How the Trump Indictments Backfired

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

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🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

A year ago, Donald Trump was facing four separate criminal indictments, and had become the first President to be charged with and convicted of a felony. Now that Trump is President-elect, and with the Supreme Court having granted sitting Presidents broad immunity, the Justice Department’s efforts to hold Trump accountable appear to be over. Even so, Trump’s legal saga has radically changed American law and politics, the New Yorker staff writer Jeannie Suk Gersen argues. “These prosecutions forced the Supreme Court to at least answer the question [of Presidential immunity],” Gersen says. “It will affect the kind of people who run for President, and it will affect how they think of their jobs.”

This week’s reading:

“Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” by Jane Mayer
“Stopping The Press,” by David Remnick
“The Fundamental Problem with R.F.K., Jr.,’s Nomination to H.H.S.,” by Dhruv Khullar
“Did the Opioid Epidemic Fuel Donald Trump’s Return to the White House?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy,” by Isaac Chotiner.
“A Coup, Almost, in South Korea,” by E. Tammy Kim.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Former President Donald Trump's New York hush money trial in a high-stakes case against Donald Trump over election interference.
0:08.7	The classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.
0:12.0	Donald Trump's criminal trials were one of the biggest stories of the campaign season.
0:17.0	On this podcast, we covered the various indictments against Trump, and we covered his hush money trial in Manhattan, which ended with Trump becoming the first ever former U.S. president to be convicted of crimes. Now, he's set to become the first convicted felon to enter the Oval Office. You might think that these prosecutions didn't matter. Only one of them, the hush money
0:39.0	case, ended up going to trial, and the sentencing has been put on hold now that Trump has won the
0:44.3	election. The other cases, too, seem mostly dead, with special counsel Jack Smith asking federal
0:50.8	courts to dismiss two of the remaining cases.
0:56.6	But perhaps they did matter.
1:01.2	They have had massive long-term effects on the office of the presidency and on the nation's legal system.
1:03.8	Not to mention that they probably paved the way for Trump to be re-elected.
1:07.8	And now, he is filling the Justice Department
1:10.1	with the lawyers who argued on his
1:11.9	behalf. Today, Harvard Law Professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suit Gerson joins the show
1:17.9	to discuss the ultimate consequences of the prosecutions against Donald Trump.
1:22.9	You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.
1:31.2	Hey, Jeannie. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. To start off, could you just give us a
1:38.4	kind of like a reminder of the various legal cases that Donald Trump has faced over the last few years, it can be kind of
1:45.2	hard to keep track of them.
1:46.9	Well, there are many, many of them. But if we just focus on the criminal ones, we have four of them.
1:53.7	Essentially, there are two federal ones and two state ones. The federal ones were brought by
2:00.8	Jack Smith, the special counsel, who was appointed
2:03.8	by Merrick Garland, to investigate really two areas. One is the efforts to interfere with the
	...

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