Donald Trump Isn't Running A Presidential Campaign. By Brian Beutler

It's a campaign for immunity from the law, and Democrats aren't doing nearly enough to counter it.

BRIAN BEUTLER

MAR 20, 2024

∙ PAID

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Every now and again it’s fun to hold the unfiltered public comments of normal politicians up against the Donald Trump’s ravings on social media. “Merry Christmas” vs “Haters and Losers” etc.  

If you try that this week, you’ll find Trump completely unmoored from the calendar or any national circumstance. No good tidings for St. Patrick’s Day, no particular interest in federal policy. Trump’s mind has been neatly divided between his hallmark agitprop and unrelenting obsession with evading the nearly half-billion fine he owes the state of New York for serial business fraud. 

When you pan out even further it becomes clear: Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign. He might become president in spite of this, but his efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.  

Take the biggest threats to him one by one, and a pattern quickly emerges: 

Trump is dedicating immense time and resources to rewriting the history of his lawbreaking. It’s reminiscent of his more successful bid to rewrite the findings of the Mueller report as “NO OBSTRUCTION! NO COLLUSION!” except now the legal process is much farther along, and he has no Bill Barr to do his dirty work for him. The approach is, thus, often clumsier. 

In Atlanta, where he faces a lengthy prison sentence for trying to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020, he sent one of his co-conspirators rifling through the bedroom of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. All the evidence of Trump’s crime remains, but he managed to derail the proceedings with a lengthy detour into Willis’s romantic relationship with a fellow prosecutor, who has since been dismissed from his role. On right-wing and social media the case has ceased to reflect any connection to Trump’s failed coup and has become synonymous instead with her sex life and her exasperated defense of her privacy and integrity. Here the damage to the rule of law may be real: The case has not reached jury selection yet, and the pool is now thoroughly tainted. 

Trump was set to begin trial in the New York hush money case this month, but was just awarded a delay of at least 30 days by the judge in the case after federal authorities in the Southern District of New York belatedly produced documents stemming from their own hush-money investigation to Trump’s defense team. At the very least, this hiccup is a product of Trump’s own dilatory tactics, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. But there may be more to the story—the judge has requested records of communications between Trump’s team and the notoriously Trumpy SDNY to investigate whether he colluded with his allies in law enforcement to delay this trial outside the bounds of legal process. 

In Florida, Trump barely has to exert himself at all. The judge in his classified-document theft case, Aileen Cannon, is one of his own appointees, and keeps doing undisguised favors for the defense. She may even be teeing up a plan to dismiss the charges against him (presumably in a conveniently-timed manner) before the trial even begins. Trump seldom comments on this case because his agent is overseeing it. 

Refer a friend

His other agents on the Supreme Court have delayed his federal January 6 trial until at least the summer, but Trump still brays about his claim to dictatorial immunity, because that’s his ticket to getting the case dismissed. Unlikely as that is, there’s a back up plan: He suspects that if the five most MAGA-aligned justices validate any sliver of his appeal, it’ll add another layer of delay to this trial, presumably until after the election.

Trump is already liable for assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll. But as he appeals the immense damages he owes her, he’s also filed a defamation suit against ABC News and This Week host George Stephanopoulos for asserting he’d been found liable of “rape” when under New York state law the term for what he did to Carroll is “sexual abuse.” This is Trump’s clunkiest effort of all, because his suit is probably unwinnable even if Trump draws a MAGA judge. Lewis Kaplan, the judge who presided over the Carroll trial, has explained repeatedly in official documents that the terms are synonymous. By fixating on Stephanopoulos, Trump will only draw further attention to the prior verdict. But winning a defamation case may be less important to Trump than intimidating other journalists out of describing him as a rapist, or using any variation on the word “rape” to describe his liability to Carroll. 

