The Trump indictment is both too much and not enough
Plus: A new memoir on evangelicals and politics, solid shampoo, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The Trump indictment is both too much and not enough
There was a big market for presidential indictment takes last week, but I didn’t write one, in part because I am very tired of discussing former President Donald Trump. There was a stretch of time in which his willingness to do and say things no one else in national politics would do and say (in public, anyway) raised legitimately novel and interesting questions for those of us in the chattering class to consider. That time is past, however, and I’d be obliged if he would depart from public life.
Yet in the meantime, now that the initial flurry of commentary and legal analysis is over, here are a few thoughts on the New York indictment.
It’s too much. The allegations are incredibly convoluted, and the morally unambiguous part—that it’s wrong to cheat on your wife with a porn star and then pay the porn star to hide your infidelity—is not the alleged crime.
Moreover, it’s far from clear that Trump will be convicted here, and if he is, he’ll be guilty of falsifying business records which resulted in payment of more taxes than were actually owed. Such falsification would usually be handled as a misdemeanor were it prosecuted at all, which seems unlikely given the overpayment. It’s only a felony here because it’s allegedly connected to a federal campaign finance violation, which is similarly equivocal at the ethical register in which we normally assess criminal law and charges.
All that to say: Indictment seems like too much here. It’s a lot of risk for little likely reward, and I’m not sure the net effect will be to bolster the rule of law, which can be undermined by over-prosecution as much as under-prosecution.
But also, it’s not enough. I’m all for indicting presidents and other high-ranking officials. I don’t even want to wait until they’re out of office! But I want to indict them for real stuff, like war crimes and constitutional violations and trying to get an election official to fabricate thousands of votes. Not for hiking a tax bill in the process of hiding immoral conduct by a man whose fame has long been tied to his public flaunting of immoral conduct.
The common analogy here is Al Capone and the tax evasion conviction, but Trump and Capone occupy very different places in American society. There are real limits to comparing an ex-president, however unpopular, to a personally violent mob boss. It isn’t realistic to expect the same reaction to their prosecution for petty crimes. Even if these allegations are somehow proved to universal satisfaction, a large portion of the public will forever remember the whole affair as a matter of politics, not law.
Happily, these aren’t novel observations. Yes, cable news was pretty ridiculous in its coverage of Trump’s arraignment trip to New York. Yes, there’s plenty of disagreement on the merits of this prosecution.
But my sense is the median of public opinion is in a relatively reasonable spot on this, neither rejecting wholesale the idea of holding ex-presidents to legal account nor simplistically enthusing over a messy and debatable case. And given how unreasonable the discourse around Trump has often been, that’s … not bad?
2. What I'm reading this week
Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, by Jon Ward (forthcoming April 18, 2023).
I’m usually not much for memoir as a genre. But I’ve appreciated
's work at Christianity Today and Yahoo News (including, of course, our conversation about Untrustworthy on his podcast), so I was intrigued when I learned he had a memoir coming—and from my own imprint, Brazos Press—and happy he was willing to send me an advance copy.Testimony is a quick read (I finished it in two or three evenings) and a very personal account. Much of its broader interest comes from the fact that Ward grew up among evangelical figures, like C.J. Mahaney and Joshua Harris, who have since become even more widely known, particularly in connection to the scandals around Mark Driscoll. I also grew up in evangelical communities, but we weren’t similarly near any subcultural power center, so it was fascinating to see what Ward’s childhood and mine had in common and where they diverged.
Perhaps what I most appreciated about Testimony is that, though it is a critique—and sometimes an unsparing one, as the subtitle indicates—Ward doesn’t go the route many outside observers of evangelical politics have taken in the last eight years, which is to claim there were never any real principles in evangelicalism, never any value, just hypocrisy and a thinly disguised lust for power over more vulnerable people.
Ward’s contention is different, as he explains in this CT interview (c. the 22-minute mark). “I really don’t think that most people in the church I grew up in were frauds, and I don’t think most people in evangelicalism are frauds,” he says. “There are plenty of those people around, but … it was an intensity of belief and certainty that blinded people to the need for accountability, the need for institutionalism, and the need for the wisdom of history and tradition.”
3. A recommendation
HiBAR shampoo, a solid shampoo bar that is not just soap. We’ve moved to solid soaps for almost everything in our household—they’re more convenient and less wasteful—and HiBAR was the start of that shift. I get it on a subscription basis as there’s a small discount, but you can also try a single bar from Whole Foods and, I think, many Targets.
4. Recent work
Nothing published since last week, actually, for a combination of reasons, including being sick and the aforementioned being sick of writing about Trump. So, uh, buy my book?
5. Miscellaneous
Twitter is avidly discussing whether, as one viral-ish tweet suggests, it is bad—exploitative, even!—to let 14- and 15-year-olds have jobs.
This is buzzy partly because of a new Arkansas law which eliminated work permits for kids that age, as well as a court case in Nebraska involving a 14-year-old whose parents used falsified documents to claim she was 22 so she could take overnight shifts cleaning equipment in a meatpacking plant.
But the tweet wasn’t about anything so Jungle-y. It’s a photo of a McDonald’s offering to pay teenagers $15 an hour to take orders and flip burgers. That’s it. That’s the “exploitation.”
What I’m wondering is: Is that a common perspective now? When I was in high school, it was not unusual to get a job as a teenager. It was not a political statement to hire teenagers without bothering to ask for a work permit or even, with younger kids who couldn’t legally work yet, to pay cash under the table. Across the political spectrum—at least, where I lived—no one thought this was a big deal.
So, while there are other reasons teenagers are less likely to have jobs compared to a decade or two ago, I’m curious about these cultural norms. Have they really shifted so much and so fast? Or is the tweet (which has lots of agreeing replies) getting attention because it expresses what is still widely considered an odd view?
