The stories we will tell

By Ande Jacobson

It started on 30 March 2023 when a former president was indicted on criminal charges for the first time. Now in early August 2023, we’ve seen this happen four times so far this year. Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the U.S. is now defendant Trump. He tried to conspire to end democracy as we know it and take away our crucial rights as citizens to vote and have our votes counted, defraud the country, steal critical classified documents when he finally, grudgingly left office, and attempt to defraud his business to pay off an accuser. He’s also been shown to be guilty of sexual abuse in a civil trial. What a guy. To hear him tell it, he’s the victim of persecution by his enemies. Of course he defines his enemies as anybody who disagrees with him, stands up to him, or challenges him in any way under any circumstance, so he clearly has a lot of enemies.

The truth is that for somebody who has gotten away with decades of criminal behavior, being held to account for his actions as a private citizen feels like persecution, but in reality he’s just finding out what the rule of law actually means. When you violate the law, there are consequences. The U.S. has never had a former president behave this way before, and it’s quite a spectacle that just keeps getting weirder because this particular defendant refuses to behave like a normal defendant despite the fact that he is not special. He is a private citizen subject to the laws of the land. Technically even a sitting president is subject to those laws, but over time, the government has erected some protections that delay some of those restrictions until a sitting president is no longer in office. The DOJ’s policy to not indict a sitting president is not a law, only a departmental policy that is normally followed in part to protect against frivolous partisan interference while a president is in office. The process to remove a sitting president who is either unable or refuses to do the job of president is in the domain of the U.S. Congress and also of the president’s cabinet. If a president is removed, they become a private citizen and are then subject to the judicial process if warranted.

A decade or so ago, if someone had written a novel or a script to portray a U.S. president or even a former U.S. president as Trump has and continues to behave, it likely wouldn’t have been believable. We had the illusion that the checks and balances in the system from our voting process to oversight within the government itself would have prevented something like this from happening. While we could acknowledge our shortcomings as a nation, we hung onto the trope that what has happened in countries that have lost their democracy to a strongman couldn’t happen here. That illusion has been carefully shattered over the last decade though it had been pursued for far longer than that.

Even the crimes committed by former President Nixon pale in comparison. Nixon’s crimes were substantial, creating a crisis for our democracy at the time. Although he resigned to avoid impeachment, he was never held legally accountable because his successor, President Ford, pardoned him. Nixon only confessed once, during an interview with David Frost, but even at that he wouldn’t admit that what he had done was illegal or even wrong. Since then there have been numerous books, documentaries, and dramas written about Watergate, but as gripping as many of those were, the crimes Trump is alleged to have committed are far worse. The indictments for Trump’s crimes are exciting reading, and once the trials are eventually complete, it wouldn’t take much to turn them into terrifying political thrillers across various media.

In 2019, I reviewed a regional production of Frost/Nixon which was a riveting dramatization of the cat and mouse game the two played when Nixon agreed to allow David Frost to interview him a few years after his resignation. Historically, those were some of the most watched interviews of all time, and the play didn’t disappoint. While true to the actual interviews up to and including some text from them, the play added some behind the scenes material, some of which didn’t actually happen but fit well to fill in some of the gaps in public knowledge.

There have already been documentaries galore about Trump’s various crimes. Frontline has brought many of them forward over the last several years. We as a nation also bore witness to two impeachments which ended in failures to convict, not because the charges and evidence weren’t compelling, but because of partisan brinksmanship. His own party admitted that he did what he was accused of doing, but they didn’t care. This is a big difference between the cases against Trump and former President Nixon. In Nixon’s time, congress would have impeached and convicted him on a strong bipartisan basis had he not resigned. Historians have since revised their opinion on the pardon saying that had Ford not pardoned Nixon, and Nixon been forced to stand trial and account for his crimes, the U.S. may be in a very different place today.

We also watched in rapt attention as the bipartisan House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol ran its public hearings. Through those hearings, they told the story of what happened on January 6, 2021 and the weeks leading up to it, and the part that defendant Trump played in it. Like with the indictment, their witnesses were all Republicans. They were or had been Trump supporters, and they still reported truthfully on the criminal activities of the then sitting president.

Now, with federal and state criminal indictments in place, the next few years will likely be filled with court cases in New York, Washington D.C., Georgia, Florida, and possibly other states as well. Scheduling will be somewhat dicey, and the defendant’s team will do all it can to try to muddy the waters and delay, not just so the defendant can run again for the office he so grossly abused the first time, but to push as hard as they can to prevent those trials from coming to conclusion despite there not really being any viable defense for what he has done. The evidence is well documented, and while we can never know for sure how a jury will vote, with so many trials in the offing, it’s almost certain that some (if not all) will end in convictions. And after the trials, there will be numerous appeals, but eventually those too will run out, and it’s likely that at least some of them will stand in conviction.

If we can get far enough removed from these events in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be interested in reading some of the novels and watching some of the adventure series and movies that will result from this period. I wonder how much will have to be altered to make them flow and be believable. The old adage that truth is stranger than fiction seems apropos here, and I have some personal experience with that one.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a fiction writing class. As part of the class we were each to write two stories, one of which was to be evaluated by the class as a whole. We went through three of our classmates’ stories each session giving each other constructive feedback. In developing skill in fiction writing, it’s instructive to not only write our own stories, but to read other stories critically, looking for the elements of good storytelling.

For my first story, I veered toward the advice to write what I knew and wrote a fictionalized version of something that actually happened. To make it fictional, I changed the place, the characters, and I added a bit of whimsy. As part of the story, I kept an unusual occurrence from work intact. The shocking thing to me was that when my classmates gave me their critique, they accepted all the fictional parts of the story and actually found them quite entertaining and believable. They just didn’t believe the things that really happened.

Meanwhile, we are where we are right now. Our current reality is something that many couldn’t imagine happening in the U.S. even as recently as a decade ago. The country is watching this unfold, and the world is watching us. And at some as-yet-to-be-determined time in the future, there will be compelling stories resulting from all of this.

References:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-30-2023
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/indicted
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/a-superseding-indictment
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-1-2023
https://terikanefield.com/
https://terikanefield.com/trump-january-6-indictment-over-the-cliff-notes/
https://terikanefield.com/criminal-law-101-trumps-j6-indictment/
https://agoodreedreview.com/2019/01/21/tw-frost-nixon/