A preview of the next four years?

Trump's conviction could herald a conservative renaissance, or four years of crippling institutional conflict

"Donald Trump" by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

“Now Watergate does not bother me/ Does your conscience bother you?” — Lynyrd Skynyrd

Yesterday, as you may have heard, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York. All of the charges relate to falsifying business records. Basically, Trump slept with a porn star, had his lawyer pay the porn star to stay quiet about it, and then mislabeled the payments as legal expenses in order to keep the whole thing quiet. After sentencing, Trump will now start a lengthy appeals process.

That may sound like a minor crime, but the state of New York takes it seriously — as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s actually a fairly common thing to be prosecuted for. Nor is there much question that Trump did the crime. One of the jurors on the case reported that one of their only two sources of news was Truth Social — Trump’s own website! And yet that juror still voted to convict Trump on all counts.

On one hand, this is a country of laws, and no one should be above the law. If you do a crime, you should not be immune from prosecution, conviction, and punishment simply because you’re a prominent politician. This is not a banana republic. Trump is a well-known shady guy who plays fast and loose with the law in a lot of cases, and sooner or later that was probably going to catch up with him.

On the other hand, Trump supporters are probably right that the vigor and zeal with which the prosecutors pursued the case was probably due at least in part to the fact that Trump is a prominent politician whom they don’t like. Prosecutors have lots of discretion about which case to pursue, and it’s hard to believe that Trump’s prominence didn’t make him more of a target. That’s a common occurrence in democratic countries, but I don’t think it’s a sign of the health of our democracy.

In any case, the crimes Trump was just convicted of are not the kind of thing I’d personally send anyone to prison over, and they intuitively don’t feel like something that rises to the level of a felony.

Then again, the Trump supporters decrying the New York verdict are mostly guilty of breathtaking hypocrisy. In 2016, Trump and his supporters pushed for Hillary Clinton to be prosecuted for using a public email server for private uses and/or for allegedly misusing her charitable foundation for private gain. Trump supporters who chanted “Lock her up!” clearly wanted exactly the kind of politically motivated prosecution that they’re now accusing Trump’s opponents of organizing.

So the whole affair is just pretty sordid and depressing, and it’s going to get even worse. In addition to Trump’s sentencing and appeal, this is only one of four things he’s being indicted over, in four different courts:

• He’s being prosecuted in Florida for mishandling government records.

• He’s being prosecuted in Washington, D.C. for conspiracy to obstruct the transfer of power after the 2020 election.

• He’s being prosecuted in Georgia for racketeering in an effort to overturn the 2020 election result in that state.

The last two of these are very serious charges — much more serious, in my view, than either the government record mishandling or the hush money payments that Trump was just convicted for. They are definitely the kind of crimes that I would want someone sent to prison for. And although I’m no legal expert, the scuttlebutt is that the cases against Trump are stronger in these three other cases than in the one he was just convicted for. So brace yourself for a lot more of this.

Anyway, these are all pretty basic points that a lot of other people have made. So what insight do I have to add here? Two things, I think.

First, I think Trump’s prosecution fits pretty strongly with my historical analogy of the 2020s to the 1970s, with Trump in the role of Nixon. I don’t expect Republicans to be happy about Trump’s prosecution and conviction, but I do think it could herald the start of another conservative revolution in American politics.

On the other hand, there’s a substantial chance that Trump will not go out like Nixon, but will win another presidential term instead. If that happens, history will pivot from the 1970s script we’ve been following so far, and we’ll experience four years of bitter institutional conflict and chaos — at a time when the U.S.’ enemies are on the march looking to take advantage of any weakness.

In other words, Trump’s conviction simply reinforces my view that we’re at an important historical pivot right now.

Nixon had to fall for Reagan to rise