The Decibel - What we’re missing about the Trump indictment

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges. He faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money paid to porn star, Stormy Daniels.The scene at the Manhattan courthouse where Mr. Trump appeared was a frenzy of cameras, journalists, protesters and Trump supporters. While this moment is a first in U.S. history, Jared Yates Sexton argues that focusing solely on Trump ignores the underlying factors that brought the country to this point. Jared is a frequent contributor to The Globe and the author of several books including “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.” He’s on the podcast to tell us about where the MAGA movement that brought Trump to power is at now and how they might shape the current political situation today.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Former U.S. President Donald Trump made his way past cameras and reporters as he entered Manhattan court on Tuesday afternoon. He faces 34 criminal charges. President Trump, will you please come take some questions? How did you plead, President Trump? How did you plead? How did you plead, President Trump? He pleaded not guilty to all counts.

The charges relate back to a time just before Trump was elected, in 2016, when Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels. It was hush money, so she wouldn't go public about her alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump later paid Cohen back, and the current charges are connected to how and when that payment was made. This is the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been criminally indicted. But by focusing so much on Trump, we might be missing important parts of the bigger picture.

That's the argument that Jared Yates Sexton is making. He's a political analyst and frequent contributor to The Globe. And he's also the author of several books about the U.S., including The Midnight Kingdom, a history of power, paranoia, and the coming crisis. Today, Jared will tell us about why this indictment goes beyond Trump and what else we should be paying attention to. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jared, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you for having me. So a lot of the coverage of Trump's indictment is about it being unprecedented, which I feel like we say a lot when we talk about Trump.

But you argue that the coverage here is actually missing the main point. What do you mean by that? One of the things that's happening here, and let's just go ahead and be frank about this, the fact that Donald Trump ever became president of the United States of America is unprecedented. It's very weird. It's very strange. It changed the nature of the office. But one of the things that we're doing in this is that we're spending a lot of time looking at the office itself,

almost as if this is some sort of an institution that has been sullied by a single individual. There's a reverence that's taking place here by saying, I can't believe the president of the United States has been indicted for a crime. But one of the ways that that changes the way we look at this situation is it keeps us from understanding that our institutions have been sullied over time, that has made the presidency of the United States of America susceptible to someone like a Donald Trump. And instead of focusing on him and his personal crimes, alleged crimes, what we need to do is actually to understand that the problem with America right now and the problem in a lot

of Western democracies, it goes much deeper than Donald Trump. Yeah. And in your writing, you've described Trump essentially as kind of a symptom and not the actual problem in the U.S. So, Jared, what is the problem here then? Well, it goes back decades. And, you know, in terms of Donald Trump, sometimes it's like one of those old magic eye posters. It's like you both have to focus on him while also unfocusing. Right. And when you do that with Donald Trump look at this sort of change in terms of politics, economics that took place with what some people would call Reaganism, what other

people would call neoliberalism, and how we moved from a system in which governments were attempting to pay for social programs or employment programs. There was an idea that we should be investing in these types of things and creating social safety nets. But that change in the 70s and the 80s eventually went towards a laissez-faire, neoliberal sort of idea. And literally trillions upon trillions of dollars were redistributed from the working and middle classes to the wealthiest individuals. And so what has occurred over the past few decades has been a concentration of wealth and power that has corrupted our institutions. And there is a lot of frustration with that, but it has also enabled widespread corruption and it has allowed someone

like Donald Trump, who I want to point out, has already raised millions of dollars off of being indicted for these crimes and is still aggressively fundraising. It has allowed a person like that to climb his way up into a place of power as people realize that there's something wrong, that there is a crisis that is building, and they're desperate for answers. And as a result, it has allowed someone, a class of individual like a Donald Trump, to now find themselves in a place where not only were they able to become a president, but they've now become the first president to ever be indicted for a crime.

