Editorial: Trump and justice — What Cuomo gets wrong about the Trump trials
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is making headlines again and delighting MAGA world by having said Friday on Bill Maher’s HBO show that the Manhattan hush money criminal case against Donald Trump shouldn’t have been brought, and wouldn’t have “if his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president.”
Cuomo’s sentiments are the same regarding the civil case against Trump for making phony valuations with his holdings to deceive lenders and insurers.
In doing so, Cuomo echoed Trump’s own arguments that this is practically a banana republic-style attack against a political opponent, orchestrated by District Attorney Alvin Bragg and state Attorney General Tish James, both elected Democrats.
We agree that such high profile cases must be handled carefully, but we cannot agree with Cuomo’s assessment. In fact, we think he’s got this situation exactly opposite.
There are two semi-related but separate ideas here, and the distinction between them is significant. On the one hand, there’s the idea that Trump was being sued and prosecuted specifically because he is Donald J. Trump, and the officials bringing the case (Bragg and James) disagree with him politically and wish to punish him and hinder his presidential campaign. This would be unacceptable and stand in direct contravention to our system of law and government.
It didn’t help that candidate James in 2018 made clear her opposition: “I’m running for attorney general because I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president.”
We can’t pretend that there’s ever really been an era when law enforcement was totally disconnected from political preferences and pressures. But the history of our country has been one of people striving and often succeeding through hard-won victories to hew the reality closer to our founding ideals of equality under the law. Risking those principles for short-term political gain is not a gamble ever worth taking, not for those who care about American democracy.
Yet there is the other possibility, that Trump was sued and prosecuted not because of his candidacy, but because there was overwhelming evidence that he committed the offenses of which he was found guilty. He had attracted massive amounts of attention to himself not just via his political career but his affinity for impunity and he needed to be held accountable for the system to still mean anything.
In this scenario, the same would happen if he was not Donald J. Trump, and in fact if he were the Democratic candidate for president.
It might seem somewhat odd to say that in one case, prosecution threatens our system whereas in the other, a failure to prosecute does, when they seem rather similar on the surface. Yet while most people intuitively understand that the former case represents the loss of integrity in a legal and political system, the latter does the same by putting people above the law.
If Trump cannot be prosecuted just because he is a candidate for president, despite the clear evidence that he did the acts of which he was accused, plus many more that are in procedural limbo, then effectively we’re saying that some of the most powerful people among us cannot be held to the same legal standards and processes as everyone else. That is just as much a marker of a state where the rule of law has failed.
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