“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine,” wrote Sextus Empiricus, a Sceptic philosopher, almost 2,000 years ago. Justice may be slow to come, but in the end, the wicked will be punished. The mills are turning.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” said the British prime minister, William Gladstone, in 1868. That is certainly true for the many victims of Donald Trump, from the investors in the casinos of Atlantic City he drove into bankruptcy in the 1990s to the 81 million American voters he tried to cheat after the 2020 presidential election.
But the grinding noise in the background has finally stopped. Something like justice is about to catch up with Trump, not in New York (34 felony charges for falsifying business records), or in Florida (40 felony counts for hiding classified official documents), or in Washington D.C. (4 felony charges for plotting to overturn the 2020 election), but in Georgia.
The ‘core vote’ is enough to guarantee that Trump will get the Republican Party’s nomination for president again, but in the real election, 15 months from now, Democrats and Independents will vote too. In that race, Trump and Biden are currently running neck and neck. Trump’s enormous self-confidence convinced him that he would never spend time in jail — until the Georgia indictments two weeks ago. While there are only 13 more criminal charges (out of the total 91), Georgia is different.
The New York cases are weak. If the federal indictments in Washington D.C. and Florida haven’t yet gone to trial, he could just order his attorney general to cancel them. If he has been found guilty already, he can use his presidential powers to pardon himself. But there’s nothing he can do about the indictments in Georgia.
Not only can he not pardon himself for any conviction in Georgia (the president can only pardon federal offences), but convictions are also far more likely in the Georgia courts, for several reasons.
One, Trump has been charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was originally designed to arraign mafia bosses who gave the orders but did not commit the crimes themselves. Several states (and the federal government) have Rico laws, but Georgia’s are particularly broad.
Another difference is that 18 other people have been indicted for helping Trump commit the crimes. The list includes Trump’s former lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and John Eastman, a former law professor.
There are another 14 people included in the indictment, most of them ordinary people who were drawn into Trump’s scheme to overthrow the election outcome in Georgia, and a further 30 unindicted co-conspirators.
Finally, the trial will be televised. Normally that would work well for a TV pro like Trump, but he will be very uncomfortable on a stage which he does not control. The spectacle will shrink him in the public’s eyes even if he isn’t found guilty, but he’s more likely to be convicted — and then it gets really interesting.
If there’s a conviction before the election (improbable), then it would probably scuttle Trump’s chances of regaining the presidency, and he would really go to jail once the appeals ran out.
If he was safely in the White House before he was convicted, then there would be a convicted criminal running the country which was a contingency overlooked by the authors of the Constitution. But it’s doubtful that Georgia could ‘extradite’ him. Civil war? Probably not. Political paralysis? Certainly. For how long, and with what effects? Nobody knows.
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” a Roman lawyer of classical times would have said. I would say that justice must be done so the heavens don’t fall.
