Is Donald Trump headed to victory in Tuesday’s U.S. election — or is he headed to jail?
Even if many Americans spend this weekend hiding under their beds in fear of what voters will do, all major polls indicate that Democratic candidate Joe Biden will win a clear victory.
So, in the absence of anything else to do, I say: let’s relax, walk our dog and play with our kids.
But the second part of this question — will Trump eventually end up behind bars — is more complicated.
Getting rid of Trump as president is only the first step.
Undoing the horrific damage of his deadly presidency will be more difficult.
And even more challenging will be to rid the American body politic of the insanity that brought to power what will be remembered as the worst presidency in modern American history.
How did this happen in the world’s leading democracy? And how can it be prevented from happening again?
The United States will never fully recover from the Trump presidency until he and the forces that enabled him are held legally accountable for the corruption and criminality they fostered.
For American society to heal, it will need to discover some semblance of truth and reconciliation to erase the shame of this proud country’s past four years.
Internationally, there are past models that can point the way.
We have seen similar transformations in countries such as South Africa after the collapse of racist apartheid, in Argentina after the military’s so-called “dirty war” against its opponents in the 1970s, and in Canada after the scandalous treatment of Indigenous people.
After next week’s U.S. election, we can expect there will be a burst of public enthusiasm for a Biden victory, and that will be genuine.
But something more dramatic and enduring will ultimately be necessary to make America’s fractured society whole again.
A starting point will be the question of Donald Trump’s guilt:
Will he face prosecution for his crimes?
Many U.S. legal analysts believe there are several potential charges that could be laid against Trump based on his activities before becoming President, as well as his behaviour since 2017 while in office.
Some involve federal charges which would be vulnerable to possible presidential pardons, but several potential crimes are at the state level that are immune from this type of intervention.
There are many cases that are potential time-bombs for Trump, but here are four of them:
Obstruction of Justice: There are several episodes listed in the Mueller report in which Trump may have obstructed justice in the inquiry about his Russian connections. Once he is no longer President, he is liable to prosecution.
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Tax Fraud: For years, Trump has refused to make public his income tax returns, and recent disclosures by the New York Times have shown why. On both the federal level and in the State of New York, there is increasing evidence of tax fraud.
Campaign Finance Violations: Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to more than three years in prison for a crime that was also linked to Trump. Why wouldn’t Trump, once a private citizen, suffer the same fate?
Negligent Homicide: By the time Trump leaves office, more than 400,000 Americans are expected to be dead from the pandemic, many of them avoidable deaths, according to medical specialists, if it wasn’t for Trump’s negligence. There are calls now that Trump should be charged with negligent homicide.
It is assumed that Joe Biden himself, after becoming President, would be personally reluctant to see his predecessor prosecuted. But the public pressure on Biden “to let justice prevail” in some sort of non-partisan way could very well be too intense for him to resist.
Given that, what could Trump do to avoid the humiliating prospect of winding up in jail once he is a private citizen again?
He has several options, but most of them are long shots.
Before the inauguration of a new president on January 20, he could resign and have his successor, the current vice-president Mike Pence, pardon him from any federal prosecution.
More than three years ago, I predicted in this column that this is how his presidency will end, so I have a certain wistful attachment to this scenario. And I see that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said recently he believes this will happen.
For what it’s worth, if you believe that history repeats itself, this is how Trump’s hero, Richard Nixon, ended his collapsing presidency in 1974.
Trump could also try to pardon himself — and his family members, while he’s at it — which he believes a U.S. president is empowered to do. But that has never happened before, and it would only affect federal charges, so it would be a constitutional gamble.
A final option, of course, is for Trump to risk the possibility of prosecution on the assumption that he would be found innocent of all charges.
But, sadly for him, most legal analysts who have examined the powerful case that would be built against Trump don’t see his potential “innocence” as a viable legal option. American juries don’t live in the same fact-free, alternative universe that Trump and his supporters do.
