A date has been set for Trump's first federal trial!

MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2023

So has he committed a crime? A date has been set for Trump's first federal trial. Headline included, the New York Times reports the basic facts:

Judge Sets Trial Date in March for Trump’s Federal Election Case

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election set a trial date on Monday for early March, laying out a schedule that was close to the government’s initial request of January and that rebuffed Mr. Trump’s extraordinary proposal to push off the proceeding until nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election.

The decision by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, issued at a contentious hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, to start the trial on March 4 potentially brought it into conflict with two other trials that Mr. Trump is facing that month.

If Judge Chutkan's decision holds, this first federal trial will start on March 4, 2026. This raises a very important question:

With respect to the charges involved in this first prosecution, has Donald J. Trump committed any actual federal crimes?

Has Donald J. Trump committed a crime? Our overview goes like this:

Based on a wealth of public reporting, it seems obvious that Trump has almost surely committed recognizable crimes with respect to his handling of the classified material found at his Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago. But that's the stuff of his other federal indictment. That wouldn't be part of this trial.

As Alan Feuer notes in the Times, this first federal prosecution of Trump would involve "charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election." Here's the thumbnail account of the charges as provided by the leading authority:

On August 1, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on four charges for his conduct following the 2020 presidential election through the January 6 Capitol attack: conspiracy to defraud the United States under Title 18 of the United States Code, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, and conspiracy against rights under the Enforcement Act of 1870. The indictment mentioned six unnamed co-conspirators. It is Trump's third indictment and the first indictment against a U.S. president concerning their actions while in office. Trump appeared at an arraignment on August 3, where he pleaded not guilty. The charge with the longest sentence carries a maximum of 20 years in prison.

As of August 2023. the trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024.

Hmmm. If Trump had shot someone on Fifth Avenue, it would be easy enough to understand what he's been charged with doing. 

By way of contrast, does the average person know what it means to "defraud the United States," or to engage in a "conspiracy against rights?" Offhand, we ourselves have little idea what those fuzzy phrases might mean.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was surely engaged in lunatic conduct based upon a lunatic refusal to accept and acknowledge the fact that he had lost the election. Beyond that, he was certainly trying to game the system in a lunatic or ludicrous way through the demands he made on Mike Pence leading up to the formalities of January 6.

That said, did this president's lunatic conduct involve any criminal acts? We'll wait to hear the arguments on that—but we can already tell you this:

At this site, we're much more concerned with the political / epistemic / journalistic aspects of this astonishing state of affairs than we are with the criminal charges. 

We're much more concerned with a troubling political fact—with the fact that our own blue tribe can't convince half the country of the rather obvious lunacy of Trump's behaviors and claims.

We're concerned with the political haplessness of our own failing blue tribe. That strikes us as a more pressing question than the question of whether Trump can be said to have committed some sort of federal crime in the course of his lunatic conduct.

In the matter of the classified documents, it seems that Trump clearly has committed recognizable crimes.  In this matter, has he committed a "conspiracy against rights?" We aren't even sure that we know what such lingo means.

We do know this:

Trump has engaged in lunatic conduct at many stops along the way. Our tribe has been largely unable to convince a wide array of neighbors and friends of this rather obvious fact.

Oue tribe is eager to see Trump frog-marched to jail. On cable, there's virtually no other topic.

We badly want to lock him up! Given our own political haplessness, is it possible that we should spend a bit of time trying to heal ourselves?