Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
Maybe, just maybe, Judge Juan Merchan saved American democracy last week.
On Friday, the New York state judge delayed Donald Trump’s sentencing on his felony conviction for falsifying business records to hide his hush-money scheme to buy the silence of a former porn star in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump was trying to cover up his affair with Stormy Daniels just after his campaign had nearly been derailed by the October release of an Access Hollywood videotape in which he talked openly about how he harassed and molested women. Figuring his campaign might not survive a second sex scandal, Trump was willing to break the law to keep the adulterous incident secret.
Now, Trump won’t be sentenced in the case until after the November election.
Many political pundits and analysts called Merchan’s decision a victory for Trump — validating Trump’s campaign to sidetrack and delay his four criminal cases before the election.
Initially, I agreed with that assessment. But then I started to think about the dangers of allowing a demagogue to portray himself as a victim.
Of course, Trump has long cast himself as a persecuted victim – a victim of the Justice Department, Congress, the media, or whoever else has most recently sought to hold him accountable for his many lies, impeachable actions, and criminality. It is the cynical playbook that he has used over and over again to whip up his followers and get them to believe his insane conspiracy theories. He doesn’t care that his rhetoric incited an effort to overturn the government during the January 6 insurrection, or that violent white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys follow his lead, or that his dark conspiracy theories led to an attack on an FBI office. Research has found that more than a quarter of Republicans now believe that political violence is acceptable.
But a criminal sentencing in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign would have helped Trump sell his fake victimhood to a wider audience, beyond his MAGA minions.
Without the sentencing – and with his other three criminal cases in limbo – Trump can still claim he is persecuted, as he did during this week’s presidential debate, but it will be less effective.
History shows there is a risk in holding would-be dictators accountable for their actions at crucial political moments. The best known case happened exactly one century ago.
Adolf Hitler’s 1924 trial for treason provides an important lesson for how to deal with Trump.
Hitler was a fringe political figure in Germany before his trial began in February 1924. The trial came just months after Hitler led an insurrection that became known to history as the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed effort by Hitler and the new Nazi Party to take over the provincial government of Bavaria as a precursor to staging a coup in Berlin to take over all of Germany. Hitler was trying to follow the model set by Benito Mussolini, another fascist who had gained power in Italy after his 1922 March on Rome.
Hitler’s putsch began on November 8, 1923, when he and his fellow Nazis stormed a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich where Bavaria’s state commissioner was speaking. Hitler fired a pistol and announced that “the national revolution has begun,” while other Nazis surrounded the hall and blocked its main entrance with a machine gun.
But Hitler’s coup attempt quickly began to collapse. When about 2,000 Nazis tried to march into central Munich the next morning, they were met by police and a firefight broke out, leaving 15 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander dead.
Hitler and many of his lieutenants were soon arrested and charged with high treason. At first, Hitler was despondent; he thought his life was over. But by the time his trial began, he was primed to turn the courtroom into a platform from which he could spout his lies and propaganda.
Hitler had the benefit of going on trial at a fraught political moment. Post-war Germany was suffering an economic meltdown, while many Germans were casting about for people to blame for the nation’s defeat in World War I and were resentful of the onerous terms imposed on Germany by the victorious allies in the Treaty of Versailles. A large percentage of Germans came to believe that Germany had not really lost the war on the battlefield. Instead, they were convinced by the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory — that the German Army hadn’t been defeated, and instead the nation’s political will had simply collapsed in the closing weeks of the war. For that, they blamed Jews and Socialists and other groups that they claimed had forced the surrender and the abdication of the Kaiser.
Hitler took advantage of this chaotic political climate during his trial. Sympathetic judges allowed him to engage in demagogic speechifying, enabling him to portray himself as a martyr who was trying to save Germany from the evil forces behind Germany’s post-war Weimar Republic. Hitler didn’t try to fight the treason charges, but instead just claimed that he was a German patriot determined to oust the real criminals in the government. He called the Weimar government the “traitors of 1918,” who were to blame for Germany’s defeat.
Before the trial’s end, Hitler gave a dramatic speech in the courtroom that resonated wildly with his die-hard right-wing supporters. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court,” he said. “For she acquits us.”
Hitler received an unbelievably light sentence – he was released after serving just nine months. While in prison, he dictated “Mein Kampf” to other Nazi prisoners.
The putsch and his theatrical trial turned Hitler into a political star in Germany; he and his supporters were able to claim that he was persecuted by a corrupt legal system.
To be sure, the parallels between Hitler and Trump are not precise. It took Hitler nearly a decade after his trial to gain power, while Trump’s sentencing would have taken place just weeks before the presidential election. Most importantly, the economic and political conditions in the United States today are nothing like Germany in the 1920s.
But Hitler and Trump have relied on the same style of victimization and demagoguery. Both saw their political fortunes rise thanks to claims of persecution and martyrdom. Trump’s playbook – claiming that he is a patriot battling dark forces inside government and other elite institutions – was also Hitler’s playbook.
While it is disappointing that Trump has yet to be held accountable for any of his many crimes, it is possible that it is better for the nation that he won’t be seen by many voters as a persecuted victim in the weeks before the election. Trump in handcuffs might only help him politically.