by tyler | Mar 24, 2023 | CNN, opinions
The news of a potential indictment would likely derail most presidential candidates.
But former President Donald Trump isn’t most presidential candidates, and we’ve seen him thrive in politically challenging environments before.
Ever since Trump announced last week that he would be indicted in New York, where a grand jury has been hearing evidence about an alleged scheme to falsify records to conceal hush money payments to an adult-film star, we have been waiting to learn his legal fate.
But it seems New York is not his only cause for concern. Trump’s legal troubles could be ramping up elsewhere, with an appeals court ruling that Trump’s defense attorney must testify before a grand jury investigating the handling of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago and Georgia prosecutors considering potential racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.
However, it’s worth remembering that the former president has already survived two impeachments, numerous investigations and countless controversies before. Given what he’s gone through, and how he’s established his political persona, an indictment that might end other political careers is not an inevitable body blow for Trump.
In fact, numerous commentators, including Democratic officials, are rightly speculating that an indictment in the New York case could end up strengthening Trump’s hand going into 2024. Based on this perspective, it was not surprising that Trump himself announced (incorrectly) on Truth Social that he would be arrested on Tuesday, calling on his supporters to protest such a move. Privately, according to the New York Times, he has been considering how a “perp walk” might be perceived.
And while Trump’s political brand has struggled in the past few months, recent polls show him leading the pack of potential Republican presidential candidates — with a significant gulf between him and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
So, why might Trump gain further strength if he is indicted?
Trump’s legal troubles play directly into the ways he has packaged himself as a politician. For one, Trump thrives on media attention. This is his major weapon in political combat. He loves to dominate the news cycle, redirect national conversations, lash out at his enemies and eclipse all other issues. Trump, who has an instinctive feel for the rhythms of cable television and social media, did it again this week. As war rages in Ukraine and US officials try to contain a potential fallout in the banking sector, there’s been considerable coverage of his possible arrest after his Truth Social post this weekend.
It doesn’t seem to matter that much of the attention is negative. As president, reality television star and real estate mogul, Trump has cast himself as a fighter who has warded off individuals and institutions that he claims are out to get him. This is an essential part of his political persona: the aggrieved public figure who is at perpetual war with the world around him.
In a manner that would make President Richard Nixon supremely jealous, Trump knows how to weaponize attacks like nobody else, turning on his opposition and making the case to supporters that his adversaries are the ones who are abusing power. He used this strategy with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (“Crooked Hillary”), the media (“fake news”), former FBI Director James Comey (“Slippery James Comey”) and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller (“rigged Mueller Witch Hunt”), to name a few examples. Trump went even bigger when he took aim at the entire election system after Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020. Most recently, he called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg a “woke tyrant.”
Trump uses this to connect with Republican voters, many of whom are White men in rural areas who feel as if the world has left them behind. This allows Trump — a man of wealth, power and privilege — to paint himself as being “anti-establishment,” a message that continues to resonate in a post-Watergate America. As a result, Trump relates to his supporters, making the case that he is fighting against the forces they are up against as well.
It appears Trump’s strategy is still effective, as Republicans have rallied to his defense in a Pavlovian fashion. The airwaves this past week have been filled with Republicans playing their familiar roles. It only took a few days after Trump’s social media announcement for Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio to further weaponize the House Judiciary Committee by calling for an investigation into Bragg. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, seemingly unable to separate himself from Trump, accused Bragg of unfair treatment, saying, “Lawyer after lawyer will tell you this is the weakest case out there, trying to make a misdemeanor a felony.”
And then there is a part of Trump that has always loved the tough-guy, mob boss image. Professional wrestling fans will remember the gusto with which he embraced the fighting spectacle and the connections he forged to the world of professional boxing. As someone who rose to prominence in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, he is not deterred by the idea that many Americans are more likely to see him as a character out of “The Godfather” or “Goodfellas” than someone who belongs in the West Wing.
