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It is already starting. Trump is trying to get the people most likely to oppose him to capitulate before he even takes office.
Saturday, there was reporting from NBC that Trump’s team is considering whether it’s possible to court-martial U.S. military officers over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That’s puzzling, if true, because it’s difficult to figure out what the basis to court-martial officers for following lawful orders would be. After all, Trump signed the timeline agreement for the Afghanistan withdrawal and drew down troops before he left office. And before courts-martial could get underway, charges would have to make it past a Rule 32 hearing, similar to grand jury proceedings in criminal cases, to substantiate that a basis for moving forward exists. Short of corrupting the entire process and everyone in it, it’s unlikely there would be convictions. It would take a horrible abuse of military justice and unlawful efforts to impose command influence for this to go anywhere.
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But convictions aren’t the point, just like they aren’t the point with the more than one hundred revenge prosecutions and punishments Trump threatened in the course of his campaign. Trump is trying to use fear and intimidation to bring people who can effectively oppose him to heel.
It doesn’t matter that there isn’t a sound basis for these actions. Seeing them through to the end isn’t the point. The point is subjecting people to stress, extraordinary expense, and loss of professional reputation. Trump likely believes that he can use the levers of government to crush those willing to oppose, but that most people will quietly submit, seeing it isn’t worth it. It’s reminiscent of the Schedule F plan that would make career civil servants fireable if they flunk a Trump loyalty test. Although there are estimates that 50,000 employees could fall into that category, Trump allies told Axios there would be no need to fire that many people because firing a few would produce the “behavior change” that is going to be essential to executive branch employees for the next four years—loyalty to Trump, not to the oath they took to uphold the Constitution.
So, as we head into the week ahead, let’s understand what the stakes are here and what Trump is trying to do. This syncs with the early phase of The Democracy Index I wrote about Friday night, a methodology for tracking Trump’s abuses so we can stay focused without becoming overwhelmed. Trump is already trying to tear down the institutions by threatening people who are doing their jobs without subservience to him. He is attacking the military and the Justice Department, and it seems likely the intelligence community won’t be far behind. Those three institutions stood up to him in 2020, and he hasn’t forgotten that.
Trump seems to have absorbed the lesson of other authoritarian regimes: that it’s important to create an appearance that your attacks on your enemies are legal. Instead of “lock her up,” use the legal system to proceed, so that your attacks are cloaked in the appearance of legitimacy. Trump didn’t understand the importance of this during his first term in office. He seems to have caught on.
Legality is the crucial disguise Trump will try to wear.
Watch for that this week in Manhattan, where, unless the schedule changes, District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team and Trump’s lawyers, including Todd Blanche (now nominated to be the Deputy Attorney General, the number two position at DOJ) and Emil Bove (nominated to be the PADAG, the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, a member of senior leadership and the principal counselor to the Deputy Attorney General) will try to sort out the details of Donald Trump’s delayed criminal sentencing with Judge Juan Merchan on the 34 counts of conviction in the DA’s prosecution of Trump. Trump desperately wants to have prosecutors terminate the cases against him, which will permit him to claim, even though it isn’t the truth, that he was an innocent man. In reality, prosecutors are struggling with the reality of what it means for the country to have elected a man who is a criminal defendant in two cases and was convicted in another, with the possibility that the Eleventh Circuit might still reinstate the classified documents case unless Special Counsel Jack Smith tells the court he’s abandoning the case.
I’m currently in the process of looking for new words to express the idea that we are watching unprecedented events unfold. The word unprecedented feels wholly inadequate for what we’re about to experience. But at least for now, it’s the best way I have of characterizing the fact that two top political nominees for a future president’s administration are representing him in criminal court following his conviction, ahead of his new administration taking over. That’s the legacy of the tough-on-crime Republican Party.
It’s worth pointing out just one of the aspects of the fact-free environment Trump will operate in. In the wake of Trump’s persistent—and false—claims that violent crime in New York City is out of control, right wing social media is awash in claims that if the District Attorney is reelected next year, women won’t be safe, nor will anyone else, so New Yorkers should abandon Democrats.
The District Attorney pushed back on Friday, using actual statistics, not wild claims, to show that violent crime has decreased significantly since he took office.
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It’s clear that we’ve firmly entered the age of disinformation and will have to stay alert and engaged to avoid it.
But for this week, the DA is scheduled to file his proposal for how, if at all, to move forward with the court by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, November 19, after asking the court for a brief continuance to consider the impact of Trump’s election. There is no clear indication yet of where this is headed and whether the prosecution will insist on sentencing for the convicted president-to-be.
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Also, we should expect to see the battle over the release of the House Ethics Committee report about allegations of sex trafficking a minor and illicit drug use by Attorney General nominee and now former Congressman Matt Gaetz heat up this week. I’m told by folks familiar with proceedings in the House that the committee loses its jurisdiction to proceed against someone who is no longer a member of the House—Gaetz’s resignation last week seems almost certain to have been an effort to prevent the report’s release. But, Democratic senators will demand it and, if nothing else, they can certainly start an investigation now that Gaetz has been nominated and hear from the same witnesses, including one who says she testified to the House panel that she saw Gaetz having sex with a minor at a house party. They could compile the information in the report even if they don’t get the report itself.
There’s a fascinating report in The New York Times about another one of Trump’s nominees, Robert Kennedy, Jr. In addition to describing his brain worm and the intense levels of mercury poisoning that led to significant memory loss for the 70-year-old, the Times writes that he has divulged his eating habits: “Mr. Kennedy has also described what he does not eat. For one thing, he says he never eats processed food.”
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Some of it is so silly that you almost want to laugh. But it’s serious times. We are entering a moment where it’s either the Constitution or Donald Trump. You can’t have both. It’s not just fun and games and fast food. It’s time to start paying attention.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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