David Corn: The New Trump Indictment Will Supercharge His War on American Democracy [View all]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/08/trump-indictment-jack-smith-2024-election-democracy/

Even after all these years of Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on American democracy and decency itself, the four-count criminal indictment handed down by a federal grand jury on Tuesday that accused the former president of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results still is a shocking development. It would be quite the capstone to the Trump era. Yet despite these criminal charges, the Trump era is not yet over. There are motions and presumably trials (in this case and others) to come, as well as the entire 2024 election. Trump has not left the building. And whatever happens in the various courtrooms, a key question remains: Will this latest—and most serious—indictment of Trump do anything to break his hold on the paranoid and irrational imagination of tens of millions of Americans?

Of all the Trump indictments—which also cover his payment of hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged extramarital affair and his alleged theft of classified documents—this new set of charges addresses the most fundamental threat he has posed American democracy. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him. He schemed to overturn legitimate vote counts. And he riled up his followers to such an extent that thousands stormed the Capitol and violently tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—a bedrock principle of American society.

But this alleged crime was not Trump’s doing alone. He had millions of accomplices: all those Americans who bought his bogus claims about the election.

Trump was only able to promote the biggest con of his career because there was an audience of Republican voters who believed his bunk. The GOP establishment did not oppose Trump’s disinformation operation—his assertions that he had actually won the election and his many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud—because it feared the party’s base. After the 2020 election, as Trump poisoned the national discourse with his conspiracy theories, Republican leaders did not counter his lies out of fear of alienating Trump’s voters. This afforded Trump the political space to mount assorted and overlapping plots to retain power. With this indictment, special counsel Jack Smith alleges these actions were crimes. And when those allegedly illegal schemes failed, Trump’s cultish loyalists provided the shock troops for the January 6 insurrectionist riot that nearly prevented the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

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