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(Trends Wide) — Former President Donald Trump and his movement pose new challenges to accountability, free elections and the rule of law, ushering in a new period of political turmoil.
On Saturday, Trump dropped his clearest signal yet of a new White House bid at a time when he is on a new collision course with the Biden administration, the courts and facts.
Trump was never really gone after losing re-election in 2020, but a dizzying catalog of confrontations is returning him to the center of American politics. He is likely to deepen polarization in an already deeply divided nation. And Trump’s return to the spotlight likely means next month’s midterm elections and the early stages of the 2024 presidential race will be rocked by his trademark chaos.
The controversies that are coming to a head underscore that the nation and its political and legal systems are still far from overcoming the fallout from the shock and fear of Trump’s turbulent single term in the White House. Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, alluded to that reality when she said Sunday that the panel wants to prevent Trump from turning her potential testimony into a “circus.” ”.
Those controversies also show that, given the open legal and political loops involving the former president, a possible 2024 presidential campaign based on his claims of political persecution could create even more turmoil than his four years in office.
And while fierce differences are emerging between Democrats and Republicans over economic policy, abortion, foreign policy and crime heading into the 2022 midterms, while concerns about democracy often rank lower among voters , it is very likely that the next political period will revolve mainly around the past and future of the former president.
A flurry of controversies is coming to a head
Trump, for example, is now locked in a standoff over the subpoena of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. A growing number of Trump advisers are appearing before a grand jury as the Justice Department moves closer to a fateful decision on whether or not to indict the former president for the mob riots.
In a separate investigation, the Justice Department is investigating whether Trump broke the law by amassing highly classified information at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Any prosecution of the former president and those around him would set off an extraordinary political conflagration, especially if Trump, already the GOP front-runner for 2024, is by then an avowed contender for the presidency.
Trump men and women are also stepping up their activity. His political guru Steve Bannon, whose own grassroots movement seeks to infiltrate school boards and the local election machine, vows to expose the Biden “regime” in an appeal of a prison sentence handed down last week for defying a congressional subpoena. Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is asking the Supreme Court to block an attempt to force him to testify in a Georgia investigation into Trump’s effort to steal the election.
In Arizona, one of the former president’s favorite candidates, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake, a serial propagator of falsehoods about voter fraud, is once again raising questions about the electoral system. “I’m afraid it probably won’t be completely fair,” Lake told AZTV7 on Sunday.
There is a growing prospect that next month’s elections will install a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that will effectively mean a return of Trumpism to political power given the control that the former president maintains over the House Republican Party. Some prominent “Make America Great Again” Republicans are already talking about a possible campaign to impeach Biden and have already signaled that they will use their powers to investigate the president for a possible showdown with Trump in 2024.
One of the most powerful pro-Trump Republicans, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the party’s number three leader in the House, told The New York Post last week that impeachment of Biden was “on the table.” . However, South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace told Trends Wide’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday that she didn’t want to see tit-for-tat impeachment proceedings after Trump was impeached twice. times. She said that she was against the process being “armed”. But when she was asked if Biden had committed impeachable crimes, she said, “That’s something that would have to be investigated.”
A pro-Trump Republican presence in Washington is likely to expand after the midterm elections. Dozens of Trump-backed candidates are running on a platform of their falsehoods about 2020 voter fraud, raising questions about whether they will accept the results if they lose their races in just over two weeks.
On another politically sensitive front, the Trump Organization’s grand theft and criminal tax fraud trial opens in Manhattan on Monday. The former president has not been charged personally, but the trial could affect his business empire and spark new claims by him that he is being persecuted for political reasons that could inject another element of controversy into the election season. In a separate civil case, New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, filed a $250 million civil lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they ran tax and insurance fraud schemes to get rich for years.
Democrats have made their own attempts to return Trump to the political spotlight. President Joe Biden has equated MAGA supporters with “semi-fascism” and some campaigns have tried to scare critical suburban voters by warning that pro-Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.
But raging inflation and spikes in gasoline prices appear to be a much more potent concern before voters head to the polls, which could spell bad news for the party in power in Washington.
An unprecedented political hangover from a former president
Trump’s current prominence on the political scene was already highly unusual. One-term presidents generally fade into history pretty quickly. But he is a testament to the firm control he maintains over much of the GOP and that he remains a key player nearly two years after losing re-election. And while there is growing talk about whether his tangle of political and legal controversies might convince some Republican primary voters that it’s time to move on, Trump still appears to have plenty of juice.
The former president told supporters at a rally in Texas on Saturday about the possibility of a new White House bid: “I’ll probably have to do it again.”
His more immediate clash with accountability institutions went to another level Friday when the House’s Jan. 6 committee issued a subpoena for documents and testimony. Trump has a long history of questioning such requests and trying to delay or thwart investigations into his conduct. But the subpoena also raised the possibility that he might choose to testify to claim political attention, even though testifying under oath could cause him further legal exposure.
Cheney warned on Sunday that Trump would not be allowed to turn an appearance into a political opportunity.
“It may take several days, and it will be done with the level of rigor, discipline and seriousness that it deserves,” Cheney told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.
“This is not going to be, you know, his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and food fight that it turned into. This is too serious a set of problems.”
Trump offered a glimpse of how he could use an appearance before the commission to create a political spectacle after the panel announced it would send the subpoena. In a 14-page letter, he made multiple false and discredited claims about voter fraud, and lashed out at the panel itself, calling members “highly partisan political thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working and whose records in life have been unblemished up to this point of attempted ruin.”
The commission has taken most of the depositions behind closed doors and on video and has used testimonies throughout its highly produced presentations. Only his most sympathetic witnesses have appeared in person. While this has helped create a powerful narrative that has painted a picture of Trump’s shocking derelictions of duty on January 6, it has also deprived viewers of seeing witnesses during cross-examination. This has made it difficult to assess whether the commission’s case would withstand more rigorous evidentiary requirements in a court of law.
The prospect of video testimony over an intense period of days or hours is likely not appealing to the former president because it would make it more difficult for him to dictate the terms of the exchanges and control how his testimony might be used.
This could all get academic anyway. Given the possibility of Trump legally challenging the subpoena, the issue could drag on for months and become moot, as a possible new Republican majority in the House of Representatives would likely eliminate the Jan. 6 commission as one of its first acts.
The panel is debating whether to make criminal referrals of Trump and those around him to the Justice Department for their actions around Jan. 6. But the biggest potential areas of criminal liability for the former president lie with Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Jan. 6 case and the storm of classified documents, and prosecutors in Georgia, who are investigating Trump’s attempts to and his allies to nullify the 2020 election in the battleground state.
If there is evidence that a crime was committed, Garland would face a dilemma over whether the national interest lies in implementing the law to its fullest extent or whether the consequences of prosecuting a former commander-in-chief in a contentious political atmosphere could tear the country apart.
The decision to impeach a former president who is running for a second non-consecutive term in the White House would certainly cause a firestorm. But keeping him from being held accountable if there is evidence of wrongdoing would send a damaging signal to future presidents with strongman instincts.
Given that everything about Trump’s political career is unprecedented, it’s no surprise that his political resurgence raises new questions that have the potential to further challenge and damage the country’s political institutions.
