Why the new Trump indictment feels so different: This time, there are victims

The weeks between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021 often feel like a blur. That was very much by the design of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators. At the time, Sidney Powell, Trump lawyer and fellow coup plotter, told the press, the strategy was to “release the kraken.” The idea was that a frenzy of assaults on the election process would overwhelm the system so that it would break, allowing Trump to seize power illegally. 

But even in the melee of lawsuits, attempts to disrupt election certification, and sweaty Rudy Giuliani press conferences, one moment stands out in my memory: The day after the election, when Giuliani and Eric Trump tried to stop the ballot counting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I live. Those two jackasses showed up at the convention center, where mail-in ballots were being processed, for a “press conference” that looked very much like an effort to gin up a MAGA crowd to storm the building. Similar efforts had already been launched, to varying degrees of success, in Michigan and Arizona. In Philly, it failed miserably, in no small part because hundreds of city residents turned out to stop them. I watched folks march and dance after running off the would-be fascist storm troopers, celebrating a successful defense of the ballots inside. After all, those were our ballots, the ones we had so carefully filled out and dropped off mere days before. 

Special prosecutor Jack Smith packed a lot into the 45-page indictment filed against Trump late on Tuesday. He details four felony counts against Trump and much of the evidence supporting the prosecution’s claims. The fourth count stands out for being spelled out briefly but profoundly, accusing Trump of trying “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons” out of “the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” The law being invoked was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870, as part of a larger effort to crush the KKK, which was conducting a terror campaign against former slaves. It has been used innumerable times since, including by the Justice Department against people who try to use violence or force to attack the civil rights of others. 

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In discussing Trump’s attempted coup, the language in the media can get awfully abstract. There’s a lot of talk about protecting democracy and our institutions from Trump, which can feel ennobling to the pundits, but often feels bloodless to ordinary people listening. So I was grateful to Smith for making a point of charging Trump under the anti-KKK law. Unlike most of the crimes Trump has been indicted for, this time the document mentions “persons,” the flesh-and-blood human beings Trump victimized: You. Me. Every single person who exercised their right to vote, only to see Trump try to take that away from us. Yes, even Trump voters were victims. Plenty of them also filed ballots that would have been destroyed in Trump’s scheme. 

During the coup, a Trump-supporting relative of mine took offense at a Facebook comment of mine, pointing out that Trump was trying to take away my personal right to vote. She denied that I was specifically being harmed, but had no answer. but sputtering, when I pointed out that my actual, physical ballot was in the Philadelphia batch that Trump was demanding be thrown in the trash. I had carefully filled the bubble next to “Joseph R. Biden.” I had slid it into an envelope, signed and dated it. I had walked it all the way to the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts and handed it over to the nice young man putting ballots in the box. That vote belonged to me, and Trump was trying to destroy it. When Trump called Philly voters “frauds,” the people he was lying about were me and my neighbors. 

The indictment spells out how much Trump and his co-conspirators were ready — eager, really — to inflict harm on everyday people, simply for defending our right to vote for someone other than Trump. As the indictment outlines, Trump’s conspirators regularly spoke about suppressing dissent against the coup through violence. When one White House advisor worried that the public would rise up if Trump stole the election, Trump lawyer John Eastman said sometimes “violence is necessary.” When a White House lawyer worried again about public resistance to Trump’s coup,  Justice Department official-turned-co-conspirator Jeffrey Clark casually suggested using the military to put it down. 

As the events of January 6 show, Trump’s embrace of violence to get his way was not merely hypothetical. Indeed, even before these indictments, there have been a number of people who have spoken publicly about how they were personally affected by Trump’s coup. There are the Capitol and Metro police who were injured in the riot, some so badly they were forced into early retirement. There are the election officials who have been terrorized by right wingers who have threatened them and their families. There’s Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who became the target of MAGA conspiracy theorists falsely accusing them of stealing votes for Biden. Even former vice president Mike Pence registers, in reading this indictment, as a person directly endangered by Trump’s actions. 

Victims with names and faces: That’s something that’s been missing from a lot of the other crimes Trump has been accused of. The Manhattan tax-and-campaign fraud case involves serious crimes, but it’s hard to argue any person was directly harmed by all of Trump’s cheating. The classified documents case is more concrete, with photos showing Trump’s hordes of stolen boxes. But since the government can’t really say what is in the documents or whether foreign spies got hold of them at Mar-a-Lago, the consequences of Trump’s crimes are still maddeningly abstract. 

And while we can see the importance of centering human victims of Trump’s crimes in the E. Jean Carroll case, at first, the press had a muted response to the case because Carroll only filed a civil lawsuit, not a criminal one. That swiftly changed when it became apparent that public interest in the case was high. The reason was simple: Carroll was a real person who had a story to tell about being sexually assaulted by Trump. Her suffering provoked an empathetic response, one that is a lot harder to gin up when talking about tax fraud or shuffling classified documents around. 

We’re looking at months or, god help us, years of discussion about this as the case moves forward. It is my fondest hope that none of us — not the pundits or lawyers or just ordinary people talking about this on social media or at dinner tables — will lose sight of the very human cost of Trump’s crimes. His coup ruined lives and killed people. His lies continue to distort the minds of his followers, detaching them from reality and, in many cases, turning them against their families and communities. And he tried to steal your right to vote, just like he stole those classified documents. Trump didn’t just commit crimes against the government or an abstract concept like “democracy.” He abused regular people, and his victims number in the millions.