The Indictment of Donald Trump Could Save Democracy | Opinion

Earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith announced a four-count indictment of disgraced former President Donald Trump for his role in trying to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. On Thursday, Trump was arraigned and pled not guilty to all charges.

Trump's other indictments—there are so many at this point that you need an app to track them all—are all important in their own way. But this one is the only one that really matters for the future of America's deeply flawed but resilient democracy. Donald Trump, the unrepentant, coup-plotting scoundrel, will finally face justice for his role in subverting the peaceful transfer of power.

There has never been much doubt about what happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election—Trump and his gangland associates did most of their dirty work out in the open, spewing hallucinatory lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud, launching countless baseless legal challenges and convincing a critical mass of Republicans that the election had been stolen from them. Had he stopped there, he could have retired to Mar-a-Lago as the malevolent grifter that he is, enjoyed his ill-gotten wealth, and died as happily as possible for someone incapable of feeling joy or empathy. It is highly unlikely that anyone would have indicted him for anything.

But when the lies and the absurd lawsuits failed to push back his move-out date from the White House, he then, fatefully and consequently, launched an illegal, seditious effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, the first time in American history that this once-taken-for-granted feature of our democracy was threatened. He organized fake, alternate slates of electors to send to Congress. He leaned on state Republican officials to change the vote counts in their states. He invited GOP state legislators to Washington and tried to convince them to unilaterally declare him the winner. He tried to install a lackey to lead the Department of Justice and overturn the election results in the critical battleground states.

When all of that failed like one of his Atlantic City casinos, he tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to stop the counting of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6, and when that effort too collapsed, he directed a mob of armed supporters to sack the Capitol building and then sat on his hands and watched with interest as his supporters hunted members of Congress instead of using the powers of his office to stop them. It is easy to laugh at the ham-fisted nature of some of these plots, but the underlying goal was deadly serious, and the evidence says that Trump and his associates had every intention of perpetrating a coup and installing themselves in power indefinitely.

What did Trump's allies in Congress do? A majority of them voted to use loopholes in the poorly written Electoral Count Act to overturn election results in battleground states. And then in the aftermath of the insurrection, just weeks after Trump's mob tried to murder them, they acquitted him in the Senate after his second impeachment trial, wasting yet another opportunity to rid themselves of what most of them privately regard as an electoral albatross.

Despite the very public nature of these conspiracies, he probably would still have gotten away with it if he had just closed his yap trap and slunk away to Florida for good. Ironically, it was Trump's announcement of his 2024 presidential bid after the disastrous midterm elections that led to this indictment. We now know that the DOJ, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the FBI made a concerted decision not to launch a serious investigation of Trump's role in the post-election conspiracy and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, fearing the public fallout would harm their institutions.

But when Trump made his 2024 bid public, Garland was forced to turn his moribund investigation over to Smith, who as it turns out, actually had the stomach to pursue it where it led. And once someone who cared more about the fate of American democracy than his own reputation took the reins, it wasn't long before he started rolling up the conspirators, who, and I can't emphasize this enough, were such inept coup-plotters that they didn't bother to hide much or any of it and did most of their work either literally in front of reporters or left a paper trail so obvious that even geriatric congressional Democrats, who have generally been content to let right-wing zealots take over the country institution by institution, were able to turn it into the Jan. 6 hearings.

There is a lot of noise in American politics, a constant din of scandal and outrage and nonsense that can often obscure simple, linear narratives. But this is quite a straightforward story. Donald Trump and his friends conspired to prevent the duly elected government of the United States from taking power. He led an attempted coup, and our elected officials couldn't get the job of accountability done. The only question in the aftermath of these terrible events was whether he would, as he had his whole life, walk away without a scratch. We got our long overdue answer yesterday.

What happens from here is impossible to predict, but we all owe Jack Smith a debt of gratitude. If Trump were allowed to get away with a broad-daylight attempted putsch, without so much as an indictment, we might as well pack on up, head home and let the budding fascists of the new far-right take over forthwith. What would possibly stop Trump, or the next Republican president, from trying to do it again? We would be facing an existential stress test of a broken system every four years, and eventually the legs would give out and the whole thing would come crashing down.

This much we can say for sure: it won't be today.

This article was updated on 8.4.23 to reflect Trump's arraignment.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.