Former President Donald Trump is mounting a familiar response in the face of legal peril: claiming victimhood and vowing revenge.
Trump recently became the first former or sitting president ever indicted on federal charges; The Department of Justice recently levied 37 charges against Trump, including obstruction, illegal retention of defense information.
Now Trump is responding in the way everyone expected, in the way that has marked his standard operating procedure for years. Trump is claiming victimhood, claiming that he is the target of the DOJ and the target of a grand witch-hunt.
More notably, Trump vowed to retaliate against President Joe Biden should Trump win the 2024 election and resume command of the Executive Branch (which includes the DOJ).
Donald Trump has a point…
Trump doesn’t often help his own cause. Seemingly, much of the adversity Trump faces is self-inflicted. In the present case, for example, Trump could make a logical and reasonable case demonstrating that he is being unfairly targeted.
But when Trump starts talking about mounting a retaliation against Joe Biden, the narrative shifts, and the sympathy withers.
What Trump should emphasize, in clear and subdued language, is that the Department of Justice’s case against him does likely have a political taint.
Document classification is an administrative issue, meaning that violations of classification procedures are typically dealt with in administrative terms – firings, reprimands from the HR department, that sort of thing. For a violation of classified documents to be dealt with in criminal terms is unusual.
And then, of course, you’ve got to consider that a president can unilaterally declassify classified documents. Trump could have declassified the documents in question had he liked. He failed to do so, which was lazy and/or stupid. But he could have, which means the current case is predicated upon a technicality. A procedural screw-up has Trump facing a terminal prison sentence.
He has a case to make to the American public if he could just get out of his own way. And if Trump wanted to bolster the notion that his current prosecution is politically motivated, he could cite the Hillary Clinton 2016 email scandal. Clinton also violated classified materials procedures, when she sent thousands of sensitive emails, in her official capacity as Secretary of State, from a private email server. The DOJ did not bring a 37-charge indictment against Clinton, nor should they have, but the discrepant outcomes is worth noting. Similarly, President Biden is currently under investigation for mishandling classified documents.
The Biden-documents investigation is still ongoing, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling that Biden will not be facing criminal charges even though, conceptually, the offenses were similar. Granted, liberal pundits are discerning the Trump incident from the Biden incident in terms of quantity and cooperation – but don’t kid yourself, in terms of principle, the offenses were quite similar.
…but Trump’s response is inappropriate
Trump can’t just highlight the facts, can’t highlight the case in a way that rationally makes him a somewhat sympathetic figure.
Instead, Trump is out there saying he’s going to retaliate against Biden. That’s not a good play and not a good look. That’s third-world stuff, where political opponents are jailed. That’s the sort of talk that makes the charges against Trump appear sinister; it’s the sort of talk that makes one wary to defend Trump, or wary to vote for Trump.
It’s all hot air, and people should be able to separate the machismo rhetoric from the substantive reality that is Trump and his actions – but Trump doesn’t always make that easy.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor and opinion writer at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
From 19FortyFive
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