Why the Trump Indictments Fail
The Age of Trump is an Era of Egregious Double Standards and a Sense of Impending Doom
Something Personal. A Preface in Two Morose Thoughts.
1. The sustainability of the American Project seems at risk if we re-elect a president in 2024.
2. The Election of 2024 may be our best indicator of whether God remains favorable to our great undertaking. To be blunt, if God allows a binary choice between our two current leading candidates as the final alternatives on Election Day, I will take it as a sign that “providential agency” is now (at best) indifferent to “the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States.”
Having said that, I cannot celebrate the mounting legal campaign to sideline Donald J. Trump. What feels hollow about all these indictments?
Who remembers Deflategate?
Bear with me.
With an appearance in Super Bowl XLIX hanging in the the balance, the New England Patriots defeated the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 on January 18, 2015. In retrospect, the game is mostly remarkable for accusations that Tom Brady orchestrated the “underinflation” of game balls to give his team an advantage. After intercepting a Brady pass during the first half, the Colts presented the captured football to game officials and quietly asked for a measurement of air pressure. At half time, the refs deemed the Patriot game balls inadequately inflated. By rule, teams provide, maintain, and play with their own footballs on offense. The officiating crew returned all the footballs to maximum inflation, returned them to the Patriots, and the game resumed on time and without any official comment or sanction.
Almost immediately following the game, news of the incident broke as a national news frenzy and quickly earned a label that stuck: “Deflategate.” Like you, I began the week almost completely ignorant of the obscure rules and procedures governing pigskin maintenance. NFL regulation requires game balls inflated to a minimum of 12.5 pounds per square inch and not to exceed 13.5 psi. Brady, reportedly, preferred a slightly softer football, and, allegedly, presumably with the knowledge of his team, supervised an elaborate system to reduce the air pressure in between inspection by officials and game time.
At first blush, I was livid. Context. I was not especially tuned in to professional football during that period of my life. Looking back, my interest was ramping back up. But, as a casual fan, I held a mild Patriots hatred, skepticism of Brady, and I accepted the widespread narrative that Bill Belichick would do anything to win—including cheat. “Big Deal, Little Deal, or No Deal?” For me, BIG DEAL!!! These guys broke the rules. Make them pay. My solution in real time—admittedly a bit crazy: REPLAY THE GAME. Keep the Super Bowl on schedule and, as a penalty, assuming the Patriots would beat the Colts again, make the Patriots play an extra game and forfeit one week of preparation and recovery heading into the Super Bowl.
Overkill. Impractical. But, as I say, my blood was up.
Then, the more I thought about it, my temper started to cool. Maybe this was not a big deal. Not a rule I had ever heard of before. Did this violation actually affect the outcome of the game? With underinflated balls during the first half, the Patriots outpaced the Colts 17-7 with one Brady interception. With regulation balls restored, the Patriots hammered the Colts with even more authority, outscoring them in the second half 28-0 with two Brady touchdown passes and no interceptions. And, if this was a big deal, why did NFL allow teams to manage their own game balls in the first place?
As it turned out, the recently enacted protocol reflected the rising popularity of superstar quarterbacks who thrilled fans with precision passing and highflying offenses designed to generate more points and more excitement. The new process encouraged quarterbacks to spend time with these game balls prior to the contest and squeeze them and scuff them to their liking in order to facilitate their own higher comfort. The more we learned, there was not even a consensus that a pound of air pressure made much of a real difference, a subtle variation that few would ever notice via natural observation.
As the imbroglio played out on the cable news networks, my fellow Patriot haters, who were doing all the heavy lifting on the perpetuation of this scandal, started to repel me. The conversation waxed vituperative and calumnious. As the investigation dragged on over the course of seasons, the affair seemed way too personal, attenuated, and disproportionate to the alleged crime.
To be fair, Brady was not always helpful. Advocates on his behalf offered up clever defenses that complicated the facts, impeached much of the evidence, and introduced mitigating factors such as weather and undependable instrumentation. But, in the end, it seemed clear the Patriots knowingly broke the rule. Brady lied when the truth would have served him better and, while not an actual crime in this case, probably destroyed evidence.
