A Useful Typology for the Trump Indictments
A Useful Typology for the Trump Indictments
Don't worry, I'm a political scientist and I am here with my 2x2!
Just in case you were living under a rock, Donald Trump notified everyone yesterday that he’s going to be indicted next week. The Washington Post and other respected media outlets were saying that it was a seven-count indictment, but the actual indictment reveals 37 charges. This the second criminal charge filed against the former president, following the New York indictment in March of this year. In all likelihood, there are two more indictments coming in the next few months for Trump’s post-2020 election crimes, one from the state of Georgia and one from the federal government.
There are plenty of explainers for the myriad criminal cases that Trump faces, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that what is needed here is an old political science standby: the 2x2.
Political scientists fucking love 2x2s, they’re one of the easiest ways of modelling how two variables can explain a variation of outcomes. I use them all the time, whether I’m explaining different kinds of regulatory coordination or modelling zombie apocalypses.
So here’s my 2x2 to explain the different Trump indictments — current and future:
The two variables we need to consider are the severity of the crimes Trump stands accused of committing and the likelihood of smoking-gun evidence that Trump did the criming.1
On the severity of the crimes, there are two lower-level cases and two more serious felonies. The New York case “feels like penny ante stuff” as I noted in March. The documents case is more serious but as WaPo’s Josh Dawsey noted, Trump’s real problem in the indictment just handed down is not the underlying crime so much as his ridiculous but willful efforts to obstruct justice once the FBI got involved. They are definitely crimes — felonies, even. Still, the severity of them compared to, oh, I don’t know, coup-plotting seems tame.2
In contrast, both the Georgia case and the federal inquiry into Trump’s role on 1/6 are really goddamn serious. In both instances Trump’s activities directly contravened both the spirit and letter of the Constitution. In the Georgia case he was trying to coerce officials into falsifying election results in his favor. The January 6th events are even worse because they involve aiding and abetting violent attacks in a desperate bid to stay in power. Compared to mishandling documents and skirting campaign finance laws, these are the more serious crimes.
The other dimension is the degree to which the prosecutors have smoking-gun evidence that Trump did what he stands accused of doing. It is only possible to infer this based on the publicly available evidence. Regarding the New York indictment, the logic is sufficiently convoluted that I’m not sure how much there is there. I suspect the evidence is there, but it’s not obvious enough for a dolt like me to comprehend it.
That is not the case with the indictment that came down today. You can smell gunpowder wafting from that document, that’s how specific the evidence is against Trump. The federal government has voice recordings, photos, text messages, and documents all showing Trump did exactly what he stands accused of doing.
We have not seen the indictments for the Georgia case or the federal 1/6 case against Trump, but it is easy to infer those indictments will also contain smoking-gun evidence. The January 6th case, at a bare minimum, contains all the evidence from the January 6th Commission Report. Those hearings seemed pretty damning for Trump. As for the Georgia case, we know there is recorded evidence of Trump pressuring state officials. We also know that the Fulton County prosecutor was able to haul a lot of Trump allies into the grand jury, and that the grand jury recommended multiple indictments. There is probably some damning evidence coming down the pike from that.
This leads to the 2x2 above. For those readers who do not want Trump to win in 2024, there’s a lot of good news. The first takeaway is that the more serious the charges against Trump, the more likely the prosecution has smoking guns in its possession. That is reassuring from a rule-of-law perspective, and puts the lie to the GOP charge of weaponizing the law against Trump. The second is that Trump has only faced the less severe indictments so far. When the other federal case and the Georgia case get to the indictment phase, the details will be even worse for Trump.
The last takeaway is that Trump is one of the dumbest criminals in the history of crime. It turns out that a person with a short attention span, poor impulse control, oppositional behavior, and nasty temper will generate lots of incriminating evidence while conducting illegal activities. Who new?
Note that the question of Trump’s actual guilt or innocence is not on the table. He’s obviously guilty of what he’s been charged with, what he will be charged with, and untold amounts of other shit. The question is not whether he’s a criminal, it is whether it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s a criminal.
Yes, I’m aware that Trump in committing so many crimes, Trump weirdly makes it easy to minimize some felonies. The point remains that some of these crimes are worse in intent and outcome than others.
Good start (frankly I like 2x2 tables) but I think you underestimate the weight of the charges under the Espionage Act.
Ben Wittes and Quinta Jurecic at Lawfare nailed it six years(!) ago. "There’s only one problem with Trump’s eligibility for the office he now holds: The idea of Trump’s swearing [the oath of office] or any other oath 'solemnly' is, not to put too fine a point on it, laughable—as more fundamentally is any promise on his part to 'faithfully' execute this or any other commitment that involves the centrality of anyone or anything other than himself."
"What does it even mean for a person who contradicts himself constantly, who says all kinds of crazy things, who has unknown but extensive financial dealings that could be affected by his actions, and who makes up facts as needed in the moment to swear an oath to faithfully execute the office?"
Spoiler alert, it meant nothing. Trump was a rogue president, which was bad enough, but he turned most of the GOP into a rogue, anti-American party. And turned his apologists at anti-anti-Trump publications like the WSJ and National Review and activists at outfits like Judicial Watch, the Federalist Society and Heritage into rogues too. They could stanch the bleeding today, and may do so, by simply accepting that the indictments against Trump deserve to be taken seriously, and accepting the results of the judicial process, whatever they are. Early signs are not encouraging, but one might as well be an optimist.