As I wrote in 2016, this suits the cultural era of the anti-hero and allows Trump to revel in the tough bravado that comes with that role. And shortly after he entered the Oval Office, he surrounded himself with military officials who bolstered his image as a man of strength.
To top it all off, Trump, who does not seem to feel any sense of shame, appears to have insulated himself from the psychological pressure that others might feel to step down in the face of controversy and scandal.
Put all of this together and it becomes easier to understand why an indictment might not be the worst thing to happen to the former president. It must also be said that an alleged relationship with a porn star, which Trump denies having, may no longer be an automatically disqualifying issue the way that it used to be. It’s also worth noting that this allegation about his personal life seems to pale in comparison to the full-throated campaign to reverse the will of the electorate and undermine our democratic system in 2020.
Whether or not someone benefits from an investigation or indictment should have no bearing on those who work on behalf of the law and the Constitution. And regardless of the outcome of the many investigations, they are — contrary to what Trump may claim — worthy pursuits of justice.
Ultimately, voters can still respond how they like in 2024, since an indictment or conviction would not bar Trump from becoming president again. While there are many factors that will determine whether we can reestablish the many guardrails that have disappeared in American politics, the electorate will be of utmost importance when it comes time to decide who should be given the responsibility of inhabiting the Oval Office.
On Election Day in 2020, Americans proved that Trump could be defeated. If an indictment, or several indictments, come down in the next few months, voters — not courts and not prosecutors — will once again be the ultimate judges of his political fate.
by tyler | Mar 24, 2023 | CNN, opinions
I started this year talking about a daily practice that’s made me feel more connected, content, and attentive: writing a daily haiku that makes me take note of the world each day. I’m still enjoying that practice: With all the rain in California, today’s haiku is: “So much depends/ on wet plum blossoms/ in my red wheelbarrow.”
Now I’m working on another centering strategy: Taking a deep social media unplug. Despite the fact that I’m a writer, in a field with nonstop pressure to share, craft and amplify, I recently got off all platforms for two months. Instead of using social media, I talked to artist friends about it as a concept — why we use it, how it affects us and what boundaries we need. These conversations helped me savor a deeper engagement with one-on-one friendships and my lived community.
I felt a delightful freedom from the pressure to document my life and was more attuned to what really matters to me.
To back up: There were many reasons for me to take a social media sabbatical. Time online was making me bored, anxious and grumpy. I was falling down attention rabbit holes, scrolling for boots when I actually wanted to play Uno with my kids. I was buying stuff I can’t afford, didn’t need and didn’t even desire.
I was a fraudulent environmentalist, leaving a trail of plastic packaging behind me. I noticed a connection between the garbage-y levels of my attention span and the physical garbage I was creating. It felt bad.
Other things disquieted me as well: the general tenor of rage. The strange woman or bot who began trolling me, leaving hateful posts. I felt vulnerable and exposed to random fury: you might go online to like someone’s new baby and suddenly be swept up in the day’s melee, like being slammed into rush hour traffic.
Finally, I noticed upsetting perception gulfs between my awareness of people’s avatar selves and their real ones. Once, having read of a friend’s mother’s death — movingly detailed in social media posts — I saw that same friend in real life and somehow did not process that she was still grieving.
Conversely, I ran into a friend who seemed happy online, but realized quickly after talking to her in person that she was actually in a very dark place. I felt that my time on social media was moving me further away from human experiences.
During my months off, I spoke to maybe 10 artists, some of whom wanted to be named and some of whom didn’t. I also spoke to Carmella Guiol, a digital health educator based in Durham, North Carolina, who said she is struck by the enormous social media fatigue and exhaustion many people (and particularly young people) share.
Guiol has been interviewing college students as part of her work. “Social media is really cutting into their lives,” she said. “They feel like it’s this pressure that takes away from the time to actually live.”