Nevertheless, by the time it was all over, and even in the midst of the controversy, astonishingly, the debate transformed me into a Brady, Belichick, and Patriots fans. By the second half of the Super Bowl, just two weeks after the “deflategate” game, I found myself cheering hard for the Patriots down the stretch as they battled the Seattle Seahawks in a titanic struggle that came down to the very last play.
See here for my previous and fuller explanation of why I came to love Brady.
Why did I stop caring about the violation?
In simplest terms, I came to believe no damage was done. Virtually no impact. Who was harmed? What injustice needed rectification? We were NOT in need of remedy because there was no injury. Upon further inspection, the entire uproar proved mostly a vehicle to vent irrational hatred for the Patriots, Belichick, and Brady.
How could this possibly shed light on Donald Trump and his legal troubles?
NFL rules are not federal laws. Donald Trump is no Tom Brady.
Brady, arguably, the most successful quarterback to play the most important position in the game, succeeded by taking his above-average natural ability and elevating himself through hard work, dedication, and an unparalleled commitment to team. Donald Trump, with all his flashes of greatness, keen instincts, and his ability to energize and entertain, offers up the opposite of Brady. Trump refuses to do the intellectual heavy lifting, takes too many shortcuts, rarely seems capable of marshalling his team to win the big game, and, most alarming, does not have an innate love and feel for American republicanism.
An Aside. Trump is not a would-be authoritarian exactly. No Republican Party president, facing the checks and balances inherent in the controlling institutions of American political culture, could ever overcome the partisan bias and suspicion that casts all Republican officeholders as threats to Democracy. In this sense, only a national Democratic politician possesses the capacity for running a truly authoritarian regime.
Having said that, as a demagogic, self-centered hammer of the underserved class, Trump inflames an already polarized nation. Even worse, based on his track record, rather than making America great again, Trump 2024 represents one more lost opportunity to right the ship in a moment in which our lost opportunities are starting to mount in a foreboding way.
What explains the tens of millions of Americans who love Donald Trump?
The flamboyant and hilarious, bigger than life figure, who, for all his purported billions, “plays so well in Peoria” because his tormentors always overplay their hand, exaggerating and fulminating, showing their teeth and their unhinged hypocrisy. In a mostly well-earned historic crisis of confidence regarding our betters in the academy, science, journalism, and the expert class, tens of millions of Americans see a posse of discredited elites intent on chasing down Donald Trump and destroying him to save democracy.
What about the Brady analogy?
TWO THINGS:
The Trump indictments mostly resonate with people who already hate him and are primed to believe the worst. Only a dedicated Trump hater could feel good about the hijinks on display in courtrooms in New York, DC, and Atlanta. The tumultuous emotional legal dramas seem unprecedented and disproportionate to fair-minded observers.
His passionate political opponents offend our American sense of fair play when they attempt to “take the ball” out of Trump’s hands. More to the point, sidelining Trump takes away our agency as well. By distorting the rules and norms to disqualify him, they take away our choice. In a system of elective self government, our power is our vote. In an effort to save democracy, for our own good, our Never Trump friends seem intent on foreclosing any possibility that the American people might do something ridiculously self-destructive and re-elect this dangerous person.
In the case of Brady, in the midst of his two-decade juggernaut, as his detractors came to grudgingly understand, just comeuppance for the Golden Boy could only transpire on the field. Eli and the G-Men did it (twice). Improbably Nick Foles and “fly Eagles fly” pulled off the impossible once. And, of course, Father Time remains undefeated. In the interim, Brady won three more Super Bowls. And the haters had to choke it down. But a remedy short of besting Brady in the arena would have proved not only unsatisfying—but ultimately ruinous to the sport.
Donald Trump is not Tom Brady. He is by no means the G. O. A. T. He barely won one Super Bowl (metaphorically)—and it was arguably a fluke. But, in order to beat this unique and considerable political talent in a way that does not damage the integrity of the system, his opponents need to take him on and take him down on the field of play and by the rules of the game.