James Ker-Lindsay is
Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics.
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Donald Trump is going to jail.
That’s a whole big story in itself, the reason why Donald Trump is going to go to jail, I’ll talk about that a bit in a moment, but that’s not really the point. The real point is that Donald Trump is going to jail. And he’s going to jail soon.
That’s audio of the crowd at a Trump rally when he was running against Hillary Clinton shouting ‘lock her up’, one of dozens, probably hundreds of times that it happened. I don’t think that any but the most deluded of the people shouting really believed there was any chance that Hilary Clinton would actually be going to jail; someone once said that Trump’s detractors took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.
It might be because there’s been so much insincere talk about sending people to jail that I think people aren’t really taking seriously two things that are going to happen; I haven’t seen any commentator give a reasonable analysis of what I think are two important likely outcomes.
The second most important one is, of course, what do you do with the reality of having a candidate for president of the United States locked up in a federal prison cell, at the height of the election campaign.
But, much more important, and it’s getting even less attention; I talked on the podcast a while ago about how important it is, when you’re discussing any topic, to give some thought to what happens next.
Donald Trump is convicted in a federal court of serious crimes, he’s handcuffed, he’s led away to a prison van, and taken to a federal penitentiary where he may well spend the rest of his life. It would be a media event comparable with 9/11, but what happens next?
After the World Trade Centre attack, there was saturation coverage for weeks, but very few people were contemplating the what happens next that we have been living through for more than two decades now.
You might think ‘Trump going to prison? It’ll never get to that’. If you do, you’re not paying attention. First some basic facts. The US has a federal government, and a federal system of courts and prisons and criminal laws. Almost all cases are heard in state courts – murders trials like OJ Simpson, defamation trials like Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and many less famous ones, they are all heard by state courts, under state law.
The FBI and the US Department of Justice investigate federal crimes, and despite their prominence in films and TV, their cases only make up a tiny proportion of all the trials in the US. For the Feds to get involved, the crime must be something that crosses state lines, like the Unabomber who posted his bombs from one state to another, or it must be an attack on the federal government itself.
So, in America, it’s pretty unusual to be charged with a federal crime, but if you are, your fate is pretty much sealed. Their conviction rate is truly spectacular. Of cases that come before the courts at all, even just for a preliminary hearing,
