Updates: Democracy and the law, the state of US democracy

Legal cases against Trump inch forward

Multiple sources are reporting that the last few days have been uniformly bad for Trump in five separate lawsuits. The Daily Beast writes:

In a matter of hours Tuesday, former President Donald Trump suffered humiliating defeats in courtrooms across the country that put him on track to have his personal taxes exposed, see his company dismantled, face a trial for an alleged rape, and confront the unencumbered power of the Department of Justice.  

In the midst of this maelstrom of legal trouble, the real estate mogul’s longtime personal accountant completely disavowed the company’s financial shenanigans, saying if he’d known the way executives were dodging taxes for years, he would have died of shock. “I probably would've had a heart attack,” Donald Bender testified in Manhattan criminal court, where the Trump Organization is defending itself at trial against the District Attorney’s Office.

What needs to be kept in mind is how successful Trump has been in gaming both the legal and business systems and getting away with it. Trump is second to none in breaking laws and contracts and getting away with it. 

He is equally expert at delay and stonewall tactics where patience, time and/or money simply run out for people in court trying to nail the bastard. Above the Law comments on this point:

Keeping it local, the fun picked up in the courtroom of New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, where Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba appears to have long since exhausted the court’s patience. And filing yet another motion to dismiss on the eve of the scheduling conference characterizing the detailed complaint filed by Attorney General Letitia James as “clumsily attempting to recharacterize decades of business transactions between highly sophisticated parties, only to succeed in establishing that she cannot plead a claim” did not help.

At one point, Habba suggested to Insider that Trump would actually take the stand in his own defense here. To which we would just note that the former president and his children litigated for years on end to avoid being deposed behind closed doors. And when they ran out of road, they largely took the Fifth. So … make of that one what you will.

Lat September, the ethics-focused CREW updated the list of 56 credible crime allegations since 2015. All 56 remain unindicted and unpunished. CREW wrote:

Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes

As of November 2022, Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 56 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015. That total only reflects allegations relating to his time in or running for office and omits, for instance, Trump’s criminal exposure for fraudulent business dealings.

A detailed table that CREW put together shows crimes that still can or cannot be prosecuted. All of Trump’s delays have served him very well. Nine of the 56 alleged crimes appear to be not prosecutable due to the statute of limitations having run. When in red, the column “likely deadline to file charges” indicates that the listed crime cannot be prosecuted because too much time has passed. That shows just how useless the rule of law and the court system is for rich and powerful elites. Some of the table of alleged crimes is shown below.

One can reasonably believe that many laws are either (i) intentionally written by rich and powerful people to preferentially protect rich and powerful people, or (ii) apply to everyone equally in theory but are enforced and prosecuted unequally. The US really does have a two-tiered system of law, an easier one for the elites and a much nastier one for the rest of us. Sociologist Brooke Harrington, tax advisor to wealthy people, once commented on this: 

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

Former president President Richard Nixon once expressed a similar sentiment when musing about himself:  

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

Maybe Trump did not have as nearly a bad a time in court the last few days as much of the reporting on it suggests. Every day that goes by where a crime is remains unindicted is another little win for the criminal. Every day not spent in jail is another little win.

The state US US democracy

One commentator cautions against getting too complacent in view of the results so far from the 2022 elections. The Guardian writes:

‘The US can still become a fascist country’: 

Frances Fox Piven’s midterms postmortem

The 90-year-old sociologist on ‘vengeance politics’, cruelty and climate change as she looks back on half a century of activism

“I don’t think this fight over elemental democracy is over, by any means,” she said. “The United States was well on the road to becoming a fascist country – and it still can become a fascist country.”

All the main elements are now in place, she said, for America to take a turn to the dark side. “There is the crazy mob, Maga; an elite that is oblivious to what is required for political stability; and a grab-it-and-run mentality that is very strong, very dangerous. I was very frightened about what would happen in the election, and it could still happen.”

“There’s going to be a lot of vengeance politics, a lot of efforts to get back at Joe Biden, idiot stuff. And that will rile up a lot of people. The Maga mob is not a majority of the American population by any stretch of the imagination, but the fascist mob don’t have to be the majority to set in motion the kinds of policies that crush democracy.”

That speaks for itself.