Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Attorney General Merrick Garland arrives for a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 29, 2023.
There is something seriously amiss when the first criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is for paying hush money to a porn star, even if New York DA Alvin Bragg was able to creatively bootstrap a misdemeanor into a felony. The prosecution makes it look like Trump’s political enemies are on a fishing expedition. It gives ammunition to Trump, in high victim mode, to rally his MAGA faithful. Trump could even beat the rap.
Trump is of course guilty of far more momentous misdeeds, the gravest of which is attempting to overthrow the 2020 election by violent insurrection combined with explicit pressure on Vice President Pence to reject duly certified electors.
This was all carried out in broad daylight. In case the Justice Department needed a little help, the House Select Committee on January 6th provided a detailed prosecutorial memo. It has been 27 months since our democracy narrowly averted a coup, and ten months since the House Committee laid out Trump’s seven-part plan to overturn the election.
So where in hell is Attorney General Merrick Garland? Only now are prosecutors even getting around to interviewing Pence. The old saying is that justice delayed is justice denied, and never was that truer.
Instead of the spotlight and the obsessive media coverage being on Trump held accountable in criminal court for trying to overthrow an election, it is on the relatively trivial offense of paying off Stormy Daniels. And yes, Trump did commit violations of law, even felonious ones. But is this the high crime for which America should be holding Trump criminally accountable?
The Democratic political class is taking some perverse comfort in that the hush money prosecution reinforces Trump’s hardcore support among the MAGA base, which in turn all but seals his status as the likely 2024 nominee. Why is this comforting? Because Trump will bomb in the swing states and be the easiest Republican for Biden to beat.
That may be so, but the more consequential fact is that Trump needs to be held criminally liable for trying to steal this republic, and not for one more tawdry act of the sort that has marked his whole career. An attorney general worthy of the name would have gotten on with that prosecution long ago.
In case you missed it, as part of our April issue on the failed economic models that in turn lead to bad policy advice, I have a feature piece called “Is Economics Self-Correcting?” The article assesses the state of a profession too wedded to unreal assumptions about the economy and the society, and asks whether the new openness of some economists is around the edges or at the heart of the discipline.