My conversations turned up similar themes. Despite the pernicious pressure to be “seen” and “liked,” most people I talked to shared their sense that the constant pressure to perform their lives for the algorithm had become alarming and stale.
Some people had left social platforms entirely. (“It felt as addictive as alcohol,” said a poet in recovery from both alcohol and Twitter.) Another, writer Thaisa Frank, reported having been relieved to have had a concussion: She stopped using social media and rediscovered the attention span to read books.
Anyone I talked to who used social media regularly with any degree of happiness had set strong boundaries. Guiol took a full year off, before returning, partly to share her work. Now she wears a watch (which means she doesn’t check her phone for the time), uses an alarm clock in the bedroom and doesn’t keep apps on her phone. She talked about going on platforms only with a distinct errand in mind — “join a new moms group” or “post an item for sale.”
She also talked about taking time offline to engage hard but necessary questions: What is a community? What art practices do you need to honor? What feeds your spirit?
Tiffany Shlain, a visual artist and author of the book “24/6,” talked to me about her decades-long practice of taking a weekly 24-hour tech-Shabbat, or day off screens, in which she “could host a beautiful meal, and journal in her notebook, and allow her creativity to come back in.”
Matthew Zapruder, a poet and editor who has felt exhausted and burned by “people who are mean as hell,” felt he was constantly trying to sidestep what he called “his unpaid internship on social media” — that is, the labor of curating personhood in algorithmic space.
Zapruder also harbored doubts about the future of social media, noting: “It’s not really about whether or not I or any one of us thinks we can handle it, it’s about whether or not it’s a force that actually spreads violence and discord.” Now he uses social only during certain hours, and only to amplify work he cares about.
I’m writing this article while off any platforms. I got a lot of good writing done these past months. I savored a lot of tender moments, too. Eventually, I will tiptoe online, and, yes, probably post this article to social media. Later this summer and fall I’ll be launching projects and I do plan to share them. I’m excited about some good work I’ve gotten to do and I want to hear from friends I might otherwise miss.
But I report that it’s good to unplug, and I’ll do it again, maybe for longer. In the beginning, I worried about feeling I would be missing out. I did not.
In the first few days off, I noticed that the moments I would have reached for social media were the moments when in the old days, I would have reached for a cigarette. For those times, I put a book of poems in my bag instead. I’d text friends. I spent two hours each week volunteering in my favorite community garden (but didn’t photograph it). I savored and cultivated something which nobody has figured out how to monetize: A sense of private delight. Indeed, I felt a new sense of private wonder.
Here’s a phrase that came to me somewhere during my time off: You have a real life, not an advertisement for a life. I wonder if there’s a way to go back online with more intention, less passivity. As Guiol put it, to “think about who is using who.”
I don’t want to be an algorithm zombie. It’s not good for me or for the world. I think of the early video artists, like Nam June Paik, who were able to use technology for art, but also somehow kept reminding us that we, the fragile human, are here, and we can and should disrupt the machine.
One of the best conversations during my time offline was with the poet Julia Guez, who wrote a beautiful book of poems called “The Certain Body,” about illness in the body, and in the civic body, too. There’s a poem in her book keep I thinking about, called “Still Life with Insufficient iCloud Storage.”
This poem imagines the cloud which carries our online personae as a real cloud, which, for better or worse, has to hold all we send to it, before raining it down again. Somehow I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that image. That poor cloud, full of our rage, raining it elsewhere, raining it back down on us once again.
Often, in these past hard years, many of us have sat doomscrolling. There’s been a lot of reason to seek community online, and there’s also been a lot of reason to grieve and rage and despair. It’s been easy to forget the joys and challenges of making community in real space. And it’s been easy to forget that at the other end of these portals, which often seem faceless, there are still real people, real human needs.
If I go back online, I only want to post and share what I would want to rain down on me, or a friend, or on the neighbor who one code calls me to love like a self.
