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It wouldn’t be Tuesday without another Donald Trump indictment. This one comes out of Georgia, where Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators have been charged in a complex scheme to steal the 2020 election. The indictment in some ways builds on Jack Smith’s case from earlier this month, but it centers specifically on events in Georgia, a key swing state where Trump tried hard to manipulate the election outcome. Here are some takeaways:
It would be extremely fitting for Atlanta, the Black Mecca, to be the place where Trump met his downfall. It’s important to remember that Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was overwhelmingly an attempt to invalidate the votes of black and other minority people specifically. Atlanta’s Fulton County, where Trump claimed illegal voting had occurred, is majority non-white. So are Philadelphia and Chicago, where he made the same claims. Trump’s actions were not just an egotistical attempt to stay in power but a direct assault on the right of American minorities to equal political representation. He quite literally said that their votes shouldn’t count, didn’t count, were somehow “wrong”. That’s an old story in America.
Legally, this is the worst case for Trump. Not because it’s necessarily stronger than the others - that remains to be seen - but because even if Trump wins the presidency in 2024, he cannot pardon himself for these crimes. That’s because the case has been brought under Georgia state law rather than federal law, and presidents can only pardon federal crimes.
That means the complex scenarios that I laid out which might result from the federal indictments do not apply here. If Trump is convicted and sent to jail for the charges in Georgia before he is inaugurated as president, he is toast. If he wins the election and still refuses to step aside, we could even end up with the spectacle of a president governing from prison.
So who has the power to pardon him in this scenario, you might ask? Most states invest the pardon power in governors, but in Georgia it’s invested in a state board. The board has no power to issue pre-emptive pardons, and its guidelines say that pardons can only be issued to criminals who have already served their sentence. Amending the state constitution or at the very least forcing the board to change its rules would be the only way around this.
What if Trump both wins the election and manages to delay the trial until after January 2025? He’s likely at that point to claim immunity from prosecution. A president has never been charged of a state crime, so what would happen next would depend on the Supreme Court. How it might rule is unclear, although it did previously give presidents immunity from being civilly sued for official acts. If the Supreme Court ruled against Trump, the Secret Service would - in theory - have to hand him over to the U.S. Marshals.
I realize these scenarios sound crazy. That’s because they are.
Politically, the Georgia indictment is also the worst for Trump. The federal indictments are diffuse in their impact, arguably helping Trump in the primary but hurting him somewhat in the general election. But none hurt him as much in a specific, important swing state as the Georgia case does. Polls and reporting confirm that if many Georgians were sick of Trump in 2020, they are even sicker now, and that includes large numbers of suburban white voters who the GOP needs in order to power to victory in a diversifying Atlanta. Trump also takes relentless incoming not just from Democrats but also from Republican figures in the state, some of whom have already testified against him at the grand jury and will do so again at the forthcoming trial. Trump has done nothing to improve his position in the state since 2020, and lots to worsen it - and his path to the presidency looks a lot more difficult without Georgia.
Another reason the Georgia trial is so bad for Trump: unlike the federal trials, it may be televised. Georgia law has a presumption in favor of allowing cameras in courtrooms unless judges have a compelling reason to bar them. The footage might begin flowing as soon as Trump’s arraignment, likely to take place within the next ten days. Some people argue that for Trump all media is good media, but I wager that shots of Trump acting meekly and petulantly in one of the few settings in which he can’t bluster and lie to his heart’s content will not be a net positive for him.
This is the first indictment to also take aim at Trump aides like Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows. Giuliani’s descent from “America’s mayor” to facing hard time in a Georgia penitentiary is scarcely less remarkable than Trump’s. It’s richly ironic that Giuliani has been charged under Georgia’s racketeering law, which is modelled on the federal racketeering law which allowed Giuliani to make his name dismantling the New York mafia as a prosecutor in the 1980s.
It is heartening to see that some of the charges relate to the slandering and defaming of Georgia election officials, one of whom had to go into hiding and eventually leave her job because Trump and Giuliani’s lies led to threats against her life. Donald Trump has been used to acting with impunity for a long time, not caring whose life he destroyed along the way. His ability to do that might soon be at an end.