An Actual Experiment in Democracy Protection

An Introduction to the Trump Trial Diary

As I begin this first entry in what I imagine as a diary of the Trump trials, the former president faces four separate criminal cases even as he seeks his party’s nomination for the office he once held.

If we believe the current trial schedule, his first criminal trial will begin just under four months from now. If we believe the polls, Trump will by then have all-but cinched the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

The former president barely even pretends any more not to aspire to a dictatorship. He accuses his successor in the presidency—who is also his opponent as he tries to retake it—of weaponizing the nation’s criminal justice apparatus against him, even as he promises overtly to weaponize it himself against his foes when power resides in his hands once again.

We are eleven months from an electoral showdown between two old men—the one of them tired, uncharismatic, verbally challenged, and thoroughly decent, and the other of them manic, savage, and unfalteringly opposed to decency and all its works.

Whether we are sleepwalking into authoritarianism, slouching towards it with our eyes open, skipping toward it gleefully, or fighting it every step of the way, as my colleague Robert Kagan put it recently, “This is the trajectory we are on now.”

And so we talk about protecting democracy. We hold worthy conferences. We build organizations—some of which register voters and improve elections, some of which litigate, some of which lobby legislatures, some of which rally citizens. There is philanthropy. There are policy proposals, some of them foundational, some of them would-be pin-pricks.

There is a great deal of earnestness in the whole endeavor, in this idea that we can somehow protect the people’s authority to govern themselves from the polity’s own stupidity and propensity to choose the worst of us as our leaders.

If I sound skeptical, I’m actually not. What are we supposed to do, after all: not try to protect democracy?

Yet if we are candid about this undertaking, we must admit that none of us really knows how to protect a democracy. We know some stuff, of course. There are the people who do comparative studies of democracies under stress and tell us when those democracies do and do not survive—and maybe there’s a path there. And there are the studies of the “authoritarian playbook,” which come with an accompanying set of implied countermeasures, and maybe there’s a path there. And then there are the devotees of ranked-choice-voting or more proportional legislative representation, or other reforms—some more promising than others. And there are the legions of people arguing for the policies they always favored, only now reframed in the name of protecting democracy.

And yet, at least after a couple of drinks, we should all acknowledge that we have no basis for confidence that any of these approaches, individually or collectively, will actually protect democratic government in a two-party system in which one of our major parties no subscribes to the idea of democratic government. After all, in a two-party system, both parties eventually win. What happens then?

And this is the part where we gulp, wring our hands, and admit that we really have no idea how to do this protecting-a-democracy thing.

Yet amidst the hand-wringing, a natural experiment is taking place before our eyes in the protection of a democracy: the criminal prosecution of a former president for attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, seize power illegally instead of acknowledging a clear electoral loss, and deploy an insurrectionary mob against a coordinate branch of government to prevent his opponent’s victory from being formalized.

This prosecution, along with its sister cases—which all involve alleged abuses of presidential power or efforts corruptly to gain political advantage—present one of the chief obstacles to the defendant’s reclamation of power.