The spirit of democracy is a force that challenges the very idea of a government of laws, not of men and undermines our republican form of government. Recent warnings of becoming a banana republic, where the winning party tries to imprison figures of the opposition, are a result of this force. The indictment of Donald Trump last week prompted radio host Mark Levin to respond with a full-throated roar, claiming that there is no law and that it is a war on Trump and the Republican Party. The spirit of democracy is a bone-deep belief that haunts us and drives a great deal of strange behavior, including crazy talk of lawlessness and Vivek Ramaswamy’s sweaty promise to pardon Trump.
In America, we fear the prosecution of former heads of state, unlike other republics where nobody thinks that the prosecution of former prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy is a political hit job aimed at delegitimizing all members of his party. The spirit of democracy is partly why James Comey let Hillary Clinton off so easy and why 80 percent of Republicans in one recent poll said that President Trump should still be able to get back into the Oval Office, even if he’s convicted in the documents case.
Once a person credibly submits themselves to the judgment of the American people for the highest office in the land, the American people, consciously or not, deem themselves the only qualified body in the land to judge that person henceforward. Legal attacks on the president are treated as if they were legal attacks upon the legitimacy of his supporters. This helps explain why Gerald Ford was so anxious to pardon Richard Nixon and why Democratic partisans felt in some way that Bill Clinton’s soaring post-impeachment approval ratings were the real final word on whether he perjured himself, obstructed justice, or did anything all that wrong at all.
Merrick Garland’s office initially tried to give Trump the same kind of treatment that Hillary Clinton got. But Trump’s great tragedy is that he has understood America’s real constitution better than anyone else. He intuited that “if you’re a celebrity, they let you get away with it.” The flagrancy with which Trump violated the Espionage Act and abused the Presidential Records Act was far more provocative, and it finally brought our written laws and unwritten customs for presidents into open conflict.
The rally effect that Trump experiences when he is prosecuted is the response of voters protecting their own prerogative as the great sovereign from the lesser powers that pretend to delimit their choices. It’s not rational or by the book, but it’s just the way we are. Ultimately, legal attacks on the president are treated as if they were legal attacks upon the legitimacy of his supporters, and this dark, inscrutable, and mysterious force is at the heart of our unwritten constitution.
