Despite Trump’s Felony Conviction, Fiscal Liberalism Has Failed

Liberals have little reason to be cheerful right now, so one can’t spare a little joy at Friday’s news that a New York court declared Donald Trump a convicted felon over payments he made to the actress adult film actress Stormy Daniels to maintain her silence. . There is certainly some satisfaction in Trump’s displeasure at the ruling, as recorded by The New York Times: “With his arms crossed and his brow furrowed, President-elect Donald J. Trump avoided prison, but he became a criminal.” Trump’s conservative base was pleasantly outraged. Fox News host John Roberts. sizzling“Now they’re branding him Donald Trump with a scarlet letter of a big F on his forehead that he’s a convicted felon.” Roberts went on to complain that the conviction was “crafted… to smear Donald Trump.”

On the contrary, tennis legend Martina Navratilova Serious“Convicted felon Donald J. Trump rings true, right?” Other liberals euphorically listed the many countries where Donald Trump would be banned from entering for being a criminal (a joke that loses its force once you realize that, as American president, he will be able to easily obtain an exemption from the normal rules).

Stepping back from the immediate partisan reaction, Trump’s felony conviction seems like a small victory for liberalism that hides a larger catastrophic defeat. Even if we welcome the small symbolic justice of the felony conviction, there is little to celebrate in the fact that this conviction is for the least consequential of the criminal cases Trump has faced and that both the judge and the prosecutor They agreed that there should be no punishment for it. . As The New York Times information:

Trump once faced up to four years in prison for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal, but on Friday he only received a so-called unconditional release. The sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation, reflected the practical and constitutional impossibility of imprisoning an elected president.

In other words, the conviction does not reflect the end of Trump’s lifelong impunity, but rather is another manifestation of that impunity. With Trump about to enter the White House, the other criminal cases against him are virtually over. On Friday, special counsel Jack Smith, who was overseeing the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, resigned. The Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group, captured the contradictions of the moment by observing“Donald Trump ran for office to avoid punishment for his crimes, and it worked. The fact is that he is a convicted felon 34 times.”

In truth, Trump’s toothless felony conviction, coming on the cusp of his return to the White House, is not a moment for jubilation: Rather, it should stimulate serious reflection among anti-Trump forces about the failure of procedural liberalism. Using prosecutors and courts to counter Trump has been the focus of much liberal energy over the past decade, but it is a failed strategy that has only ended up strengthening Trump.

In 2017, I wrote a column for The New Republic where I questioned the faith many liberals had that prosecutors like Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller were about to outsmart Trump and neutralize him as a political force. I argued that

(Relying) on ​​Rosenstein and Mueller as barriers against Trump’s worst excesses is a prime example of a trap liberals have fallen into again and again when dealing with presidential abuse of power: a tradition of “fiscal liberalism,” that seeks legal rather than political interests. Remedies to punish presidential misdeeds. Such an approach is dangerous because it allows lawmakers to hand off political problems to apolitical law enforcement officials.

In 2020, after the Mueller investigation failed, reflected in The Nation on the cultural and historical roots of procedural liberalism.

The Mueller cult was based on the dubious idea that a Republican and lifelong member of the Washington elite would conduct a relentless, sweeping investigation into a Republican president. This belief, in turn, was based on an idealization of federal law enforcement, seen as uncorrupt and rigorously loyal to the law. The liberals who joined the Mueller cult gave as much credence as any conservative to the cultural myths that J. Edgar Hoover created in the early 20th century to legitimize the FBI. These myths paint federal agents as exceptionally dignified: shaven-haired defenders of justice who can be trusted more than politicians.

Although procedural liberalism has failed repeatedly, its hold on center-left elite opinion has only deepened. A big part of Kamala Harris’ political personality was the boast that she had been a very tough district attorney in California, to be able to confront the criminal Trump.

In fact, not all voters loved Kamala-the-police. Many on the left, encouraged by the police reform movement, saw his tax career as a reason to distrust her. A report on working-class people of color in the Bronx who voted for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2024. documented that there was popular distrust in Harris’ judicial record.

The problems with procedural liberalism are twofold. First, it is a strategy that attempts to use the legal system to do the work of politics. Of course, if figures like Trump commit crimes, they should fall under the purview of the law. But the law itself is not prepared to resolve the question of a corrupt politician’s status before voters. There is a long story of voters who reward politicians who break the law or have been embroiled in scandals, beloved scoundrels like former Washington Mayor Marion Barry and former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards.

The names Barry and Edwards highlight the second big problem with procedural liberalism: it is a counterproductive strategy in an era of anti-establishment fury. Barry and Edwards were popular scoundrels precisely because their run-ins with the law reinforced their overall populist stance. The fact that Barry was targeted as part of an FBI crack-trap scheme only demonstrated that he was a threat to the system, giving him credibility among working-class voters.

We live in an era of anti-establishment rage, which has now spread from impoverished areas like Washington, DC and Louisiana to the entire United States. Trump’s popularity is due to the fact that he can give voice, even if fraudulently, to anti-establishment anger. Countering Trump with cardboard FBI heroes like Robert Mueller or the liberal punishment of Kamala-the-cop only serves to legitimize Trump’s own claims that the powers that be are opposed to him.

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Trump’s corruption and lawlessness remain a serious problem. But in his second term, liberals have to abandon the fantasy that there is a popular and legitimate legal system that can hold Trump accountable. Instead, the focus must be on making the political case: Democrats must demonstrate that Trump’s corruption is self-serving: that far from being a Robin Hood fighting for ordinary people, he is simply another plutocrat defending his interests and those of his followers. rich friends .

It is possible, indeed likely, that Democrats could regain control of the House of Representatives in 2026. If they do, they will have the opportunity to engage in the political battles they have so far avoided: using Congress’s investigative powers to investigate genuinely Trump’s abuse of power beyond the Russia-centric issues that are the national security state’s primary concern. Another avenue of attack is the entire area of ​​presidential power and the impunity of the elites. There is an urgent need to review the challenges posed by the control of the imperial presidency, which dominated politics in the era of Richard Nixon. Making a political case against Trump’s corruption will not be easy, but it at least offers hope of finding a systematic solution rather than simply returning to a procedural liberalism that has repeatedly failed.

jeet heer

Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The Nation and presenter of the weekly Nation podcast, The time of monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, the guardian, The New Republicand The Boston Globe.

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