His current fixation on the civil-fraud judgment stems from the fact that he has been unable to post a surety bond from a legitimate financial institution to forestall Attorney General Letitia James from seizing his assets. He’s asked a New York appeals court for special treatment under the law, so that he might block James from collecting the fine while he appeals the verdict. But by Monday, he’ll be out of time. That explains the lashing out. It also strongly suggests Trump and people close to him are madly soliciting bribes—trading away campaign promises to shadowy U.S. billionaires or foreign nationals, so that he doesn’t lose Trump Tower. 

This is what the Trump campaign is. There’s scarcely room in his schedule for anything else. 

The problem is it could all work, particularly because his political opposition (not the judges and prosecutors he accuses of partisanship, but actual Democrats) aren’t drawing negative attention to his schemes in any systematic fashion. We could easily wake up in November to find the Fulton County trial hasn’t happened, the hush-money case delayed or on appeal, the document-theft case dismissed, the January 6 trial on hold, Trump’s history of rape sanded down, his private businesses secretly bailed out, and little public awareness of how he abused his wealth and power to escape or defer justice. 

This is where Democrats should come in. In all but the first of these cases—the Fulton County case—there’s a clear nexus to federal law or federal oversight, and thus an alternate means for Democrats to draw attention to Trump’s corruption even if he’s able to delay official legal proceedings. 

Senate Democrats and/or Attorney General Merrick Garland could pick up where the hush-money judge left off and mount a thorough inquiry of the MAGAfication of SDNY.  

Special Counsel Jack Smith has been both shrewd and patient with Cannon, and may be able to outmaneuver any play she might run to falsely exculpate Trump before November. But senators have a role here, too. They could make it clear to her that she won’t be getting a Supreme Court appointment if Trump loses—far from it, they can begin scrutinizing her background thoroughly now and reminding her judges can be impeached. They can bring Brian Butler, the Smith witness who just came forward with damning depictions of Trump’s obstruction and endangerment of state secrets, before a Senate committee of relevant jurisdiction. 

Leave a comment

They could (and should all along) have mounted a pressure campaign to define what the Supreme Court is doing to the January 6 case as partisan meddling on Trump’s behalf. They can also (and should also) hold hearings on legislation to establish the absence of dictatorial immunity—replete with reminders of all the violence Trump has already incited—and force Republicans to vote on it.

E. Jean Carroll (if she were willing) could testify before a Senate committee about Trump’s assault on her, why it matches the plain meaning of rape, and thus, why under federal law, what Stephanopoulos said wasn’t false at all, let alone defamatory.

If Trump posts a shady bond to save his New York properties, the Senate can and should dedicate enormous resources to figuring out who gave him the money and what they were promised. 

I applauded last week for offering a specific theory of why Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in the polls and when Biden supporters can expect him to pull ahead. 

Today, I really want to applaud him for breaking the campaign against Trump down economically into this easily digestible recitation.

Democrats place serene faith in the power of paid advertising to convey information like this, so much so that they devote almost no strategic thought into generating free media around these disqualifying liabilities. Meanwhile, everything Trump’s doing can be viewed as an effort to dodge the free-media penalty of being a criminal, a rapist, and a fraud. 

Perhaps Democrats think news coverage of these proceedings is enough free media to do the trick. If so, they should take notice: Trump was held liable for rape (sorry, sexual abuse) and most people do not know! His lawyers, trying to get him off the hook for January 6 said his dictatorial immunity would allow him to assassinate his political opponents without risk of criminal prosecution, and most people have no idea that this is the power he seeks. 

These questions are ripe for congressional input. Invoking Article I power would draw attention to Trump’s degeneracy in a more organic fashion than any TV ad or stump speech, because it’d be woven into the legislative agenda, instead of the four corners of the presidential campaign—the kinds of definitionally partisan communications that reporters are loathe to cover credulously for fear of conveying favoritism.

Or they can let Trump have all the agency here, then stomp their feet when he gets his way and wins the election without a thorough airing of his crimes.