I want to go back to something you said there, Jared, about institutions. You talked about how wealth and power over time has kind of corrupted institutions in the States. We talk about Trump and how he's affected kind of corrupted institutions in the states. We talk about Trump and how he's affected our trust in institutions as well. So can you, I guess, connect those dots for me? Like how has, I guess, this consolidation of wealth and power and then Trump, how has all of this affected how we view these institutions? Well, again, it's about focusing and unfocusing

at the same time, right? It's kind of funny because there are so many things that a Donald Trump or someone within the MAGA movement will say. When you say, sorry, the MAGA movement is the Make America Great Again movement. The Make America Great Again movement. There are moments where they will say something that is both true, but it's also not true, right? It's both things at once. There is a reason to distrust our institutions. That concentrated wealth and that corruption has allowed a lot of representative government to be more or less bought off by this wealth. And history shows us that this is always what happens, right? When you have groups of people, and in the past it used to be a wealthy

person could afford their own private jet. Now, all of a sudden, the top 1% can have their own private space agencies, right? And when you have that much wealth, eventually history shows us you are always going to start flooding it into the political sphere, right? You're going to start fundraising for politicians. You're going to start lobbying for laws or deregulation that helps your profit continue to grow. So on one hand, we should look at our institutions critically because they have been more or less bought off by a lot of these special interests. And we see that. We understand that representative government is not that interested in taking care of things like gun violence. It's not that interested in making sure that, I don't know, our trains don't derail

constantly and, you know, create major ecological disasters. But they are there to bail out institutions. They are there to go ahead and deregulate and make sure that corporations and sort of the wealth class are taken care of. Those are valid criticisms. And by the way, our legal system is absolutely prejudiced and is not fair. We know that. We know that like inherently. It's one of the things that we've seen building up over the last few years. But for Donald Trump to come out and say the legal system is coming after me, right? They're coming after me. And as a result, they're prejudiced or this is a witch hunt. There is a criticism that our legal system should not be trusted, but it's being twisted. Donald Trump understands this intuitively, which is you tell people a little bit of truth and then you twist it aggressively and it keeps you from getting to the to the nut of the problem.

Jared, Trump has also claimed that this indictment is politically motivated. Is it? I mean, that is a great question. I mean, like this, this is one of those things. And I've tried to be candid about this in the past, because, again, with as in all things, Trump, some things are both true and not true at the exact same time. Right. I do not think that there is a deep state plot against Donald Trump. The culture war has

shown us that literally everything in the world has at least a taste of politics to it. So I do not believe it's a witch hunt, but I also, I have to tell you, I'm not so sure that these things would be taking place if Donald Trump would have removed himself from the private eye, particularly with the reverence that we have for the institution of the presidency of the United States of America. Nobody wants to prosecute a former president. That's a massive, massive embarrassment. It sullies the institution. I think if he simply would have walked off the stage and gone away, I think that a lot of this might not have necessarily happened. We talked about the MAGA movement a little bit. That kind of came to fruition, of course, during the early days of the 2016 election when Trump was running.

Where is that movement today? And I guess, who is represented in this movement? Well, I mean, that's the $64,000 question right there. But the MAGA movement is in a very strange spot right now. And what we see is that Donald Trump was kind of an aberration. In 2016, I think a lot of Republicans saw him as an exciting prospect, but they were so ready for him to get off the stage, right? Because he was sort of an outsider. He was kind of beyond their control. And in Republican politics, there's long been this push to go ahead and have sort of laissez-faire, conservative, you know, fiscally conservative, socially conservative ideas, but also to go ahead and cultivate what some would refer to as a populist base, right? Which would be white Americans who

are afraid of progress and are upset. Well, Donald Trump sort of freed himself from that control. And now, in this current iteration, we see from Fox News, we hear it all the time from Republican politicians, they are desperate to get Trump off the stage. But to go ahead and win elections and to go ahead and pursue their political agenda, they have to maintain his base. I try and explain it to people. It's like an organ transplant. They're trying very hard to move beyond Donald Trump while going ahead and taking the organ of the MAGA movement and placing it within institutional bounds. And so now you're seeing this incredible sort of tiptoeing, you know, high wire act in which you'll notice on Fox News they're going after the D.A. in this case, Alvin Bragg. They're even using the Trump chosen sort of rhetoric,

