The former president of the United States, Donald Trump, was booked and fingerprinted at a Miami courthouse on Tuesday as he faces 37 federal charges for alleged theft and then storage of highly sensitive, classified documents at his Florida estate. Trump's deepening legal woes not only complicate his path to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, they also suggest that he is headed toward government-provided housing, but not the White House. He may live out his days in prison, and that is how it should be.
The specifics of the case are quite damning for Trump. This is not a ham sandwich that a Florida grand jury just indicted. Trump is an actual criminal. He did not accidentally bag a few boxes of meaningless classified documents and unwittingly transport them to Florida. Instead, Trump appears to have knowingly pilfered extremely sensitive documents and then engaged in an elaborate and unsubtle effort to hide them and deceive investigators as to their whereabouts. He appears to have bragged about possessing classified documents on tape. No one who did something like this would escape indictment, and because we are a nation of laws, not men, Trump must face the penalty for what he did.
That's because Trump's actions, and his cavalier handling of these secrets, represent a national security threat rather than the "process crime" that his apologists will claim he committed. Yes, the United States wantonly over-classifies information, but Special Counsel Jack Smith would be unlikely to indict a former president running again for office if the documents in question were not important. Not only that, but because he engaged in his defiant pattern of obstructing justice and making false claims after he left office, he no longer has the preposterously impregnable protections of a sitting president against indictment and prosecution. He's just a guy who stole national security secrets, stashed them at his country club and then dared the feds to come get them with the same arrogance he wielded during his corrupt presidency.
Trump was always a national security threat, from his open collaboration with Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign to his clear vulnerabilities to blackmail, bribes, and self-dealing due to the shady global business empire that he refused to divest himself from after he was elected. And because he is seeking another term, the next 18 months might be the only opportunity to keep this incredibly dangerous man out of office forever. It is to their credit that Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team have ignored calls to let Trump skate for his crimes because to do otherwise would inflame the MAGA masses and trigger civil violence. On the contrary, failing to hold him accountable would only embolden the far right and encourage even worse malfeasance from the next Republican president.
There is a delicious irony here as well. It was Trump, of course, who popularized the chant "Lock her up" during the 2016 presidential campaign in reference to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. As secretary of state, she used her own email server (as had been the practice before she took office), which harmed no one and was clearly not meant to intentionally spirit classified documents away from their rightful holders. A small number of classified documents were found on her server, and no one was able to prove intent or malice. But Trump and rank-and-file Republicans from top to bottom treated it like the second coming of Iran-Contra rather than a completely meaningless scandal and managed to get major media outlets to treat it as the most important story of the election to the exclusion of all other policy matters.
So, what does Trump do the minute after he loses the election? He knowingly lifts boxes of classified documents and lies about it on the way out. Whether it was to brag about them or funnel them into the wrong hands does not matter in the eyes of the law. What matters is that he remains a man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency and whose contempt for the law has only grown even as his luck at evading accountability for his many crimes is rapidly running out.
American prisons are needlessly cruel, dehumanizing, and unforgiving places that should be reimagined—at the least dramatically reduced in size. But Trump won't be going to the kind of horrific place that he has always fantasized about sending those he fears and loathes, and you should have no qualms in wanting him to spend the rest of his miserable life confined to whatever luxury detention facility is deemed appropriate for him. More important than his literal incarceration will be the unmistakable message sent to those who would abuse the sacred trust placed in them by the American people: this is how it ends.
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.
Updated with Trump's processing at a Miami courthouse at 3:50 p.m. on June 13.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
