The real threat to democracy amid Trump 'hush money' trial drama

Attacks on the courts are another attempt to overwhelm our democratic institutions with violence

Don’t let tawdry elements of the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president distract from the most chilling, autocratic aspect of these legal proceedings: How Trump deliberately puts people who uphold the rule of law in danger. 

Instead of focusing on presenting a sober, respectful defense, Trump is using this trial, as well the others he faces, as an opportunity to attack the judiciary, using his tremendous profile to weaken it as an institution of accountability.

Ahead of the New York trial that begins Monday, Trump relentlessly threatened judges, their family members and prosecutors involved in the case, and has similarly done so to those involved in the criminal charges filed against him in Washington D.C., Georgia, and Florida. Ty Cobb, one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, told Politico that Trump targets the family members of judges as a “strategic” act of intimidation, “designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.” 

Think about that. A “traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.”  Trump is openly working to poison the courtroom with fear and flood the public with lies about what’s happening inside it. 

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Of course, we don’t only see this impulse in Trump’s trials. We saw it on January 6, 2021, when he told lies about the election and egged on a mob to attack the Capitol to stop Congress from performing its duty to count electoral votes and announce Joe Biden as president. And, we see it on the campaign trail, as Trump lies about the jailed rioters, describing them as “patriots” and hostages,” and promises to pardon them. He’s made that pardon promise a central feature of his 2024 bid to return to the White House, signaling his approval for the violent assault on the Capitol and showing his willingness to license more January 6-style assaults.

These shameful actions by Trump share a common thread. On trial and on the campaign trail, Trump is inviting more violence as a method of destabilizing our democratic institutions. 

He stoked violence in Washington on January 6th, he’s stoking violence toward courts across America and he’s promising to license more violence with the pardon power if he’s re-elected.

Stoking violence as a means to overwhelm democratic institutions is a tried-and-tested, known authoritarian ploy and Trump is presenting us with a trifecta of past, present and future examples of how he’d like autocracy to unfold in America.

While incompatible with our system of government, it can be effective. It’s no secret that some number of Republican representatives and senators were too worried about their and their families’ personal safety to vote to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6th insurrection. Now that Trump faces accountability in the courts, he has accordingly turned his ire to the judiciary. 

His words have already had a terrible effect. A recent Reuters investigation found that judges involved in Trump-related cases have “faced an unprecedented wave of threats.” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said: “I could not believe how many death threats I got,” after he sentenced a woman who pleaded guilty to participating in the January 6th riot. 

To protect the criminal proceedings, three out of four judges in charge of the criminal cases against Trump have issued gag orders to bind him from lashing out. But Trump has continued to target them. Shortly after Judge Juan Merchan expanded an existing gag order to stop Trump from attacking his daughter, Trump posted on Truth Social that Merchan is “a HIGHLY CONFLICTED & CORRUPT JUDGE, whose hatred for me has no bounds.”

Judge Aileen Cannon, who is in charge of the case regarding Trump’s mishandling of classified documents in Florida and was nominated by Trump in 2020, has not issued a gag order but did block Trump from publicly releasing the names of potential witnesses after prosecutors argued there is a “well-documented pattern in which judges, agents, prosecutors and witnesses involved in cases involving Trump have been subject to threats, harassment and intimidation.”

The judges are issuing these warnings because they know how fear and threats of violence corrupt the legal process and make it difficult to fairly apply the law, which is exactly what Trump seeks to prevent. He doesn’t want any accountability, at all.  

We know this because while Trump’s criminal cases proceed, the former president is appealing to the Supreme Court to grant him absolute immunity for any criminal acts he engaged in as president. He is expected to lose that argument, as state and federal courts have already repeatedly rejected similar claims from Trump for the plain reason that nobody in our country is above the law. But if he can escape any accountability under the law by attacking the courts, getting re-elected and using the pardon power to license more political violence to advance his aims, how would that be any different?