Trump's conviction is a victory for the left
When liberals opposed criminal charges for political opponents eight years ago, the left stood firm.
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Donald Trump’s political opponents have cause to celebrate this evening now that the former president has now become a felon. A New York jury has found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, evidently in connection with hush money paid to a porn star back during the 2016 election. It’s a comically petty crime compared to everything else our presidents do, but if you supported Hillary Clinton back then, Trump’s conviction gives you the perfect excuse to pop open some champagne, turn on Rachel Maddow, and pretend that the liberal Democratic agenda only lost because the system failed it.
Ironically, however, there’s one point of the 2016 Clinton agenda that today’s liberal Democrats want everyone to forget: their outspoken opposition to charging political opponents with crimes.
I could go on. Recall that, eight years ago this very week, the State Department announced that Clinton had violated basic security rules by storing work emails on her private server. Like Trump’s accounting shenanigans, this is the sort of irresponsible law-breaking that powerful politicians almost certainly engage in on a regular basis without consequence. And in this case, the partisan positions were exactly reversed: Republicans chanted “lock her up” while Democrats grimly warned that charging and prosecuting political opponents with crimes is the stuff of banana republics.1
The left, meanwhile, generally gravitated towards two takes. The first was simply to reject some special rule of law for Clinton and insist that she should in fact be in prison:
Even on the merits of the charge at hand Clinton was only in the clear by technicalities at best: for example, more than 2000 of the documents she’d kept on her server should have been classified, and simply weren’t due to bureaucratic error. But the stronger case, the one the left actually cared about, was that Clinton was implicated in a litany of political crimes — for instance, because of her vote to authorize military force in Iraq.
The second take makes an appearance in Corey Robin’s The Media Has an Amnesia Problem, where he noted that liberals could not possibly be as shocked about Trump’s “lock her up” antics as they were pretending to be, since they had already gone through the same performance just months before. For a lot of leftists, this performance of hysteria telegraphed perfectly the moment we’ve arrived at today: now that it’s convenient, liberals have completely abandoned their misgivings about prosecuting the political opposition.
And that’s why it’s the left, not liberals, who really have something to celebrate today. It is the left who, for the past eight years, have insisted that the same rule of law must apply to everyone — be it Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Liberals may say that no one is above the law today, but anyone can see how they responded when Clinton faced her own legal troubles.
There are two standard liberal objections here but neither are very convincing. The first is to say that Trump was promising to jail her on unspecified charges. But this is just revisionism: Trump’s famous prediction that she “would be in jail” came at the end of his actual pledge, which was “to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into” her “situation” since there had “been so many lies, so much deception.” These comments were clearly made in the context of Congressional Republicans doing the same thing. Though they obviously were making all sorts of allegations at the time, the actionable one was that Clinton had committed the specific crime of perjury and that this needed to be investigated. Whatever one thinks of the merits of that charge or how Trump was going about it, this is all clearly in a very different ballpark from jailing Clinton on unspecified charges.
The second objection is that even if Trump believed that Clinton had perjured herself, it was inappropriate for him to actually say so. Again, there is some real inconsistency here: one of the few grievances liberals have been willing to voice with Biden over the past year is that he hasn’t said more about Trump’s legal jeopardy. And indeed, Biden has clearly been pursuing a strategy of talking about the case without talking about it; his team wants to limit his exposure to accusations that he is “politicizing” the trial, but is simultaneously looking for ways to remind voters of his legal problems. It’s a sound messaging strategy! But what is is not is evidence of some principled difference between Democrats and Republicans over whether elected officials should voice their own opinions about allegations of criminal behavior.