“It’s incredibly urgent that Vance prosecutes Donald now,” Mary Trump, a psychologist and Donald Trump’s niece, told The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, has Donald Trump under investigation for an assortment of financial crimes with the potential for putting the former president behind bars. “A felony conviction wouldn’t disqualify Trump from a second term,” Mayer writes, “but a prison sentence would certainly make it harder for him to be elected again.”
But more than Trump’s political fortunes are immediately at stake, even if a second lawless Trump presidency might end the republic:
Vance’s office could well be the only operable brake on Trump’s remarkable record of impunity. He has survived two impeachments, the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, half a dozen bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. And his successor, President Joe Biden, so far seems to prefer that the Department of Justice simply turn the page.
As a result, the contest between Vance and Trump is about much more than a financial investigation. It’s a stress test of the American justice system. George Conway, a lawyer and a Trump critic, who is married to the former President’s adviser Kellyanne Conway, said, “Trump is a man who has gotten away with everything his entire life. He’s an affront to the rule of law, and to all law-abiding citizens.” In office, Trump often treated the law as a political weapon, using the Justice Department as a tool for targeting enemies. Now he is pitted against a D.A. who regards the law as the politically blind foundation of democracy. As Conway put it, “For Trump, the law is a cudgel. For Vance, it’s what holds us together as a civilization. And that’s why people who thumb their noses at it have to be prosecuted. If they aren’t, you’re taking a big step toward a world where that is acceptable.”
“The bookkeeper’s no good to us dead.” — quote from The Untouchables
The focus now is on getting a Trump insider to testify against him:
Persuading an untarnished insider to flip against Trump would clearly be a breakthrough. Judging from investigators’ questions and subpoenas, their sights are set on Allen Weisselberg. “I think he’s the key to the case,” Steven M. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor who is close to many top political and legal officials in New York, said. Mary Trump agreed, noting, “Allen Weisselberg knows where all the bodies are buried.” As the man who managed Trump’s money flow for decades, Weisselberg would certainly make a star witness. He originally worked as a bookkeeper for Trump’s father—a job that, Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law told me, he got after answering a newspaper ad while driving a cab in Canarsie. By the mid-eighties, he was bookkeeping for Trump.
Weisselberg, now the Trump Organization’s CFO, is not believed to be cooperating just yet, Mayer explains. But at 73 and with two sons, Jack and Barry, involved with the Trump Organization, the pressure is on. Former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen went to prison for falsifying financial records for Trump. He tells Mayer that Weisselberg won’t let his sons go to prison. “And I don’t think he wants to spend his golden years in a correctional institution, either.” Cohen added.
There is speculation that Barry Weisselberg could be on the hook for failure to declare free rent at a Trump apartment on his taxes. If true, that could prove a pressure point. Barry Weisselberg’s ex-wife Jennifer suggests it is:
In Jennifer’s first extensive public remarks, she told me that, when someone works for the Trump Organization, “only a small part of your salary is reported.” She explained, “They pay you with apartments and other stuff, as a control tactic, so you can’t leave. They own you! You have to do whatever corrupt crap they ask.” (The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.)
How much would her former father-in-law know?
“You walk down the hall, it’s Allen-Donald, Allen-Donald—they don’t do anything separately. Allen would know everything.”
Anne Applebaum, the author of “Twilight of Democracy,” believes failing to apply the law to rich and powerful heads of state “is dangerous—it creates long-term feelings of impunity, and incentives for Trump and those around him to misbehave again.” Vance’s case may not be the ideal way to hold Trump accountable for a lifetime of flaunting the law, but the alternative “is lawlessness.”
The country’s slide toward authoritarianism has been long and slow, beginning perhaps with the slow-building backlash to the New Deal. Later came the strangulation of unions and the deregulation under Reagan. Multiple financial crises demonstrated how virtually immune from criminal penalty were top dogs in most industries, especially on Wall Street. The result is the collapse of faith in equal treatment under law, the growth of conspiracy theories, and eventually Trump’s lawless presidency and an attempt by his cult to overthrow, well, the government itself.
New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns, “If we have the chance to make a strong statement that the rule of law matters, and we fail, the message is that these strongmen can get back in power. That’s the lesson for us.”
Allen Weisselberg, Trump père’s former bookkeeper, right now is the key. Watch that face … er, space.