The High Price of the Trump Indictments

The U.S. isn’t going to break. Countries don’t do that. Greece, an eternal mess, is still around. But the U.S. does look as if it’s heading toward a long downward roll.

Donald J. Trump, the 45th president—who received nearly 63 million votes while winning in 2016 and more than 74 million votes in his 2020 loss—has been indicted four times. Twice by federal grand juries and once each in the New York borough of Manhattan and in Fulton County, Ga.

Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis has built her case around Georgia’s RICO law, patterned after the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, which was intended to catch mob bosses but since has been stretched routinely into a prosecutorial grab bag, in part because the media loves to intone the word “RICO.”

The Fulton County sheriff, a Democrat, promises there will be mug shots of former President Trump and presumably Rudy Giuliani and the other 17 indicted individuals. If that happens, the media will display stacked rows of the images from here to Iowa.

What we’re witnessing now may be all about getting Mr. Trump, but presidential takedowns as a full-time strategy began during the presidency of George W. Bush. I recall being struck after 9/11 during the two Bush terms by how personal the animosity toward him became among Democrats and their affiliated media. We talk now about Trump derangement syndrome, but Bush derangement syndrome was its precursor.

The divide between Democrats and Republicans on just about all political matters existed during W.’s presidency. It widened during the Obama years, and with Mr. Trump, well, here we are, at the inevitable endpoint of winning through personal destruction.

Mr. Trump’s modus operandi is to size up whatever political environment he’s in and manipulate it to his advantage. He carved through his 2016 Republican presidential primary opponents with one act of personal political destruction after another, such as linking Sen. Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination. When Mr. Trump arrived at the Oval Office, the White House press corps, for which stuff like this is batting practice, couldn’t wait to tee him up.

The Russia-collusion narrative, the Mueller special-counsel probe, the impeachments were all chapters in our by-then-normalized politics of demolition. The consequence, seen repeatedly in banana republics and Italy, is a U.S. soaked in political bitterness that will last for years.

For starters, there will be payback. The Georgia Trump indictment was brought by a county prosecutor, not even the state attorney general. New York City Trump prosecutor Alvin Bragg

A Democratic cynic would say sacrificing a few party members is an acceptable price for taking down Mr. Trump. The reality, of course, is they are building him into an almost unstoppable political phenomenon.

My reading of Mr. Trump’s more than 50% support in the primary polls has been that 30% is his standard base and at least 20% consists primarily of resentment of these prosecutions alongside the wrist-slap prosecution by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department of Hunter Biden and his well-aware, enabling father.

Many Republicans do want to move past the Trump mayhem, but it is getting harder to see how the pro-Trump resentment vote does anything but increase through this year. The serial indictments have many non-Trump Republicans furious.

The Democrats’ bet has been that Mr. Trump is the one Republican

What great timing: The one thing the U.S. needs—for itself and an amazed, watching world—is a serious presidential election.

Xi Jinping

Mr. Trump calls the prosecutions “election interference,” by which he means the election in November 2024. But clearly the prosecutions are wrecking the Republican Party’s traditional process of candidate selection, potentially reducing both parties’ primaries to nonevents.

The first GOP primary debate is Wednesday. At this juncture, the one reliable piece of the system still standing is the totality of Republican voters, who will have to decide whether to continue this chaos or offer the country a substantive alternative.

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