Jack Smith's Roadmap To Donald Trump's Corrupt Mind

In addition to placing Trump on trial, he's teaching Democrats how to think like Trump, and be prepared. Are they listening?

Special Counsel Jack Smith worked tirelessly for months to assemble a granular record of Donald Trump’s criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election. And yet through the malice of the Supreme Court and the indifference of the national political media, its impact on the course of the 2024 election will be indirect and likely slim.

The six Republican justices intervened in extraordinary fashion, first to pause Trump’s criminal proceedings for months, then to provide him the presumption of immunity for any crimes he committed during his presidency. Taken together, their actions ensured that Trump would not face trial for attempting a coup before the 2024 election—if ever.

The new immunity doctrine they created on his behalf is perverse as both an expedient exercise of political corruption and a standing incentive for unscrupulous presidents to violate the law.

Today, thanks to John Roberts et al, presidents can break laws that carry criminal penalties with complete impunity, so long as they cook up pretextual public-policy purposes for their violations. If they use their official powers to violate the law for personal gain, they may face legal jeopardy, but only if prosecutors can find evidence of their crimes outside the confines of the executive branch.

The only incidental upside is that the official-acts immunity doctrine obligated Smith to lay out his evidence in detail—to demonstrate that Trump’s conduct did not stem from his official duties, and that the government’s evidence does not intrude on intra-executive branch deliberation.

In a 165 page motion, which Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Tuesday, we learn through Mike Pence that Trump blew off multiple direct admonitions from his own vice president that they had lost the election legitimately. We also learn that Trump’s decision to resort to mob violence to pressure Pence one final time was premeditated. This evidence may be admissible only insofar as their discussions pertained to election certification—a process in which the president has no role, and the vice president has only a ministerial role in his capacity as president of the Senate.

By contrast, Smith can also substantiate that when Trump learned Pence’s life was in danger, his response was, “so what”—but he can’t introduce this evidence at trial, because the witness who provided it was a White House aide, deduced to be Trump’s personal assistant, Nick Luna.

That’s where mainstream media enters the picture. Smith’s latest bombshells could have reoriented the whole election around Trump’s efforts to overturn the last one. Instead…

Notice a subtle difference?

Nevertheless, the fruits of Smith’s labor thus far still carry political value. They serve as a virtual tour through Trump’s desperate, lawless mind—of how he goes about abusing power to claim more power. Anyone who hasn’t already trained themselves to think like Trump, to anticipate how he might break rules and laws in the future, can treat Smith’s brief as a textbook. A big outstanding question as we enter the final month of this election is whether Democrats realize this is a skill they should learn.

TIP OF THE CONSPIRACY

“In his capacity as candidate, the defendant used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process,” Smith writes.

There is no single writ that creates these stages. They stem from a body of law contained in the Constitution, the Electoral Count Act, and state codes, which work together to establish something fairly uniform across the country. First, voters cast ballots. From there, the result should be inexorable—lawmakers and elected officials must merely see to it that the will of the electorate is reflected in the results. They count the ballots; they certify state by state which candidate won the most votes; they name electors; Congress tallies the electoral votes; the candidate with a majority of electoral votes wins.

As Smith lays out, Trump went from node to node of this rote process with the goal of subverting it any way he could. In Michigan, his aides openly contemplated false pretexts to challenge ballots they knew had been cast validly for Democrats; they were eager to foment a riot outside a Detroit vote-counting facility. Trump then tried to derail certification of Biden victories in states he’d won four years prior. When that failed he worked with loyalists to gin up fraudulent slates of electors, hoping Pence would cite them, when presiding over the electoral count, to deem the results inconclusive. When Pence refused to play along, he sent his mob down to the Capitol, hoping to accomplish by force what fraud had failed to deliver.

If Trump weren’t a degenerate criminal, there’d be something to admire in his persistence—how he treats every procedural juncture as an opportunity to advance one goal or another, every obstacle a hurdle to leap. But knowing he views government rules and processes in this way is like having a glimpse at his playbook.

In 2016, when he was an underdog and something of a pariah, he still understood the value of subversion. He worked in tandem with the Russian government to subvert Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He worked with Rudy Giuliani to subvert law enforcement processes toward the same end. And it paid off.

