Copeland's Corner: August 3, 2023
This will be the most important trial in American history.
After over a year of speculation following the congressional hearings held in the House of Representatives last year, on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump was indicted by special prosecutor Jack Smith on four criminal counts relating to his conduct surrounding the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. Trump is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction; and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted. He will be arraigned today in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.
If you’re counting, with the criminal charges D.A. Alvin Bragg brought in Manhattan over the Stormy Daniels hush money affair and the previous Jack Smith indictments for the mishandling of classified documents that were squirreled away at Trump’s golf clubs at Mar-A-Lago and Bedminster, New Jersey, and the recently added superseding indictments, Trump is currently facing 78 criminal charges. If Fulton County, Georgia D.A Fani Willis does the expected and indicts for alleged crimes in that state, he’ll be looking at over 80 active criminal charges in four different jurisdictions. That’s not including the E. Jean Carroll civil rape case, where’s he’s already been found liable and officially labelled a rapist by that Manhattan court, or the two civil proceedings Ms. Carroll has pending against Trump for rape in that jurisdiction.
Add all of these things together and throw in two impeachments and I have to ask, how is he still the runaway front runner in the race for the GOP 2024 Presidential nomination and neck and neck with Joe Biden in a head-to-head match-up?
I think that the answer is as simple as it is disturbing. The MAGA cult has been inundated with disinformation and it’s all they believe. Let’s take the most recent indictments around the 2020 election. Thanks to the Fox News bullhorn, right wing outlet Newsmax, and right wing talk radio and podcasts, 63% of registered Republicans currently believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Never mind the mountain of verifiable evidence to the contrary.
They live in an echo chamber in which the misinformation they already believe is regurgitated back to them, thus reinforcing it. The overwhelming majority of them buy the nonsense that the various indictments against Trump are indeed part of a Democratic conspiracy to keep him out of the White House. As if the Democrats are that organized.
On the day that the election-related indictments were unsealed, Fox News ran with the narrative that the First Amendment was being indicted and that Donald Trump was being charged for exercising his free speech expressing, truthfully or not, that there was massive voter fraud at the ballot box in November 2020. When asked for comment, most of the GOP primary contenders, lacking the testicular fortitude to confront the MAGA mob and tell the truth about the charges and the voter fraud allegations, instead spouted the same Republican nonsense about the Justice Department being “weaponized” and how the “persecution” of Donald Trump had gotten out of hand.
After making a statement in that vein, Presidential candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis said that he hadn’t read the indictment. My guess is that the majority of those supporting a man who tried to overthrow the U.S. government and the will of the voters haven’t read it. If they did bother to read the 45-page document, they’d find that the witnesses against Trump are NOT Democrats, but REPUBLICANS. Trump allies who he picked, hired and/or appointed. When (and if) this gets to trial, the star witness against him will be Mike Pence, his own Vice President, who testified before the grand jury looking into this matter. His contemporaneous notes document Trump’s weeks-long pressure campaign to get him to reject the electors in the battleground states Trump lost and replace them with fake electors handpicked by Trump loyalists.
Mike Pence, who is also running for the GOP nomination, is one of the few Republicans who spoke the truth regarding the election related indictments when he said, “Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”
As I see it, there is one possible antidote to the disinformation that has contributed to the brainwashing of millions: gavel to gavel coverage of the trial. The MAGA crowd needs to see the parade of conservative Republicans who will sit on the witness stand testifying for the prosecution. They need to see and hear the evidence for themselves without the filter of Sean Hannity and company. They need the unvarnished truth without the spin.
A televised trial can and must take place. This will be the most important trial in American history. Our very democracy is on the line. These proceedings can’t be conducted in secret behind closed doors. They must be open to let us all see the evidence of how a sitting U.S. President used his position to subvert the will of the people and retain power by force and deception.
It's the only hope we’ve got.