'Untouchable strongman': Legal expert maps out 'one common thread' at heart of Trump’s scandals

12 June 2024

When Donald Trump was convicted last month in a Manhattan courtroom on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the former president and his allies in Congress were quick to attack the entire judicial system as “corrupt.” He also claimed the indictments against him were “election interference” — even as prosecutors managed to convince a jury of 12 of his peers that Trump himself engaged in a “conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.”

As legal expert Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote Wednesday in the Atlantic, Trump and his ilk’s efforts to undermine faith in judicial process follow “one common thread” that winds through the former president’s many scandals: His “absolute disdain for the democratic process.”

Noting Trump is “a master of projection” (and actually engaged in a “matter of underhanded” election meddling he orchestrated), Jurecic writes that the “hush money” trial in Manhattan revealed “glimpses of other Trump scandals” — including those laid out “previously in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference.”

Per the Atlantic:

According to the [Manhattan] District Attorney’s Office, Trump’s campaign hurried to squash negative stories in October 2016 because of panic over potentially losing female voters following release of the Access Hollywood tape. In the end, of course, the tape didn’t preventTrump from winning the election. And though New York prosecutors didn’t mention this part of the story, the Mueller report suggests one possible reason: Public attention lurched toward another scandal once WikiLeaks began releasing hacked emails, provided by Russian intelligence, from the Clinton campaign in the hours after the tape dropped.

According to Jurecic, “The Trump campaign’s blasé willingness to accept Russian help” in 2016 and his efforts to “[bully] the Ukrainian government into providing bogus information about supposed corruption by Joe Biden” in 2020 mirror “the same willingness to engage in dirty tricks as did the hush-money episode.”

As Jurecic writes, in each instance, “Trump pushed further and further in his desire to hold onto power.”

“He can’t stand to be at the mercy of others’ judgment, because that means that somebody else is in control,” the legal expert argues. "In a candidate for elected office, this isn’t just a personality flaw. It’s foundational opposition to democracy itself.”

Jurecic surmises that part of Trump’s disdain for the jury in his “hush money” case stems from the “fury at the idea that 12 jurors could have so much control over his fate,” which the legal expert claims “is in some ways a mirror of the democratic process itself.”

"It’s no surprise, then, that Trump and his allies moved swiftly after the conviction to attacking the jurors or erasing the role of the jury altogether, accusing the whole process of somehow being orchestrated by President Biden,” Jurecic writes.

For Jurecic, Trump — both in his actions and his projections — appears to subscribe to a“vision of the world” with a “single, untouchable strongman, orchestrating events according to his will alone.”

Click here to read Jurecic's Atlantic article in full (subscription required).

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