On August 14th, former President Donald Trump was indicted on the grounds of attempting to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. This will be his fourth indictment since March of this year, leaving us with a grand total of ninety-one charges across all of his cases.
Trump and eighteen others have been charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. This allows the state to tie together the illegal activities of various people by claiming that they were all working towards a common, illicit goal. Some of these people include the white house chief of staff, the former justice department official, as well as many of his current and former lawyers.
The societal pressure surrounding Trump’s recent indictments keeps climbing by the minute and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. From deep social media divisions, to the stress of the upcoming 2024 election, people are feeling discouraged and angered by the situation. A junior at Olathe North, Mercury Hasty, expresses how they feel about the situation, “after the blatant crimes and downright disgusting things Trump has said or done on live television- let alone once the cameras were off- it is disheartening that he is not actually in jail”. This opinion is one that is commonly felt by many people throughout not only our school, but also throughout our country. From what I’ve seen, our society has been more disconnected than ever, and with this most recent indictment people are feeling pushed to the edge. As a society, we need to be evaluating the situation and asking the important questions, what led us to this point, and how is this most recent indictment going to affect the future of our country?
Over the past several years of Trump being a leading political figure in the United States, many instances of unlawful or questionable behavior have been suspected. With the mounting evidence against him, his involvement in illicit activities is getting difficult to deny.
The leading piece of evidence in Trump’s Fulton County indictment is a call that he made on January 2nd, 2021 to the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. On this call, Trump can be heard asking Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”. This just so happens to be the exact number of votes he needed to win the state of Georgia in the 2020 election. This call led to his recent indictment and now has him facing many charges, for example impersonating a public officer, filing false documents, and conspiracy to defraud the state. Trump has very adamantly denied any wrongdoing in the case and is currently attempting to quash most of the charges against him through a feeble defense.
The future of the United States seems uncertain and quite frankly, chilling. Many people wonder how after four federal indictments Trump is still allowed to run for president, and to speak plainly, it’s quite simple. First of all, it is highly unlikely that Trump will actually face any prison time due to these indictments. Most of his charges are punishable by fine as well as by prison time; if convicted on all of the charges, his fines would add up to nearly $11.2 million. But with Trump being within the elite of our society, it won’t leave much of a dent in his pocket for him to pay off fines that for any normal American citizen would be crippling.
Lets say, hypothetically, he does get incarcerated. This still would mean very little for his eligibility in running for Presidency in 2024. Technically, there is nothing in the constitution that states that a convicted criminal can not run for President, he could actually do it all from a prison cell. In fact, it was done before by Eugene Debs, a socialist who ran for presidency in 1920 entirely from a jail cell. Obviously he didn’t win, as the idea of a criminal running for presidency seemed ludacris back then, but currently, I’m not so sure our society holds our presidential candidates to the same standard. Trump becoming a leading candidate in the upcoming election is still a very probable reality even after all of the indictments. The only thing that can truly affect his run for presidency next year is public opinion.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly Trump will stand a year from now during the 2024 election, one thing is clear, his legal troubles have no end in sight and neither does his political career. Trump is here to stay, and it’s up to us to decide whether we’re okay with that, and if not, what we as a society are going to do about it.
