Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal - The Atlantic - 0 views
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These claims of criminalizing politics are themselves nothing but spin. They imply that Trump and his associates took no action beyond typical political maneuvering.
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there’s something telling about this phrasing. Politics, it suggests, is a dirty game, where the players jockey viciously for advantage—and if the game becomes rough, well, nothing can be done about that.
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actually is not the case: Attempting to overturn an election and hold on to power despite the will of the voters is far from typical politics.
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somewhere a line does exist separating the ugly but acceptable from the potentially criminal. And prosecutors allege that Trump crossed it.
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what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back.
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Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”
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The power of the presidency is far-reaching, and Trump proved uniquely skilled at exploiting his authority in the areas where controls were weakest.
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the reach of that power was precisely what had made normative constraints so crucial: For example, because the Constitution places few limits on presidential authority over the Justice Department, it’s all the more important that presidents restrain themselves from demanding that the attorney general investigate their enemies.
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Instead of the threat of prosecution, the only real constraint on a president’s actions—other than impeachment, which Trump survived twice—is that of political norms. This taste of presidential power may have given Trump a sense of invincibility—perhaps a misguided one.
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Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election.
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according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “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 Smith indictment states. But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
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Repeatedly throughout his presidency, Trump arguably violated his own oath of office and encouraged others to violate theirs. At the federal level, the oath isn’t judicially enforceable; the president’s adherence to it can’t be investigated by a prosecutor or charged by a grand jury. It is, once again, a reflection of a normative commitment to carrying out the duties of the office in the public interest
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Georgia, though, criminalizes the violation of an oath by a “public officer” in the state. And the Fulton County indictment charges Trump with soliciting Georgia officials—whom he pressured to overturn the state’s election results—to violate their oaths.
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the indictments are a signal that the foundation of American democracy rests on more than norms alone. These prosecutors aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, actual crimes—ones that Trump and his allies are alleged to have committed.