which is that he's a George Soros controlled district attorney. It's the deep state going after Donald Trump. They'll say that, but they're not defending Donald Trump. Right. It's it's it's sort of trying very hard to have it both ways because, again, they're trying to move beyond him while maintaining tens of millions of people who support him. That's really an interesting point that you're talking about here. It's essentially trying to take the support that is for Donald Trump, the person and the persona, and kind of translate that into bigger ideas so that those movements can be sustained even without Trump then. Yes. And if you actually take a look at the history of the conservative movement in the United States and in a lot of these Western democracies, the makeup of them is actually very elitish, right? There's a very, very small group of people. I always refer to them sort of as country club conservatives. They went to Yale. They went to Harvard, right? These are people who live in the cities that supposedly they hate. They live in New York City, Washington, D.C., you know,

in California. And we see it all the time. Like a Ted Cruz will put on like a hunting jacket and go out and say, we love basketball, don't we, folks? And meanwhile, he's an Ivy League educated lawyer. Well, that sort of a dance has taken place for years, particularly since the emergence of the Southern strategy with Richard Nixon and then eventually what helped Ronald Reagan and then the Bushes win their elections. That has always been a very, very intricate and also dangerous relationship because in order to go ahead and cultivate them, you have to use those conspiracy theories. You have to use xenophobia. You also have to use inherent prejudices that come from like differences in races and genders and socioeconomic classes.

And this Trump indictment is another one of those hinge points. And how the Republican Party handles it, how someone like a Ron DeSantis handles it, all of those things are now in play. And we get to see what happens with the Republican Party moving forward and whether or not he maintains his stranglehold of power. We'll be back in a minute. Trump, of course, says he is going to run for president in the next election in the 2024 election. What does the polling say right now around this indictment and the coverage of it? Is this making him weaker or

stronger when it comes to being elected again? This has created a new narrative in which he is in the eyes of the Mongol movement, he is the scapegoat, he is the victim, right? And his prosecution, and I want to go ahead and say, I think completely necessary. I think that we do need to move towards a legal system in which no one is above the law and the idea that a president can be indicted is absurd. But at the same time, that is exactly what the conspiracy theories said would happen, right? That the institutions of power would come after him and that they are sort of

a weaponized witch hunt thing. And so what it has done is it's given him a jolt. Prior to Trump leaking that he was going to be indicted, the numbers between him and DeSantis were cinching up. Usually it was ranging anywhere from 8 to 15 points, separating them. Right now, most of the polls are going up around 25 to 23 percent. So they have taken a jump. There has been a spike, but it remains to be seen whether or not this is just a momentary spike or if this is the beginning of the momentum. And if 2024, the main narrative of the race is going to be Donald Trump, you know, public enemy number one. It does seem like that is the overtaking narrative at the moment. Trump sent out a call to his supporters on his Truth Social page.

This is the social media platform that he now uses, where he said in all caps in one post, quote, protest, take our nation back, end quote. And in another, quote, we must save America, protest, protest, protest, end quote. I mean, this makes me think back to January 6th, of course, right? He was tweeting out things then as well. One of the things he tweeted was, quote, big protest in D.C. on January 6th, end quote, and, quote, be there, we'll be wild, end quote. And we all know how that turned out, Jared. So should we be making the connection here to what happened on January 6th, 2021? Absolutely.

And, you know, one of the weirder little blips that not a lot of people remember now is back in 2012 when Mitt Romney was defeated by Barack Obama. And, you know, Donald Trump has never been a big fan of Mitt Romney. He then took to his Twitter account and called for patriots to retake the country. That was in 2012 when it was another politician. When Donald Trump himself is cornered or when Donald Trump wants something, the temperature is just turned up so much more than that. I'm going to be worried about whether or not there are going to be the types of lone wolf attacks that we've seen with the Trump movement. This is a movement that has spawned, you know, serial pipe bomb senders, right, to media members, politicians. This is a movement that has seen people attack federal buildings, not just on January 6th, but going after IRS and FBI buildings. And I'm sure you've noticed as well as I have,

how many conversations we've had about, yeah, maybe he committed these crimes, but should we prosecute him? Aren't we taking a chance of violence? And that environment is absolutely necessary for Trump and others like him, demagogic figures, to go ahead and continue down the road is to make sure that people are cowed away from holding them responsible. The question is, what is going to happen in the next week or so? Whether or not that base that has been cultivated. And by the way, Trump has recently taken on much more apocalyptic rhetoric. Because if we don't win this next election, 2024, I truly believe our country is doomed. I think it's doomed.

