When Presidents Go to Trial

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Tuesday, April 4, former President Donald Trump was arrested and appeared in court for his arraignment in New York. The charges stem from hush money paid to Stormy Daniels in 2016, allegedly to cover up an extramarital affair. The entire case leads to larger questions about how democracies, where everyone is supposed to be equal under the law, do or don’t hold their leaders to account. Guest host Ilya Marritz spoke with Rick Perlstein, a journalist, historian, and author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, about perhaps the most famous case of a former US president alluding punishment. On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned from office one month earlier. The pardon rocked a nation still in the throes of the Watergate scandal, and perhaps permanently altered the trust of the public in the executive branch. But a quieter, separate movement had begun within the Republican Party. Perlstein explains how the groundwork for our struggle to prosecute, even the most guilty seeming presidents, can be traced back to that fateful fall day in 1974.

This is a segment from our September 9, 2022 show, Lock Him Up?.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Ilya Maritz. This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. By now you've heard
0:06.6	about the first indictment of a former US president in the history of our country.
0:11.1	The charges against former President Donald Trump were revealed in his
0:14.7	arraignment on Tuesday, April 4th, and that's the day I'm recording this.
0:19.5	I'm right outside the court house, in fact, to cover the event for NPR.
0:24.4	There's a lot of talk about how this indictment and how a trial could affect Trump's presidential
0:29.4	run in 2024. Is it good for Democrats? Is it good for Trump? On that last point,
0:34.9	it's been reported that Trump has already raised $7 million just in the time since the
0:40.0	indictment was announced. So yeah, to me, the entire case leads to larger
0:46.2	questions about how democracies where everyone is supposed to be equal under the law, do
0:52.0	or don't hold their leaders to account. Which is why we're re-airing an interview I did,
0:56.6	about six months ago, with Rick Pearlstein. He's a journalist in historian who has
1:01.0	chronicled the post-1960s American conservative movement. We spoke about perhaps the most
1:06.4	famous case of a former US president eluding punishment. On September 8th, 1974,
1:12.5	President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned from office
1:17.3	one month earlier. Pearlstein says Ford's decision to pardon Nixon still reverberates today.
1:24.4	After he resigned for Watergate, as many of his top deputies were facing trial for which they
1:31.6	be convicted, including the Attorney General John Mitchell. The statement that the kind of
1:36.7	establishment put out there was Nixon's resignation shows the system works. We had brought a
1:42.2	president to judgment and it was clanking along towards what was likely to be an indictment.
1:48.6	But then Gerald Ford, a month into his presidency, went on TV on a Sunday morning. He probably thought
1:55.4	the American people were in the mood for mercy after coming back from church. And he granted Nixon a
	...

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