still insisted he’d won. If that insistence was based on his actual beliefs, we had—and may yet have again—a president whose thinking was rooted in world-class epistemic closure. Or, if you think Trump can tell a hawk from a handsaw, we have a world-class liar with the world’s worst case of narcissism.

So, the search for other defenses must go on. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial on the indictment may have set the standard for the ridiculousness to which Trump’s defenders are driven. Consider these two gems from the Journal’s list of particulars:

If there was a conspiracy, it was by a gang of misfits … [For which reason] the conspiracy had no chance of success.

By which standard, no one could ever be accused of attempted murder, since the would-be killers couldn’t pull it off.

And:

We’ve argued that an indictment of a former President should be based on serious charges with enough evidence to convince most Americans that it is justly brought. We doubt most Republicans will see this one in that light …

Well, of course most Republicans won’t see it in that light. They’ve been bombarded by, among other things, decades of Rupert Murdoch’s propagandists, of whom the Journal editorialists constitute the elite, to reject anything coming out of a Democratic government, or any government not controlled by Murdoch-friendly right-wingers, as dangerous and corrupt. Journal editorials and Fox News have provided the bulk of the blinkers that shield Republicans from facts. An honest editorial would at least take credit for that.

Finally, before they even get to trial, Trump’s lawyers will seek to delay it, and likely move for a change of venue, too. As to the latter, they need to move the trial to a place where rulers stay in power because they have the power to stay in power. I’d suggest Russia, China, or, if all else fails, North Korea.