CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
History's Verdict Says "What Took You So Long?"
DONALD TRUMP TRIED to overturn the election of 2020, and now, in 2023, he has been indicted for it. The usual conventions of writing about criminal justice call for inserting an "allegedly" somewhere in there, but where would it go? Trump's efforts to seize a second term either happened in full public view or are as well attested as political events can ever be. Have the participants in his conspiracy even disputed that they did the things listed in the indictment?
All that special counsel Jack Smith really added to the situation yesterday was the argument that these known actions, legally speaking, violated sections 371 1512(k), 1512(c), and 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code: conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing that official proceeding, and conspiring against the right to vote. And he committed the Department of Justice to prosecuting Trump for doing it all.
Nevertheless, it was time to cue the chords of history. The indictment, Peter Baker wrote in a ponderous News Analysis column in the New York Times, "gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy." This issue, Baker wrote, "is no less than the viability of the system" constructed by the Framers in 1787.
It was, Baker's spouse, Susan B. Glasser, wrote in her own instant-analysis post for the New Yorker, an "extraordinary event." The indictment charged Trump with "an offense against democracy itself. An attempted coup. An effort to overturn the will of the voters and remain in power such as we’ve never seen before and hopefully never will again."
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