OPINION:
The indictment of former President Donald Trump for allegedly violating federal laws regarding records and classifications is a watershed in the history of the republic — and not for the reasons touted by his enemies.
What emerges from the case, as we know it, is not really a novel or unprecedented picture of a former officeholder who got crosswise with records law. Those episodes are much more common than the public realizes, involving nearly every major elected official who ends up under sufficient scrutiny.
Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have all been found at various points to have had documents in their possession that either the Department of Justice or the National Archives and Records Administration believed they should not.
This is partly because of the rampant overclassification of federal government documents — a known and apparently unsolvable problem in the D.C. ecosystem — and partly because the legitimate needs, or entirely understandable desires, of the figures involved made document access otherwise unreasonably onerous.
We should pause here and note that there are cases in which the alleged document retention was an undeniable effort to evade legitimate scrutiny and ordinary record-keeping — in other words, a real case of criminal intent.
The signal episode here is unquestionably Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. It was one of the most shocking acts of high-level official corruption in recent memory — exceeded in its brazenness only by the official decision to let her get away with it.
Mrs. Clinton regards the whole affair as a punchline these days, and in keeping with her role as the Miss Havisham of American politics, seethes with satisfaction that the man who beat her in 2016 is facing the accountability that she escaped.
The voters of 2016 did hold her accountable, but it is far less than she would have received had she been of the other party — and had she been named Donald Trump.
This brings us to the real reason the indictment of the former president is a turning point in American history. Mr. Trump’s uniqueness is in his aesthetic — everything is bigger and bolder, to which veterans of his White House like me can attest — but he is no revolutionary. He is, on substance, the president most deeply rooted in continuity with the American tradition in a generation.
That’s why the progressives and everyone else invested in uprooting Americans from that tradition despise him. It is also why he is indicted now.
We need to be clear that we are not talking about just this indictment from the Department of Justice. There is a frivolous indictment from the local prosecutor in New York City as well. There is also, very possibly, another indictment on the way from Georgia prosecutors. We can well ask why, understanding that the phrase “the process is the punishment” applies here.
It is not because Mr. Trump is a serial lawbreaker or unique in the annals of the presidency. It is because he cared nothing for the norms and assumptions of the American ruling class, and he was effective at flouting them.
And that’s what gets you indicted these days.
We live in an America in which Mr. Clinton committed perjury, Mrs. Clinton endangered our national security through illicit communications mechanisms while in office, and Mr. Biden faces increasingly credible accusations of foreign bribery during his time as vice president.
Yet it’s Mr. Trump who endures the close attention of the Justice Department over a records dispute. This isn’t mere whataboutism. We don’t mention the divergent treatment to deflect attention or obscure substantive issues. The divergent treatment — regime-favored perpetrators walk, regime antagonists get hauled before a judge — is invoked to sharpen attention because it is the substantive issue.
You see it happen again and again, and not just at elite levels. We no longer have equal justice under the law at the federal level. What we have is a system in which endorsing the regime earns you safety from prosecution, and opposing it gets you a lifetime of persecution.
If you don’t believe that, ask why the men and women of Jan. 6, 2021 — a single fraught day — are the objects of a sweeping and enduring federal prosecutorial effort, while the organizations and people who launched a violent and deadly national insurrection across most of 2020 are not.
Just asking gives us the answer. To borrow from Lenin, the great question of governance now is who is doing what to whom.
That Americans may understand the workings of their own governing class through an invocation of Lenin is evidence of a betrayal. That betrayal makes itself manifest in one law for the favored few and another law for everyone else.
Call it what you like, but don’t call it American. It is the opposite of everything we are and ought to be.
As for Mr. Trump, there is no small vindication in the fact that within this corrupted edifice, he is not among the favored few. He is subjected to the same iniquity as the rest of us. He is with everyone else.
From a personal observation, having known him and worked for him during his presidency, that is exactly where he wants to be.
• Brooke Leslie Rollins serves as president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute.
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