After Covid, Guez went on tour with her book. She was reading poems about some of the things that sometimes inflame us on social media — police violence, Covid, our own grief — but she was sharing them in rooms and libraries and bookstores. “Afterwards, there was space to hug, to weep,” she told me. “And that was amazing.”
Guez, by the way, had some of the best rules for social media use of anyone I talked to. “Never in the morning, never in bed, never before bed, never in the bedroom,” she told me. “Mostly on the train, in order to find out other people’s good news, and amplify it, and sometimes to then to write a letter or actually call a friend who you’ve seen post something and check in on them.”
I love those rules. When I go back online, I’m going to use them too. For now, in the spirit of amplifying voices we love, I share Guez’s poem. Maybe you’ll love it too.
by tyler | Mar 24, 2023 | CNN, opinions
For a presidential campaign, rally locations often serve double duty: putting the candidate in front of supporters while sending a message about the campaign.
When Barack Obama launched his presidential bid in 2007, he chose to speak at the Old State Capitol in Illinois, the place where Abraham Lincoln launched his political career with his famed “House Divided” speech. When Ronald Reagan wanted to bolster his support among White southern voters in 1980, he traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi – where three civil rights workers had been murdered in the 1960s – and gave a speech on states’ rights. When Pat Buchanan sought to underscore his connection to the Confederacy in 1992, he made a beeline for Stone Mountain, Georgia, site of a monument to Confederate leaders.
Likewise, Donald Trump’s decision to hold the first rally of his 2024 bid for the White House in Waco, Texas, sends a powerful message about his unfolding presidential campaign. The rally coincides with the 30th anniversary of a siege just outside of Waco between religious extremists, a sect known as the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh, and the federal government. The 51-day standoff began in February 1993 and ended in mid-April with a fire that killed 76 people, including 25 children.
Trump is no stranger to place-based controversy. In June 2020, he chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the site to restart his in-person rallies, after pausing them for first few months of the pandemic. The combination of the place — the site of one of the deadliest racist pogroms in US history — and the date — Juneteenth, the day that marks when news of emancipation reached enslaved people in Texas — was quickly called out for the provocation it was. Kamala Harris, who had not yet been selected as Joe Biden’s running mate, recoiled at the choice on Twitter, writing, “This isn’t just a wink to white supremacists — he’s throwing them a welcome home party.” (The Trump campaign moved the rally to the next day.)
Trump clearly knows the power of place. In the case of Waco, it is not just a provocation but a signal, likely to be read by those who have used force on Trump’s behalf as an invitation. For the past three decades, this incident has been a key element of far-right mythology: a rallying cry for armed resistance to the federal government and its representatives. For Trump, whose first term ended with an assault on the US Capitol, the choice to rally in Waco sends a clear message that will energize proponents of far-right extremism among his base.
The Waco siege occurred in the midst of a period of growing far-right, anti-government activism in the United States. The modern movement, marked by military-style training, weapons stockpiles and political violence, emerged in the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest during the 1970s and grew as time went on. Groups such as the Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity, sovereign citizens and Aryan Nations developed radical anti-government philosophies often rooted in White supremacy and armed rebellion, a development historian Kathleen Belew charts in her book “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” These groups helped feed parts of the militia movement that, by the early 1990s, had grown to an unprecedented size, according to Belew and others.
Two events in the early 1990s galvanized the growth of this movement. Waco, in 1993, was the second; the first was Ruby Ridge the year before. At Ruby Ridge, an 11-day siege pitted White separatist Randy Weaver and his family against heavily armed federal agents. Weaver’s wife and teen son were killed, along with a US Marshal.
The government’s use of deadly force against the Weavers became a recruiting tool for radical groups. Waco served as another, where militarized federal agents laid siege to a compound with warrants to investigate allegations of sexual abuse and illegal weapons. The compound housed a heavily armed group of Branch Davidians. On April 19, the FBI attempted a raid, and a deadly fire broke out – the origin of which remains disputed.