We saw when he went to Waco, Texas, which was, for people who might not know this, that was the location of the Branch Davidian siege, of course, in the 1990s, which has become sort of a mecca of far-right, white supremacist, white separatist movements. He went to Waco during the 30th anniversary of that siege and talked about this being a final battle. He's talked about this DA doing the work of the devil and, of course, the Soros-backed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. That is a direct line to a lot of the more extreme parts of the MAGA movement. For instance, talking about the devil, talking about, you know, the final battle, that is absolutely a signal to the white evangelical movement, what some would call Christian nationalism, who have over the last year, a few years, and this is going to sound

weird to anybody who recognizes who Donald Trump is and what he's about. They see him as a sort of Messiah. They see him as an emissary of God. I want to just dig a little bit into what you just you said there, Jared, about about how Trump is seen in evangelical circles and certain evangelical circles, kind of this emissary of God. Why is he seen like that? Well, I'll tell you, there is a whole lot happening in that. So personally, I'll go ahead and give a quick anecdote. I grew up in a rural community in southern Indiana in what I can only explain as like a proto-Christian nationalistic church.

And basically every Sunday, instead of going in and learning about, I don't know, the scripture of Jesus, you read the book of Revelation and talked about how Satan was taking over the world and how you needed to fight him. And it was constant. It was everything from who just won the White House to the Soviet Union to what was on the TV, what was on the radio. This was literally a spiritual war. And basically what people were told was that the world is going to end within your lifetime. You are going to see the return of Jesus and you are going to be a warrior in this battle. And a lot of these gestures and the idea that there is a deep state, that, you know, the Democratic Party aren't just traitors, but they abuse children and that they're doing the work of evil. That sort of rhetoric fits in exactly with the world framework of this movement. And a lot of these people, and one of the things that

I've seen in my research looking at this, is that those people are desperate for this to be true. They want to feel like there's something in their lives of importance, that they are, you know, playing a key role. Things like QAnon and the Trump movement have activated that and given people a sense of not just belonging, but a sense of purpose. There's obviously so much media coverage of Trump's indictment. We're talking about it here, of course, so is a lot of other media. And in the past, intense coverage of Trump has emboldened him. It's also helped rally his supporters. I wonder, is there a sense that the media is potentially repeating the mistakes of the past with the coverage of this event?

Trump has become a symbiotic element with particularly American media. They cannot quit him. They do not want to quit him. This is absolutely perfect for them. This is right now a hallmark day in American media. They are very excited about this. I always say that there is too much attention paid to Donald Trump and not enough attention paid to Donald Trump as a phenomenon.

So you're saying like, you know, this is it's an important event. People are going to cover it. But really, it's not the event itself. That's actually the where we should be focusing on. There's a lot of stuff behind it. That's actually really important to understand as well. I think it's telling that Trump and the people around him are very excited about this. They're very happy, actually, that he's being indicted and being arrested. One of the things, though, is that talking about the unprecedented nature, talking about being a president of the United States, talking about, oh, is he finally getting his? And by the way, that's another problem with this. There is and has been this hope

that if we can just get rid of Donald Trump, right, if a Robert Mueller could get him, if a James Comey could get him, if Mary Garland would just get him, if these DAs would just get him, if we can just get past Donald Trump and even the current president of the United States of America, Joe Biden, is guilty of this. He told everybody, elect me and this fever will go away and everything will be fine. And we know that's not true because, again, going back to how we started this conversation, Trump is a symptom of a much, much larger problem. And whether he's free and running for president, or whether he's in jail running for president, or whether he just goes away entirely, the problems that we need to deal with and the problems that we need to start answering, they are going to exist long after Donald Trump if we don't actually start to recognize what they are. Jared, this was a fascinating conversation.

Thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thank you. It was my pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.