Trump Criminally Indicted: GOP Wings toward Whigdom

The once formidable Whig Party swiftly disintegrated in 1854, giving rise to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, of which only a tiny and declining remnant still remains. 

Many prominent Whigs of the 19^th century understood the historical moment in which they found themselves. That historical moment was the odious continuation of slavery in America. Still, they were not up to the task of altering the Party's indifference and, therefore, the Party's rapid slide toward oblivion. Today's Republican Party, now in its 169^th year, is faced with an equally decisive moment and appears to be as paralyzed by the lack of strong and principled leadership as were the Whigs of the 19^th century when the better angels of their nature were too few and too silent.

Now, to be sure, there are vast differences between the circumstances and issues we face today and those of the mid-nineteenth century. Slavery was the overriding issue then. Half the country's economy depended mainly on the bondage of human beings, and that very reality repulsed the other half of the country.

This week, a new historical reality is facing the nation, and the Republican Party in particular. The United States Department of Justice has unveiled an exceedingly serious 37-count criminal indictment against former Republican President Donald Trump. This criminal indictment will rivet the nation's attention and turbocharge American political tension as have few other moments in the nation's history.

Already the Republican Party has charged the government with weaponizing the Justice Department against the former President. To many Americans, it is the Republican caucus in Congress that has been weaponized against law and order and the Constitution of the United States, which they have sworn an oath to defend and support.

The Republican Party has every right to demand that the nation consider former President Trump innocent until proven otherwise. Every citizen should recognize where the burden of proof resides, that is, with the government.

According to press reports, former President Trump has terminated his current legal team and brought in new legal counsel to defend him. We may never know whether the former President fired his attorneys or whether his attorneys resigned because of their inability to influence, let alone manage, Trump's vitriolic outbursts. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has decided to declare the former President a victim of a government vendetta, even before the government has had an opportunity to present its case of serious criminal misconduct.

According to the indictment, former President Trump not only purloined extremely sensitive top-secret files, but the indictment also charges that he pressured his lawyers not to turn over the documents the government sought and went so far as to instruct them to say he did not have the documents they knew he had, and, even to "hide or destroy the documents” if necessary.

The Republican Party has thrown caution to the wind with its unbridled support of the former President. The Republican leadership seems to assume that there is such a broad panoply of issues roiling the nation that they can deflect from the public consciousness the seriousness of the offenses with which the former President has been charged.  

Today, unlike the mid-19th century, during which the reality of slavery was the defining political issue of the time, Republicans seem to be counting on the fact that vast portions of the population are distracted by a myriad of other issues such as inflation, the cost of medical care, the viability of Social Security, climate change, veterans' affairs, federal income taxes, and on and on.

We're not the one-issue nation we were 169 years ago when the institution of slavery overrode all other issues, especially as the country continued to expand westward. So, most historians have, until now, correctly waved off comparisons between the Whigs of the 19^th century and the Republicans of the 21st century. Conventional wisdom has held that too many issues are important to too many people for any one issue today to have the impact that slavery had in the middle of the 19^th century.

Other than war, it has been rare for one issue to dominate the nation's thinking as slavery did in the 19^th century, sufficient to jeopardize a political party's survival. Today, however, we may be at such a moment. The 37-count criminal indictment against former President Trump, along with other possible criminal indictments being considered relative to the attempted coup on January 6^th, 2021, may represent the greatest national trauma since that which presaged the Whig’s decent into oblivion.

We are at the center of a controversy like no other in our history, and the leader of the Republican Party, former President Donald Trump, is at the center of that controversy. A week ago, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote, "If Trump Republicans propel Donald Trump over the top in the primaries, they will be doing and will have done two things. They will have made him their nominee for the presidency, and they will have ended the Republican Party. I don't mean this rhetorically, in the way of people walking around the past eight years crying, "The party as I knew it is gone." I mean it literally: The GOP will disappear as a party. Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear."

Now, former President Trump and columnist Peggy Noonan are certainly not fans of one another. He wrote of her only a year ago, "I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan."

 Since then, things have only gotten worse for the Republican Party. A Grand Jury in Washington, D.C., is apparently deciding whether to issue yet another indictment of the former President for inciting, if not planning, the attempted coup on January 6^th, 2021.

Few events in American history have riveted the people's attention, as have the legal travails, both civil and criminal, of former President Donald Trump. The Republican Party has been steadfast in its support of the former President, notwithstanding those civil and criminal charges that have been brought against him or those already adjudicated.

Jack Smith, the Special Counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate whether or not former President Trump knowingly acted illegally concerning the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th, 2021, has successfully prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans for corruption, as well as war criminals at the International Criminal Court in the Hauge.

While former President Trump has called Special Counsel Smith "a deranged lunatic," former Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr thinks otherwise. Barr said he thinks the public will eventually realize the former President's culpability. "Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt," Barr said during an interview on CBS last week. "In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the President, and this would have gone nowhere had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half."

With the possibility of more criminal indictments to come, the nation in general, and the Republican Party in particular, will, in the weeks and months ahead, write an immensely important chapter in the history of our country. We are in a time like no other since 1854 when the Republican Party was born out of the Whig Party's failings during another time of crisis in America.

Today's Republicans should carefully study that period of American history.

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