Two years later, on the anniversary of the raid, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. He cited Waco — which he had visited during the siege — as a primary motivation for the attack.
Even after Oklahoma City, Waco remained a key part of far-right lore. The low-wattage radio programs of the 1990s blared with messages about the raid, weaving it into conspiracies about the New World Order and warning that it heralded the beginning of the end times. Dubbing Waco the “second American Revolution,” far-right conspiracist William Cooper told his audience, “Folks, we lost. And you’re next.”
One of Cooper’s listeners picked up on that message and used it to build his own media empire. On the seventh anniversary of Waco in 2000, Alex Jones presided over the opening of a new church constructed at the site of the raid. Jones, who launched his conspiracy site InfoWars in 1999, organized the fundraising drive to build the church. On his radio show, he flogged conspiracies about Waco — captured most fully in his documentary “America Wake Up or Waco” — and whipped up anti-government fear in general, insisting to his listeners that the federal government would eventually train its guns on them.
The years-long surge in militia organizing that occurred post-Waco died down somewhat during the George W. Bush years, only to resurge again after Obama’s election. When it did, Waco retained its vital place as a driver of fear and paranoia. “Waco can happen at any given time,” said Mike Vanderboegh, a co-founder of the Three Percenters, a far-right group later involved in the attack on the Capitol, in a 2015 interview (Vanderboegh died in 2016). “But the outcome will be different this time. Of that I can assure you.”
The persistence of Waco as a call to arms for the far right underscores the potency of Trump’s choice to hold his opening rally there. For three decades, the city’s name has been a touchstone for groups who see the federal government not just as a problem but as the central enemy in a slow-rolling civil war.
When Trump became president in 2016, rather than becoming synonymous with the federal government as previous chief executives had done, he styled himself as both its victim and its adversary, promoting conspiracies about the deep state and encouraging supporters to keep him in power by any means necessary. In choosing Waco as the kickoff site for his campaign rallies, he has signaled that his courtship of extremist groups will continue, and that he sees his role as a pivotal figure in the far-right mythos as central to his efforts to retake the presidency.
by tyler | Mar 23, 2023 | CNN, opinions
The multi-year saga of TikTok’s struggles in Washington is approaching a dramatic climax. As the company’s CEO testifies in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, two widely different visions of the company will be on display.
To the young people around the world who spend hours per day watching the pithy, entertaining short videos, TikTok is the product that won their attention with an almost creepily smart discovery algorithm and a carefully cultivated community of top creators.
To the western world’s national security establishment, however, TikTok is a Trojan horse, bringing the long arm of China into the homes and workplaces of their citizens via its China-based parent company, ByteDance.
From my seat, as somebody who dealt with continuous state-sponsored attacks from countries around the world as the chief security officer at Facebook, and now running a research group at Stanford focused on online harms, there are indeed many legitimate concerns about TikTok. But those concerns are bigger than one company, and the Biden administration is missing an opportunity to lead the free world in addressing the big picture.
TikTok is only one chess piece in the global struggle to gather and control information. An important one, to be sure, but Washington’s laser-focus on capturing this one piece has blinded it to the bigger game.
We are clearly at the start of a long struggle between the world’s democracies and a new coalition of autocracies, led by a Chinese Communist Party that is emerging from the Covid-19 crisis with its most autocratic leader since Mao Zedong and a burning desire to demonstrate the power of the People’s Republic domestically and abroad.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit this week to a battered, beleaguered Vladimir Putin only highlighted its new role, as the Chinese leader publicly legitimized a Russian president who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes only last week. In the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait and disputed Japanese waters, China’s rapidly growing military continues to push boundaries and prepare for conflicts with its neighbors and the West.
