Special Counsel Jack Smith's New Filing Reveals the Perils of Trump's Personalization of Power

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A new filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith, released by Judge Tanya Chutkan, provides illuminating detail about the tenacity shown by former president Donald Trump and his Republican co-conspirators in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It is a stark reminder of the perils of Trump’s personalization of power.

”At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” the prosecutors’ document reads. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

On that basis, the filing argues that Trump is not entitled to the immunity from prosecution granted him by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and other far-right ideologue-justices of the Supreme Court; that ruling would grant immunity for "official acts" executed as president. 

Special Counsel Jack Smith announces the indictment of former president Donald Trump, August 1, 2023, Washington D.C. Ricky Carioti/Washington Post via Getty Images

The document reminds us of Trump's success at developing a personalist model of governance, in which the private legal, political, financial and other needs of the leader take precedence over national and party imperatives in the expenditure of time and energy among party and other political elites and in the formulation of policy.

Trump's success at remaking the GOP as his personal tool is one example. GOP resources have been diverted to meet to Trump's bottomless needs for more money and more control. The RNC continued to pay Trump's personal legal bills long after he left office, and the placement of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as RNC head consolidated this personal influence.

Like all strongmen, Trump is unencumbered by moral precepts or other checks on behavior. Such leaders specialize in getting others to do things that were previously unthinkable, like planning an assault on the U.S. Capitol, and they lead their enablers to think that they will get away with everything as long as they stay loyal. Prominent Republicans who figure in the filing enabled Trump and were active in all phases of the attempt to subvert the election, as one solution after another failed and the recourse to violence became a reality.

It is worth remembering that GOP co-conspirators included sitting Republican lawmakers. These individuals neglected the jobs they were elected to do in order to help Trump solve an unacceptable personal situation: he had lost the election and would have to leave a position that was generating considerable financial largesse for him and his businesses.

We already knew that elected GOP officials such as Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chip Roy ignored the needs of their constituents to work overtime on schemes to invalidate the 2020 election results and keep Trump in office illegally. Text messages they exchanged with the chief coup organizer, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed their commitment to undoing a free and fair election.

Lee commented at one point that he was putting in 14 hours a day to assist Trump in solving his problem. It is an example of how elites caught up in authoritarian personality cults cast aside their duties to their constituents to please the leader.

Reviewing these past exchanges in the light of the revelations of Jack Smith's new filing is chilling. The conspirators use a callous and casual tone in discussing how to interrupt the peaceful and democratic transfer of power, and they did not abandon Trump even when the utter illegality of his proposals became undeniable. In those months they were immersed in the world of Trump's desperation and his increasing demands on them —in a world in which loyalty to Trump, regardless of the criminal nature of what he asked them to do, was all that mattered.

Jack Smith's brief keeps the focus on Trump, concluding that “[w]hen the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” Whatever fallout came to those helping him was not his concern.

It is entirely in keeping with the former president's transactional nature that he replied "So what" on Jan. 6 to the news that his Vice President Mike Pence had to be moved to a safe location. Pence had disobeyed Trump in refusing to block the certification of the election results, and thus his usefulness to Trump had ended. Trump had tried to turn his mob against Pence as a way of pressuring Pence to "do the right thing," but when that failed Trump had no further interest in Pence for the moment.

This lack of care towards those who have served him faithfully has apparently not been fully understood by GOP elites such as Lee, who are still out there flogging away for their leader. One day they will understand that all their efforts on Trump’s behalf have earned them no goodwill. With the strongman, loyalty must be proven every day, because his ego and his mania to control everyone and everything demand it.

Jack Smith's focus on the private and personal nature of Trump's actions highlights the corruption that has overtaken the GOP, which now places Trump over party and country to the detriment of our democracy.