So, where does that leave us? Happily, it means that in both political and personal terms, time may finally be running out on Donald J. Trump.
Isn’t that reason enough for us to relax this weekend, walk our dog and play with our kids?
Tony Burman, formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributing foreign affairs columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: , formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributing foreign affairs columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman
meanjoegreen8 on November 1st, 2020 at 00:42 UTC »
We are here now because we never held Nixon accountable.
bunkscudda on October 31st, 2020 at 23:56 UTC »
Absolutely. It has to be made very clear to any future Trump-wannabes that doing what he did will end up negatively for you. His punishment has to exceed his gains during his unethical tenure. And he has gained a lot. Financial penalties won’t cut it. No matter the price, there will still be people who think it’s worth it.
TheBirminghamBear on October 31st, 2020 at 23:23 UTC »
Not only Donald Trump.
The entire Republican party is a crime organization. Look at how many of them are already in prison, and that's with them in power. Michael Cohen used to be the finance chair of the GOP. He's now in jail on campaign finance violations.
The entire party is completely morally bankrupt. They are quite literally an organized crime ring.
I don't use that hyperbolically. This isn't a hyperbolic attack on a political party I disagree with. They are a crime ring that uses their power to legitimize their criminality, and then commits a staggering degree of crime on top of that.
They have done nothing of any value for America. Period. They have bankrupted the country multiple times, and most recently perpetuated one of the most egregious wealth transfers in modern history, stealing from the poor to massively enrich the already wealthy, and all while hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Americans die from a disease that they completely failed to respond to.
They are criminals so many times over, and if the worst of them are allowed to scapegoat Trump and maintain legitimacy, we'll just be treading water.
EDIT: I want to issue a categorical and unequivocal fucking denial of "buh-buh-both sides!".
No. Both parties are not the fucking same.
First let's take a look at criminals indicted in each administration. Data here.
Republican Presidents:
Nixon - 58 individuals charged & indicted
Reagan: 33 officials charged & indicted
Donald Trump: ~10 officials charged & indicted (so far, we're only four years in).
GW Bush - 16 criminal indictments. 16 convictions. 9 prison sentences.
Democrat Presidents:
Carter: 0
Obama: 0
Clinton - 2
Wow well that's a fucking pattern, huh?
But the biggest difference doesn't come in the volume of the number of criminals IN each party. Political parties in a country like the US are fucking huge. They're all going to have their criminals.
The difference is, as I said, the DNC is a political party. Republicans are running the party itself like organized crime. They coordinate at the state and federal levels to perform egregious theft and abuses of power with the singular aim of benefiting the crime ring. This is not normal.
And to be clear, it has absolutely fuck all to do with policy. This isn't an ideological divide. This is one party consciously and purposefully abandoning ideology for the sake of criminality.
When Republicans in the house were talking about Putin paying Trump, then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said No leaks... this is how we know we're a family here. To be clear, they're talking about the Republican nominee for the Presidency being paid by a hostile foreign power, and hushing it up to keep it "in the family".
It's gotten so bad and so criminal that many prominent Republicans are openly talking about how depraved their own party has become.
Take this excerpt from former Republican Senator Jeff Flake's new book:
Do you see any Democrat Senators running en masse from their own party lately and writing tell-all books to condemn the criminal state of their own party?
People who still try the pathetic both-siderisms are seriously, profoundly deluded. Yeah blah blah I know all the memes, politicians are liars hyuck hyuck, but there is simply no comparison with the GOP and most other political parties in the developed world. This party has been calcifying more and more into a hardened crime ring. The moderates have run for the fucking hills because they can't compete and they've been squeezed out.
Now Donald Trump is the hero of their story. A man with 3,000 lawsuits pending against him, whose personal lawyer was thrown in jail for a crime he committed on Trump's orders, a man whose entire life has been a series of grifts and cons and who is endorsing the end of Democracy because he's so scared of going to jail when he loses the power of the Presidency that he'd literally do anything to keep it.