A similar battle plays out online, as China’s numerous intelligence and information warfare units support the country’s long-term economic and strategic goals. This includes frequent attacks to gain access to the West’s key companies and their trade secrets, as well as rapidly improving its capability to shape the world’s narratives via both overt and covert means.
Unrest in Hong Kong and the embarrassing emergence of Covid-19 from Wuhan has motivated China to rapidly improve its surveillance, influence and control around the world. This investment has paid off, and many observers, including our team at Stanford, consider China to be the world’s leader in this area.
Against this backdrop, national security concerns about TikTok are justified. ByteDance, like any other Chinese company, is subject to laws that compel extreme compliance with the interests and dictums of the state. There is no First Amendment or independent judiciary to protect ByteDance executives if they decided to deny China’s requests. President Xi has made that clear by taking direct action against China’s richest and most powerful CEOs.
So there is no question that China could quietly force TikTok to bend to its will. It could downrank voices deemed undesirable, and subtly manipulate what users see to create the illusion that pro-Chinese voices are ascendent and critics are unpopular and isolated.
The biggest risk, however, is access to all the data that is gathered in the normal operation of such a large product. TikTok does not carry much private conversation, although that could certainly change as the product and its userbase mature. It does, however, know a huge amount about the demographics, interests, location, contacts and devices of its 1.5 billion users.
China’s intelligence services have a long history of being accused of stealing massive databases from companies including Equifax, Anthem and Marriott, and even the clearance records of millions of government employees from the Office of Personnel Management. These famous cyberattacks demonstrate that Chinese intelligence services think big when they gather surveillance data on Americans, and TikTok’s data warehouse is very, very big.
TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, told Congress in his written testimony that “ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country.” He laid out TikTok’s new data security model, where American users’ data is being stored by American tech company Oracle. In my experience, these kind of internal data controls are extremely hard to build and trust, and I agree with the Biden administration’s rejection of the move.
Regardless of how the US decides to move forward with TikTok (whether it’s requiring ByteDance to sell it, banning it completely or something else), it will do little to stop the growth of Chinese surveillance and influence, and the Biden administration and Congress need to take the wider view.
It turns out that there is no US law clearly governing the access that Beijing or Moscow-based employees of any tech or social media company have to the personal data of US citizens that use their services. And, there is currently no federal law discouraging the overcollection of critical data or personally identifiable information.
It’s time for Congress to finally pass a comprehensive privacy law. With state privacy laws popping up across the US, creating chaos for American companies without addressing some fundamental issues, now is the time for Congress and President Biden to create predictable rules and take back leadership in tech regulation. And in doing so, Congress can explicitly define the kinds of critical data that can be stored or accessed in the US, in our democratic allies, in neutral countries and in our adversaries.
A federal privacy law would also discourage mobile phone networks, adtech companies and data brokers from selling the exact kinds of data that TikTok could provide to the Chinese authorities. And any fair mechanism addressing TikTok’s risks should also apply to American companies selling data internationally or to US intelligence services.
Congress can also set a legal floor to the transparency social networks provide to civil society and academic researchers around the public content they are carrying. These groups work with key American social media companies to find and analyze campaigns to manipulate both American and global politics, playing an important role in informing citizens and journalists of the kinds of campaigns that may target them.
TikTok has traditionally made it difficult for researchers to monitor its platform for this kind of manipulation, although in the past several months it has started to address the need for transparency. While US companies are often more transparent than TikTok, that is based only upon their own voluntary decisions. Twitter, long a leader in transparency, recently announced a plan to eliminate the external access that is critical to finding botnets and influence campaigns. The proposed Platform Accountability and Transparency Act would create a fair baseline for all companies and would remove this national security issue from the whims of individual tech billionaires.
The US and our allies also need to seriously engage in the information war, both by protecting and supporting journalists who are able to operate independently of any government, and by building civil society coalitions that create public resiliency against the Chinese-style censorship that is invading countries such as India and Turkey.
