When a Manhattan jury found Donald J. Trump guilty, it should have sent shock waves through the nation. Yet, though the trial and conviction of a former president was unprecedented in American history, it seems most people couldn’t have cared less. As Michelle Goldberg recently noted, only 16 percent of respondents to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they had followed the first few weeks of the trial very closely, and when asked how they felt, many replied, “bored.”
In its way, that must have annoyed Mr. Trump: How insulting that no one would care. There was media coverage but no frenzy, no rallies around the world in protest when he was convicted. But to win in the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump must now transform a trial in a run-down Manhattan courtroom from a shoulder shrug into an unforgettable event, with a story powerful enough to keep his supporters energized, if not outraged, and to drum up sympathy from the undecideds.
For months, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork, spinning his tale of tyranny and martyrdom (his own of course) and styling himself as the victim of an administration that has to play dirty to eliminate a rival as formidable as he. That story of persecution has only grown louder in recent days. Moments after hearing the jury pronounce him guilty, he predictably called the trial “rigged,” the judge “conflicted,” and a trial by jury as well as government institutions like the justice system irrelevant compared with the verdict that galvanized voters will presumably hand him in November. Politics, not the law, is his métier, and history is not his concern. His preoccupation, and his talent, is storytelling.
Instinctively he grasps the kind of broader stories that break through from the courtroom to the public. These stories fueled what pundits, particularly in the 20th century, frequently dubbed the “trial of the century” — trials that captured the hearts and minds of the public, that sold newspapers, and that would grip the whole nation, if not the world, with their cultural significance. Each of these trials riveted the country by bringing to the foreground moral values and failings that affected all Americans.
Take the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, about a new law that barred the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools, which became a showdown between a three-time presidential candidate, the eloquent politician William Jennings Bryan, and the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Covered day after day on the front page of newspapers coast to coast, it even found its way into Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises.” The issue here was faith and reason, or what passes for both, and whether government could mandate belief. A young high school teacher, John Scopes, purposefully broke the recently passed law “to show,” as the brilliant attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued, “that such laws result in hate and intolerance, that they are conceived in bigotry and born in ignorance — ignorance of the Bible, of religion, of history, and of science.”
There was the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts, which caused such international indignation that rallies against their execution were held from London to Johannesburg. Edna St. Vincent Millay published a poem titled “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” in The New York Times to protest the handling of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Felix Frankfurter called the misrepresentations, suppressions and misquotations of its presiding judge disgraceful.
There was the tragic railroading of the Scottsboro boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white girls in Alabama and who symbolized, then and later, racial injustice when three all-white juries convicted eight of them in three days for a crime they did not commit. The protracted appeals of the Scottsboro boys resulted in two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that helped spawn the civil rights movement, and as late as 1976, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, of all people, pardoned the last survivor.
That wasn’t all: Another cause célèbre was the case against Bruno Hauptmann, said to have kidnapped and murdered the baby of the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Americans were so outraged that the baby of a bona fide American hero could be abducted, right out of his home, that in 1932 Congress made kidnapping across state lines a federal crime. The law was known as the Lindbergh Act. Then, of course, there were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, two former members of the Communist Party, who were arrested, tried and convicted of allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. When the presiding judge, Irving Kaufman, sentenced them to death, he declared that the couple wasn’t guilty merely of espionage but responsible for all the casualties in the Korean War.
In the last decade of the 20th century, the criminal trial of the celebrated Black football star O.J. Simpson, accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, was also about race. Televised, with the media delivering up-to-the-minute reports on the defendant, lawyers, the judge and the public, the trial was spearheaded by Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who declared the rich football star was being punished for his success, particularly by the Los Angeles Police Department, famous for its violent racism (see: the horrific beating of Rodney King).
But the trial of a former American president — who, prosecutors argued, falsified business records to conceal an affair with a porn star — and his conviction on all 34 counts has failed to stir the public imagination the way a Scopes, a Sacco and Vanzetti, a Scottsboro or a Simpson trial did because those trials, unlike this one, spoke to issues larger than the specifics of the case itself, issues that affect all citizens, each and every one of us, whether it is the separation of church and state and the freedom to learn, or racial injustice, bigotry, and xenophobia or national security.
A trial about hush money and a misdemeanor ratcheted up to a felony is not the same as a kidnapped baby or civil rights. Mr. Trump understands this. But he has done his best to make this trial just as gripping and unmissable, conjuring up a larger story from the squalid and the dull. His dangerous gift lies in his ability to refashion his trial in that scruffy courtroom into a fantasy of oppression and retribution: If the government (“a fascist state”) can come after him — an American citizen, a former president — it can come after you. So he, when elected, will fearlessly, if autocratically, save the country from itself. And by saving the country, he naturally saves himself from prosecution, which is undoubtedly his real goal.
Sure, fantasies can be dangerous, and bloated and sentimental stories embarrass us, but to tell a good story and to tell it well is the dubious task of anyone running for office. Generally these have been stories about having nothing to fear but fear itself, or about the better angels of our nature, or about greatness and hope and change and that climb toward that shining city on the hill.
Without this kind of story to tell, backed with an acknowledgment of where we are, our limits and possibilities, and our commitment to democratic institutions and the common good, we’ll be left with a Donald Trump trying to turn his trial into a “trial of the century,” featuring himself as its beleaguered and ever-valiant hero.
Stories matter.
The post Trump’s Most Dangerous Gift appeared first on New York Times.