There won’t be a trial anytime soon — or maybe ever — for Donald Trump on charges related to Jan. 6. No matter the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision, even if the court rules that a trial can proceed, there almost certainly won’t be enough time before the election. If Mr. Trump is elected, there might not be a trial at all.
One of the things a trial gives you is an answer: There is an ending to a trial. In Manhattan last month, no matter how anyone felt about the guilty verdict, or the politics of the charges, or the cultural value of the case as a representation of what Donald Trump means in American life, Mr. Trump and everyone in the country got an ending. And that the trial itself was about such a narrow series of events and that so few people seem to have changed their minds after its ending might demonstrate how resolved the history of those hush payments already was.
Obviously endings to trials can go beyond guilt and acquittal; there are appeals that can lead to overturned convictions, and hung juries and mistrials that freeze out either possibility. But on some level even a hung jury provides an answer: Here is tangible evidence of a societal inability to resolve this issue.
There won’t even be an ending like that to Jan. 6, and if you think about it, there still isn’t a clean separation between the event and the politics of 2024.
The riot at the Capitol was happening and then it wasn’t. Mr. Trump eventually left, but didn’t leave. The House impeached, but the Senate acquitted. Prosecutors brought charges, but the process has spooled out into an in-between place.
Committees aired hearings and released transcripts; people wrote books and filed civil suits; individuals such as Rudy Giuliani have faced punishing financial penalties. And we have learned more and worse details about the inner workings of the Trump White House that melted down into disaster.
But Mr. Trump might still become president again, and he has never let go of the idea that animated Jan. 6 — that the election was stolen from him — and that idea has hardened in regular people.
It’s as if the country had a simultaneous, destabilizing experience, and it’s sitting there under the surface, and it must be doing something to the American psyche.
One of the things that makes Jan. 6 hard to neatly contain in the collective memory is the emotional, sloppy, accidental disaster nature of it. The event unfolded in public, and learning more about the lead-up to it tends to affirm the broad contours of what we knew when it took place. The select committee testimony and hearings, the indictments and civil suits and the many reported books are filled with examples of how ill conceived so much of what led to Jan. 6 was — and yet it eventually became a surreal scene where real people died, the police got beaten with American flags, aides and lawmakers ran and hid, and hundreds of people who believed Mr. Trump got wrapped up in the legal system.
The origin point of that day was Mr. Trump’s inability to accept that he lost, but everything in service of it is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not as if anybody needs a trial to form an opinion about Jan. 6. It’s not even that the criminal justice system absolutely had to be the way to handle this matter; it wasn’t, and charging or convicting Mr. Trump might have unintended consequences.
But a trial was possibly the last remaining avenue for a public re-examination of Jan. 6, certainly before the election, and possibly for years. Everyone has instead lived through an intense period of anticipating that consideration and its potential consequence, without getting it.
What all this lack of resolution can obscure is how fundamental this is to Mr. Trump as a political figure. Jan. 6 and his expansive idea of power being taken from him is something the voter has to embrace or reject or ignore or try to square with the other things the voter might care about. That the election was stolen from him is what Mr. Trump cares about, and that the transfer of power must take place is what the country was founded on, and that Mr. Trump’s endless words can manifest in cataclysmic real-life action is what people fear and the most hard-core supporters love about Mr. Trump.
That crisis is unforgettable and it is warping politics, just beneath the surface. It has to be part of why, on the edges, people who believe him about the election and take him at his word have developed an apocalyptic, distrustful view of even the most local institutions — because there truly wouldn’t be any other option but to believe the worst if something that immense had gone unchecked.
This is why a set of conservative politicians have developed elaborate cases for why the real issue was with security preparations or that there was some subversion — because if it was just Mr. Trump who’d allowed a mob to hit the Capitol because he was unhappy, then it would be unforgivable. And there are probably a good deal of people who just don’t want to think about it, no matter how much Mr. Trump is still thinking and talking about the 2020 election, no matter how much the fact of Jan. 6 is changing the voters and politicians around them.
For everyone else, there is a danger ahead that by default, a Trump victory (even if he wins for other reasons) would render what happened into something else beyond an unbelievable moral disaster — something forgivable or ignorable, something certainly that the political system, the electoral system and the justice system couldn’t quite figure out how to contain.
Nobody was supposed to act like this, and nobody still really knows what to do about it.
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