Angst and sore thumbs
It was a slow, rainy weekend after the breaking of legitimately big news about the indictment of Donald Trump for possessing classified documents and obstructing justice in his protection of those documents.
I spent too much time through that weekend in a texting war with a friend of vague partisan predilection who started it.
He shared his hand-wrung worry about the very future of the country when the Justice Department would go after Trump—a despicable being for sure, he stipulated—in a way that either seemed partisan and improper on that basis or would be widely judged that way.
From there we thumbed out zinger after zinger hour after hour on our little phone keyboards. My main point was that we can’t let the law slide for fear of a strain of insanity in the indicted one’s political base and on false equivalencies drawn between Trump’s deeds and Joe Biden’s or even Hillary Clinton’s.
I pleaded that my buddy stop normalizing Trump as if his outrage is ever generally equivalent to that of garden-variety political creatures like Biden and Hillary. They can be full of malarkey; Trump is ever full of danger.
My texting foe, long a reputable local lawyer and annoyingly consistent tennis player, said he wasn’t normalizing Trump but worrying about another Jan. 6, which I seem to recall sent him to bed, or at least away from the television for days. He counseled me not to let my disdain for Trump “get you too far over your skis.”
I may at one point have called him a Republican trying to put a veneer of altruism on his mundane partisanship, but didn’t mean it. He may have called me something nearly as bad, and perhaps not meant that.
On Monday, he texted that he might be moving my way a little—not on any point I’d made, for heaven’s sake. It was because of what Bill Barr had said and on what Alan Dershowitz had written in my friend’s favorite newspaper section, the commentary one of The Wall Street Journal, which, I acknowledge, is quite readable.
He valued both men’s reasoning and the leverage from which they offered it—Barr as Trump’s oft-obliging attorney general and Dershowitz as a legal icon who had at times defended Trump, even assisting in the defense on one of the impeachments of him.
Barr had told Fox News that, while he had stood up for Trump when Democrats came at him absurdly and abusively, he could not do so on this indictment. He called the particulars of that so “damning” that Trump was “toast” even if only half of it could be proved in court. He said Trump had been a genuine victim before, but not this time, because he “had no right” to such sensitive national security material.
Dershowitz wrote that the indictment resulted partly because Trump was targeted by the Justice Department and wholly because of the “unwise way he responded.” He wrote that the matter should have been a simple civil one by which Trump should have said, OK, y’all take that stuff back because I don’t want any trouble.
Trump doesn’t say things like that. And this time, at long last, his needlessly combative and destructive behavior ran him rather clearly afoul of the law in a highly sensitive way.
Dershowitz warned, though, that the Justice Department is at great risk if it can’t land a guilty verdict from a jury in a Trump state where there is a history of acquitting political officeholders.
That’s what both worries me and gives me admiration for the Justice Department. It could be—give this idea a chance, please—that Jack Smith and his crew simply decided the law had to be respected and defended no matter the political risk that should not be a prosecutor’s concern anyway.
My friend said I’d have been better off in my Tuesday column using Barr to make my points rather than quoting Asa Hutchinson, though he understood that I do, after all, write for an Arkansas audience. But I’d argue that Hutchinson is profoundly right about:
■ The seriousness of the Trump indictment.
■ The threat to the Republican soul posed by partisan defending of Trump.
■ The relevance, any verdict aside, of the risk of re-installing as commander in chief a man who acted that irresponsibly with highly sensitive material while risking national-security vulnerability.
My friend and I seemed to have come to a tentative, quasi-agreeable resolution.
He concluded that, even if the Democrats were wrong on Russiagate and the New York state court indictment of Trump, as I agree they were, it still could be, and in fact seems to be, that Trump damned-sure broke the law this time.
But my friend said he would insist on continuing to worry about the country. I worry about it too, first about the state of our political dysfunction and national division, and second about a banner headline saying “Trump acquitted by Florida jury.”