In 2020, he subverted foreign policy in order to place Joe Biden at the center of a far-reaching, but completely fabricated, international corruption scandal. His efforts might have succeeded, but for the fact that he got caught. Soon thereafter he began planning to declare victory in 2020 whether or not he won. When he lost, he set his conspiracy to overturn the election in motion.

In 2024, he’s much more powerful than he was in 2016, with many more willing accomplices. We should expect him to combine all of these tactics, and to begin executing his plan earlier. Whatever deals he’s cooked up with interested parties are already consummated. And if anything, we should anticipate that, this time, his efforts to “target every stage of the electoral process” will begin before ballots are cast.

THINK: TANK

What will Democrats do to interrupt these schemes?

I wish I could say I had a better sense.

Trump loyalists on the Georgia state election board have imposed ludicrous new certification rules, with the aim of invalidating the election if Trump loses. Others have begun abusing the legal system to revive the same false doubts they sowed in November and December 2020 about Dominion voting systems.

Republicans in every swing state have tried to invalidate as many Democratic voter registrations as possible. Whether planned in advance or not, Trump would surely welcome violence at Democratic polling places, or any other means of preventing Democrats from casting their ballots securely, well ahead of the counting and certification processes.

However Democrats intend to respond, at least I know they’ve assigned many competent lawyers and strategists to the problem. They sued the Georgia board, and may well prevail in court. But what about external forms of subversion?

Earlier this week I wrote about how Trump caught President Biden flatfooted with lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. These lies were easy to anticipate, and Biden’s astonishment reflected his party’s lagging unwillingness to think like its opposition—to anticipate Trump’s chicanery, and pre-empt it.

On Thursday, in response to new reporting about Trump’s habit as president of abandoning and extorting disaster-stricken blue states, Biden finally dinged Trump. “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you,” he wrote. “It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”

True enough! But this vile facet of Trump’s presidency was evident in real time. It’s been public knowledge for the entirety of the Biden administration. There have been myriad opportunities for Democrats to remind the public that Trump made decisions about which disaster-stricken Americans to help based on their party registrations. And yet somehow Democrats allowed Trump to front-run them. How is it possible that Trump attacked Democrats with false accusations of conduct he pioneered before Democrats got around to using Trump’s real and unscrupulous record against him?

The answer is: Failure to think like Trump.

Almost a year into his teetering Middle East diplomacy, Biden has come to another belated but important realization. “Biden told confidants that he did not believe his Israeli counterpart wanted a cease-fire deal,” Politico reported this week, “arguing that Netanyahu was trying to perpetuate the conflict to save his political future and assist Trump in November’s election.”

Nine years into the Trump era, it should be easy anticipate that Trump and his corrupt allies will traduce normal protocols, diplomatic and otherwise. The likelihood that Trump and Netanyahu would cook up a dirty deal, explicit or implicit, to damage Democrats—even at the cost of lives—should have factored into Biden’s strategic thinking as far back as October 8, 2023. Now, at this late date, Netanyahu’s cynical maneuvering has set chaos in motion, and Biden has yoked himself to it.

Trump flashes open anger at Republicans anytime they do anything remotely constructive—sabotage is his only priority. MAGA is currently fuming at longshoremen for ending a port-workers strike before they did noticeable damage to the economy. Suspicions swirled since early July that Trump would try to cajole the longshoreman’s union into creating economic chaos ahead of the election. It’s quite likely Trump tried to discourage a deal behind the scenes.

Things fortunately did not pan out the way Trump wanted them to, but Democrats should take a lesson from that near miss: For the next month, they should look ahead to flash points like these—not just nodes in the electoral process—and run traps for fuckery. What can Biden do at this late date to stop Netanyahu from widening the regional war? From wrecking global energy markets? What might Trump’s billionaire buddies do with all their resources to hurt the country before the election? If their plans can’t be stopped, the public can at least be warned. If their plans can be stopped, they obviously should be. And if they have no plans? Well, just because you’re paranoid…

We can’t afford to wait until some future special counsel gets to the bottom of Trump’s 2024 election sabotage scheme; not least because, if Trump wins, one will never be appointed.