OFFENSES: With what offense does Trump stand charged?

MONDAY, MAY 20, 2024

Our primitive national discourse: Abraham Lincoln put it best. For the record, he was quoting the New Testament when he did. 

We aren't Bible believers ourselves. But just to be specific, he was quoting Matthews 18:7:

The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offenses. For it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.

The specific offense to which the president referred was the offense of chattel slavery. The fuller passage in his second inaugural address reads like this:

LINCOLN (3/4/64): Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained...Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. 

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. 

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. 

"The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offenses. For it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."

In the most brilliant moral statement of which we're aware, Lincoln went on to stress the fact that both parties in this particular war bore responsibility for the vast offense in question:

LINCOLN (continuing directly): If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? 

The president continued from there, making his basic point even more horribly clear. To read his full text, click here.

Were both sides, North and South, being punished by this terrible war? If so, the president said, "Can we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?"

That was an astonishing statement about a vast historical offense. That said, the offense in question was easy to describe. It was Lincoln's moral assessment which was vastly complex.

Other famous offenses, real and perceived, have been easy to describe.

In the late Bronze Age, a vast assembly of Achaean armies laid siege to Troy for roughly ten years. The (perceived) offense in question was easy to describe:

Helen, radiance of woman, had abandoned Prince Menelaus, her Achaean husband. She had run off to become the wife of Paris, the Trojan prince. 

In the face of this perceived offense—this perceived blow to Achaean honor—a vast assembly of Achaean warriors spent ten years dying in the mud and the dust outside the walls of Troy.

By modern lights, that moral assessment was almost insane, but the perceived offense is easy to describe. Years later, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump referred to a different type of possible offense.

He did so in January 2016. Headline included, here's the way NPR's Colin Dwyer limned it:

Donald Trump: 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters'

With less than two weeks to go until the Iowa caucus, Donald Trump remains characteristically confident about his chances. In fact, the Republican front-runner is so confident, he says his supporters would stay loyal even if he happened to commit a capital offense.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."

The businessman, whose Trump Tower stands on the major Manhattan thoroughfare, cracked the joke Saturday to a receptive audience at the Christian college.

NPR read the candidate's comment as a joke. In Trump's formulation, he could apparently shoot someone dead on the street, right there in Manhattan, without losing a single vote.

It's easy to picture the general type of offense to which Trump referred. It's easy to describe the perceived offense which produced the (legendary) Trojan War.

Lincoln referred to a vast historical offense. This leads us to a puzzling situation in the present day.

Today, Trump stands charged in a New York City courthouse—charged with a criminal offense which could send him to prison. A jury may reach a verdict in the case next week—but with what specific criminal offense has the candidate been charged?

(Next week? That's based on a new ruling by Judge Merchan.)

With what crime does Trump stand charged? Also. does the legal theory in question actually make legal sense?

As best we can tell, it remains amazingly hard to answer those basic questions. Some have tried, but a great many others haven't bothered. 

The lack of clarity tells us something about the nature of our American discourse—but also, perhaps, about the fundamental nature of human capability and human impulse themselves.

With what offense does Trump stand charged? To what extent has that offense been described by our major news organizations, Red and Blue alike?

We'll be exploring those questions all week. We'll be looking at analysis pieces by newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. We'll also be looking at opinion columns by such observers as the New York Times' David French.

French is thoroughly anti-Trump, but he's also a graduate of Harvard Law School. Headline included, his column in this morning's Times begins and ends in the manner shown:

The Trump Trial Is Disturbing on So Many Levels

I can’t remember when I’ve been more disturbed by a criminal trial than I have been by the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. The prosecutors are painting a vivid picture of Trump as a vile and dishonest person, and the daily pilgrimages of Republican politicians to the Manhattan courthouse, in spite of horrific testimony against Trump, demonstrates that the party has a broken soul.

At the same time, the underlying legal theory supporting the prosecution’s case remains dubious. The facts may be clear, but the law is anything but—and that could very well mean that the jury convicts Trump before the election, an appeals court reverses the conviction after the election, and millions of Americans, many of them non-MAGA, face yet another crisis of confidence in American institutions.

[...]

Our court system does not exist to guarantee political results, no matter how much one might want Trump to lose the election. And defeating Trump with an assist from a criminal prosecution that falls apart on appeal would exacerbate the mistrust that helped make Trump president in the first place and sustains his hold on the Republican Party.

Trump’s immorality and corruption should have disqualified him with Republican voters almost a decade ago, and now we have more sworn testimony that Trump is every bit as bad as we feared. At the same time, however, one does not defend liberal democracy through dubious criminal prosecutions.

There are smart lawyers who disagree with me, who think the prosecution is standing on solid legal ground. I truly hope they’re right. But I’m worried enough to be deeply perturbed. A terrible man is in the cross hairs of American justice, but immorality alone doesn’t make him a criminal.

So says French, this morning. There's a great deal more to his column—and to the specter he presents, in which Trump is convicted and defeated at the polls, with an appeals court then coming along to declare the conviction invalid.

That would be a body blow to the citizenry's faith in our democracy. Or at least so French says. 

At this site, we're a bit more advanced than the Times columnist. In our view, the unfolding of this prosecution gives the lie to basic ideas about the way our democracy works—conceivably, about the way it has ever worked.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our American discourse has been a rolling joke for at least the past three decades.

Way back when, Lincoln described a vast offense, then offered a stunning moral assessment. "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln," a different American president said, more than a century later.

There are very few Lincolns! All this week, we'll examine various explanations of the alleged legal offense at issue in the Gotham trial.

Do you understand the alleged offense? At this site, we're still not sure we do!

Tomorrow: French and Douthat and Stephens oh my! Concerns about the current alleged offense.