This is Donald Trump’s second arraignment. Let’s not get used to this
This is a man whose playbook has long consisted of being so chaotically destructive that it becomes too hard to keep up. But this is not ‘Trump being Trump’
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump was arraigned on Tuesday — for the second time. The first time occurred in April, when Trump returned to New York to face state hush money charges in Manhattan. This second and most recent arraignment follows his indictment on — in the words of special counsel Jack Smith — “felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
In layman’s terms, this means that the former president is accused of improperly storing documents of national importance, trying to hide them when investigators asked to see them, and showing them off “cavalierly”, as The Associated Press put it. Those documents, still according to The AP, allegedly included “sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities” and “a Pentagon ‘plan of attack and classified map.’”
The first indictment made Trump the first former US president to face criminal charges at all, and the second one makes him the first former US president to face federal charges, specifically.
That timeline means that Trump’s first arraignment was experienced as the historic event it was. I was in New York that day, and it was impossible not to feel that that was a momentous, literally unprecedented day in US politics. People gathered around the courtroom in lower Manhattan to witness it. There was wall-to-wall coverage on TV. My email inbox chirped with news alerts throughout the day.
This second arraignment is unprecedented, too — the New York case is a state case, whereas this time, Trump is facing charges in federal court. Trump wasn’t just being arraigned, he was being arraigned again. This should make these new proceedings more damning, not less, than the first, and yet, I worry that some might experience today with a sense of deja vu. And with that sense of deja vu might come a slight dulling of our experience as witnesses to that event. We might, already, be getting used to it — seeing the former president turn up in court, speculating as to whether he will pose for a booking photo, waiting to hear his plea. (In both New York and Miami, Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and didn’t have his mugshot taken.)
But doing so would, of course, play in Trump’s favor. This is a man whose playbook has long consisted of being so chaotically destructive that it becomes too hard to keep up. I mean, just look at this roundup by The Atlantic of 50 moments of Trump’s presidency that would previously have been deemed “unthinkable.” It includes entries such as “Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated”, “Putin and Trump talk without chaperones”, and “Trump throws paper towels at Puerto Ricans.” These are just three entries out of a — thorough, but I think not quite exhaustive — list of 50 items.
Remember trying to hold all of these in your mind at once? It was exhausting. It was profoundly demoralizing. And so, I think, for many of us, Trump’s misdeeds and alleged misdeeds became categorized in our minds as one big, messy, exhausting category of “Trump being Trump”.
I am reminded, of all things, of something Caroline Calloway (yes, that Caroline Calloway) said in a recent Vanity Fair profile: “Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal.”
Calloway’s history, of course, exists in an entirely different dimension from the former US president’s, but her analysis of Trump here is spot-on. When someone is constantly embroiled in new controversies, a strange lowering of the stakes takes place. They become somehow less accountable, not more, than someone with one big, easily identifiable controversy on their resume.
The magnitude of Trump’s arraignments must not be dulled. The seriousness of the federal charges against him cannot be overstated: those charges include 37 felony counts, including 31 relating to alleged violations of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the willful retention of national defense information. He has also been charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements.
This isn’t “Trump being Trump”. This is a former president facing espionage charges. We must pay attention, and we must not get used to this.