The Post-Civil War Precedent for the Trump Trials

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

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

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Donald Trump may be the first former President to be indicted for a crime, but he is not the first to lead an insurrection and then attempt to dodge the consequences. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. government set out to try Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, for treason. Those efforts failed. In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine and a historian at Harvard, writes an essay about the lasting consequences of that failure. There are many parallels between our current moment and the post-Civil War reunification era: the thorniness of prosecuting politicians, the fear of inciting more political violence, and questions about how best to move a bitterly divided country forward. Lepore joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the historical lessons of Jefferson Davis and the legal efforts to kick Trump off the ballot using the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Transcript

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0:47.5	So you recently wrote a piece in the magazine about Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy,
0:52.6	who was going to be tried for treason after the Civil War and then wasn't.
0:57.2	In an alternate universe in which Davis had been convicted,
1:00.7	what might be different about America today?
1:04.4	I think we would have a sense that former presidents can be tried.
1:08.3	It can be subject to criminal prosecution.
1:14.6	And that would put the Trump trials in a new light.
1:33.6	That's Jillipur, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a historian at Harvard. Jill has written a number of pieces about the lessons that history can teach us, even about events that seem totally unprecedented, whether it be the pandemic or January 6th. Her latest essay for the magazine is about the last time the U.S. government tried to prosecute an insurrectionist ex-president.
1:39.3	You're listening to the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.
1:54.3	I mean, in your piece, you write about this, like, cloak of impunity that is draped over the American presidency, and do you think that that can sort of be traced back to this? Or, I mean, I
2:00.6	guess, where does that, where does that cloak come from?
2:03.8	Well, it's not a constitutional cloak. As the judge in the DC case ruled just this last week on Friday of last week,
	...

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