Washington is correct to deal with the immediate risks posed by the single chess piece of TikTok, but it should also see the whole board and plan for the next 20 moves. The history of the rest of the 21st century depends on it.
As a growing number of lawmakers raise national security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China, and some experts worry about the app’s impact on young people’s mental health, CNN is hosting a special to dig into these issues. Watch “CNN Primetime: Is time up for TikTok?” Thursday, March 23 at 9 p.m. ET.
by tyler | Mar 23, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Ever since last Saturday when former President Donald Trump predicted on his own social media outlet that he would be arrested the following Tuesday — a prediction that has yet to come to fruition — the entirety of the American media and political firmament quickly jumped from so-called “indictment watch” to all out “fever pitch” as it began contemplating the myriad implications of a former President of the United States being indicted and facing possible felony prosecution.
Over the past week, some commentators have appeared gobsmacked by the unprecedented nature of this turn of events for the twice-impeached former president.
But really?
The idea of prosecuting a former head of state is actually a fairly normal occurrence in the course of a functioning democracy — just not one that has transpired in this country.
Since 2000, in over 75 countries around the world, according to Axios research, heads of state who left office have been prosecuted or jailed — including in vibrant and strong democracies like Israel, France and South Korea.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been defending himself against charges of fraud, breach of trust and taking bribes for nearly three years and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was released from prison in 2017 after serving two-thirds of a 27-month sentence for fraud.
Back in 2021, France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of illegal campaign financing and received a one-year jail sentence. And in that same year, former South Korean President Park Geun-hye was released from prison after serving nearly five years following a corruption conviction.
In 2019, then former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was released from prison after serving a year and a half of a 12-year corruption sentence — and went on to successfully win back the presidency in 2022. In fact, there are plenty of recent cases involving the prosecution and jailing of former Latin America leaders. Take Peru for example where all but one of its former presidents since 1985 has been arrested or charged with criminal offenses.
Whether it’s former South African President Jacob Zuma or Taiwan’s former President Chen Shui-bian or Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Najib Razak — across the globe, former leaders are regularly prosecuted, convicted and given time behind bars for offenses stemming from corrupt business dealings, elections hijinks, or misdeeds that occurred while serving in office.
Prosecuting a former leader for wrongdoing isn’t sand in the gears of democracy; it’s a feature that keeps in check future leaders and reassures a nation that no one person, no matter his or her rank and influence, is above the law nor immunized from accountability.
America needs to take a deep breath and realize that if Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg ends up prosecuting Trump in the case relating to hush money payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, it won’t be the end of the world.
Nor will the sky begin falling if Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ends up charging the former president with racketeering and conspiracy charges related to Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 loss in the state. Or if Special Counsel Jack Smith ends up prosecuting Trump for any number of alleged offenses he committed either during or after his time in office. We don’t know if Trump will be charged in any of these investigations but if he is, American democracy will not only be OK, it will be stronger as a result.
America has already had its share of presidential public corruption scandals. From the imbroglio surrounding Ulysses Grant’s Whiskey Ring in the late 19th century to Warren Harding’s infamous Teapot Dome Scandal of the early 1920s to Richard Nixon’s role in Watergate and Ronald Reagan’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair — US presidents have often found themselves in the crosshairs of the justice system, and in many cases their close aides ended up serving time in prison.
In each of these cases, however, the president himself was spared prosecution, which ended up, over time, creating something of a mythos — entirely separate from the Constitution — that prosecuting or jailing a former president was overly divisive or unbecoming of the world’s most powerful nation.
But now it’s time for Americans to make peace with the fact that for every remarkable president that we have been fortunate to have leading us through times of war and uncertainty, occasionally, like any other country on earth, we will get a bad apple in the White House.
And using the powers of the justice system to hold these bad actors to account is not only called for — it will actually strengthen Americans’ belief in our justice system. And, as presaged in the opening line of our own Constitution, it will put our nation one step closer to becoming a more perfect union.
