Is Trump done? The Republican party leadership would certainly hope so. When the former president and would-be autocrat announced his third run for the presidency, in the days after the Republican party’s paltry and historically anomalous midterm showing, hardly any elected members of his party showed up. Since he left office, civil suits have accrued around Trump and his companies, like a river leaving silt deposits that slowly build up into muddy land. Investigations have proliferated in New York, where the state attorney general has accused Trump of various real estate frauds, and in Fulton county, Georgia, where his threatening phone calls to the state attorney general in the wake of the 2020 election have earned him a criminal inquiry.
Last week, Trump teased a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” on social media, briefly leading to speculation about what his plans might be, and how they could shake up American politics. Was he announcing a running mate? Was he going to throw his hat in the ring for speaker of the House? But no; instead, he was unveiling a new product: a line of wish-fulfillment greeting cards that depict him as a musclebound superhero. Even worse, the cards were digital only, selling for $99 a pop in a form that’s become the last and most embarrassing refuge of scammers: the NFT. The spectacle was almost sad – tacky and desperate and low-rent, even for him.
Things haven’t been going well for Trump lately, and on Monday they got a little bit worse. The House January 6 committee, in its final public meeting before the new Republican majority shutters it, addressed the nation to reiterate its findings, present its final public report and the full transcripts of its more than 1,000 interviews, and formally make its criminal referrals to the justice department.
Ultimately, the committee is recommending that the justice department charge Trump with four federal criminal counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the US government, conspiracy to make false statements to the US government and incitement of insurrection, a charge which is applicable to anyone who incites, assists or provides “aid and comfort” to a violent rebellion against the authority of the US government.
They’re serious charges, commensurate with the seriousness of what Trump tried to do on 6 January 2021. Of course, there’s no guarantee the justice department will take the committee up on it. Thus far, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has been exceedingly slow and unwilling to pursue charges against Trump, an intransigence in the face of mounting evidence that has come to seem less like caution than like cowardice. Representative Jamie Raskin, in announcing the referrals, said: “Ours is not system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and masterminds and ringleaders get a pass.” But this somewhat optimistic assertion rings hollow to anyone who pays much attention to the actual US legal system, which operates less like a series of fact-finding and fairness-determining endeavors than as a mechanism for enforcing pre-existing hierarchies of race, sex and wealth. It still seems far-fetched and ambitious to imagine that Donald Trump will ever see the inside of a criminal courtroom. No matter how far he falls, he’s still too big, it seems, for federal law enforcement to try to catch him.
There will be more stories that emerge from the material that the committee releases this week, and in particular there will be much to learn from the deposition transcripts from the more than 1,000 interviews that the committee conducted over the course of its 18-month tenure. What was presented at the committee’s public hearings, after all, has been a carefully curated selection of information – that is, the parts that fit the committee’s narrative. And its narrative has been curiously focused on Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone. Over the course of its hearings, the committee has painted a picture of a Trump administration, and a Republican party, held hostage by their president; not so much accomplices to Trump’s illegal, extraconstitutional and violent escapades as victims of them.
The committee did much to showcase the contributions of its two Republican members; in its meeting on Monday, Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, deemed Trump “unfit for any office”. The persistent message of the committee has been that the Republican party is somehow distinct from Trump and his violence, and can be redeemed of him; more, even, than an exercise in informing the public, it has been an effort by Democrats to give Republicans plausible deniability, moral cover, a way out.
If this works – if the public is convinced that Trump, with his greed and narcissism, his petty opportunism, his evils and betrayals great and small, is somehow different from what the Republican party is – then the Democrats will live to regret it. It’s true that Trump himself is a much-reduced figure, his ramblings sounding less like those of a plausible dictator and more like those of an embarrassing, drunken uncle – though it seems unwise to count him out just yet, as his whole career has been a series of humiliations and dramatic, uncowed reversals.
But the Republican party has proven itself able to embrace Trumpism as an ideology without necessarily needing to carry the baggage of Trump the man. Presidential aspirants from Glenn Youngkin in Virginia to Ron DeSantis in Florida have adopted the culture warrior messaging of the far right; in Moore v Harper, a case before the supreme court, the Republican justices seem intent on validating at least some version of the legal theory that backed Trump’s attempted coup. Maybe Trump really is done; maybe, even, the Department of Justice might encounter the courage to charge him. But the threat to the democratic order that he ushered in is still with us.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
