What’s a little autogolpe racket between friends?
By 
Ruth Marcus has a truly “this, but unironically” moment in today’s column:
A Fulton County grand jury has indicted former president Donald Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, and District Attorney Fani Willis is well within her legal rights to bring the case under state law. Whether that prosecution is advisable, in the wake of federal charges arising out of the same conduct, is a tougher call — one about which I have substantial misgivings.
The Georgia case is sprawling, a no-holds-barred indictment that runs 98 pages and that accuses Trump of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy “to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” It sweeps in 18 other alleged co-conspirators, from the well-known (former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani) to the obscure, and Willis said Monday night that she wants to try all the defendants together, within six months — an ambitious plan. And this is no modest, Georgia-focused set of charges by a local prosecutor; the indictment ranges far beyond Trump’s conduct in Georgia to sweep in his efforts to change the outcomes in six other states as well.
Where Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith took pains to acknowledge Trump’s First Amendment rights and appeared to craft the charges to avoid butting up against free speech concerns, the Georgia indictment doesn’t tread so gingerly. The very first overt act it cites in furtherance of the alleged conspiracy is Trump’s speech declaring victory in the early morning hours following Election Day. Overt acts don’t have to constitute crimes in and of themselves, but using a candidate’s victory speech as evidence against him is one aggressive move.
It is unusual to use words in a candidate’s victory speech against her in an indictment. It is also highly unusual for a candidate to announce that they have won an election they lost and then to follow that up with an actual conspiracy to steal the election! Speech acts that are part of a criminal conspiracy or that show evidence of criminal intent are conduct, not speech, for the purposes of the criminal law. What’s worse is that Marcus understands this perfectly well, but then feels the need to wring her hands about the indictment being “aggressive” because the liars and cynics defending Trump will take individual sentences of the indictment out of context and suggest that Trump is being prosecuted for ordinary political activity. It’s absolutely maddening. And it’s frankly a form of cynical dishonesty in itself.
Meanwhile, at the Gray Lady, the president’s many felonies — including the ones that were in furtherance of destroying democracy in America — lack the inexhaustible interest of, say, compliance with email server management best practices:
It’s hard to read Peter Baker’s “analysis” that “most Americans” are basically bored by Trump’s indictments without suspecting him of projection.
If you’re bored with the news, you can always stop writing for a newspaper! pic.twitter.com/tI4swMYpFf— David Huyssen (@davidhuyssen) August 15, 2023
Trump has always needed enablers who know what he is and find ways to normalize him anyway.