President & Convicted Felon: Historian on the Unprecedented Trump Verdict

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Timothy Naftali, thanks so much for joining us. I guess right now, put this in perspective, what the last 24 hours have been in the context of presidential history. How significant was this?

TIMOTHY NAFTALI, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, this was the – yesterday’s guilty verdict in the New York State case against Donald Trump was extremely significant in terms of presidential history. And it really has two significances. The first is a very simple one, but it will be one that will be remembered for all time. And that’s that in this country, even the most powerful can be found guilty, can be indicted, and then convicted by a jury of their peers. No former president, no president has ever been convicted of a crime, and we have just established a precedent that will go on forever. That significance is easy to understand. The second one, well, we’ll have to wait to understand. The second significance is to our politics. We’ve never had one of the two principle presidential candidates found guilty of a crime during a presidential election. We talk about October surprises. Those are surprises that occurred at the very end of an election that could, particularly in a close election, shift enough voters one way or the other to alter the outcome. Well, this is a May surprise, and we don’t know the consequences for the election of one of the presumed two major party candidates being found guilty. What we can predict is that some of the rhetoric of this campaign will shift, and Republicans, Trumpists are going to focus on the rule of law in our legal institutions. They’re gonna trash them. They have to trash them, because if you say that we have the rule of law, and if you say that justice is impartial in America, then Donald Trump is a convicted felon. And how do you nominate a convicted felon to lead your party to the presidency? So we can anticipate a torrent of toxic language that is going to seek to weaken the institutions of our legal system the way the Stop the Steal campaign sought to weaken America – American trust in our electoral system. We know the consequences of the Stop the Steal campaign, the very sad, tragic consequences, culminating in January 6th. We just can’t tell what the consequences of the likely attack on our judicial system will be this time.

SREENIVASAN: You know, yesterday, one of the, one of my neighbors said to me, Hey, look, Nixon didn’t go to jail. Right? If in his mind, if this got to a point where he saw the image of this president, even for a day behind bars, for him that is a Rubicon that can’t be crossed. Because if can happen to this president, what’s to say that every president after, when they leave office, won’t be tried on charge X or Y from a political opponent?

NAFTALI: Well, I believe that Richard Nixon certainly should have been indicted. The reasons why Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon are understandable. Gerald Ford was a great American. He stabilized our system, restored some trust in government. But I think the mistake he made was not to wait for an indictment so that the crimes that President Nixon allegedly committed would’ve been in one place for the American people to learn. Let’s talk about the differences between the Nixon case and the Trump case, because I think that’s why the indictments were important. The, at least the ability of grand juries to indict were important in a, after the Trump presidency. President Trump, unlike Richard Nixon, sought to remain part of our political world. Richard Nixon knew his career was over. He was not going to – he couldn’t, he couldn’t run again. He had been elected twice, but he wasn’t planning to disrupt our political system in exile. Donald Trump did not accept the outcome of the 2020 election and therefore was planning to continue his campaign to be president. So the differences are clear. Gerald Ford was thinking that he would, he would allow Richard Nixon a more peaceful political exile. Gerald Ford did not pardon Nixon so that Nixon could return as a political figure. Donald Trump decided to return as a political figure. And so he in a sense, mandated that his crimes, his alleged crimes be tried because it’s not healthy for a political system to have a felon as president. So I think there are two differences. One last point, and it’s fair on the part of those who worry about political trials. If you assume that every trial of a powerful person is political, right, then a president being tried after he or she leaves office is – puts us in the same category as countries that have political trials. On the other hand, if you respect our institutions, you should think that a grand jury should have the ability to indict a powerful person regardless of what position they may have held before. I think it’s very important for society that everybody, regardless of how high they rise in our elite, understand that if they commit a crime, they’ll be held responsible. We don’t wanna live in a society, I think, where once somebody becomes president, they know that forever they will never be tried or indicted, because that would seem to be political. That would be dangerous, that would, in a sense, be giving a blank check to any future president that no matter what you do, don’t worry. In our country, you can’t be indicted because you were once our head of state.

SREENIVASAN: Is there anything that we can learn from other countries who’ve had similar challenges with their leadership? I mean whether they’ve been convicted or tried, what’s the best lessons that we can take?

NAFTALI: Don’t elect convicts to office. That is the best of advice that – here’s where the unprecedented is actually precedent. Our country has been lucky due to two things. The strength of its institutions and the fact that most of its heads of state couldn’t conceive of the behavior that Donald Trump has exhibited. That we’ve never faced, never faced the prospect of a convicted, corrupt man coming into the office, oval office. But many countries have. Sadly too many countries have found powerful men seeking to retain or acquire power to avoid the consequences of their actions, and then to stay in power as long as possible to avoid trials to come. There are so many countries in the world where you have these – where you have leaders, really dictators, who don’t leave office because they’re fearful that there will be the day of reckoning, should they no longer control all the levers of power in their country.

SREENIVASAN: You study legacies. At one point you directed the Nixon Presidential Library. History is sometimes kinder to the legacy of presidents with the benefit of time. And Nixon largely stayed out of public life, but say for example, president Bill Clinton, who was impeached, he’s still active on the world stage. What happens to President Trump? Does this become a small asterisk? Does this become a defining characteristic?

NAFTALI: Well, Donald Trump’s history hasn’t been fully written yet. I think a lot of it has to do with what happens in November. If he returns to power one could predict that he will try to undermine our legal system by using the presidential pardon to try to mess with at least the two federal cases that he still faces. Well, that will be part of his history. So it is very difficult at this point to know in advance what my future colleagues in 30 years will write about Donald Trump. I mean, if we’re, when we’re looking solely at his first term, if that’s his first term as opposed to his only term, one would focus on the Abraham Accords, which have actually altered the politics of the Middle East. Would look at his government’s approach to vaccines. He personally did not support what his government achieved, but you know, the moonshot approach that his government took to the vaccine issue proved to be very beneficial for the American people. So I’m looking at elements of his administration that might get more attention as time passes, but he would still have to reckon, historians would still have to reckon with January 6th, which regardless of what role you think he played on that day or preparing for that day, his rhetoric certainly inflamed his base and laid the foundation for the behavior that resulted in the attack on our con, on our Congress. So yes, over time some of the achievements that men and someday women have had in the White House are fully appreciated. But the, but whatever damage they create, that doesn’t disappear. It’s just that everything is contextualized. Donald Trump did not have a opening to China moment in his foreign policy. The Abraham Accords were important, but they do not, they do not really match the brilliance and the the effect of Nixon going to China. So when everyone looks at Nixon, of course, Watergate is significant because it shows the basic corruption of the man. But you still have to come to terms with both his approach to China and his approach to Vietnam. And the fact that he signed some of the most progressive environmental bills, though he disliked, them in our history. So, the Nixon – the legacy for Richard Nixon is complex and complicated. If Donald Trump simply ends up with one presidential term, the bad of that term, especially because of January 6th, I think, will forever outweigh the good. But I can’t really speak on behalf of historians not yet born.

SREENIVASAN: The former president has been incredibly successful in openly saying, you know what, if I don’t win this coming election, it’s rigged. If I get a verdict that’s not in my favor, it’s corrupt. And really, he’s been quite successful with his base in reframing the events of January 6th and the context of the election lie over and over again. And I wonder if the president has had I guess a measurable effect on how Americans think about facts, think about our government, think about personal responsibility.

NAFTALI: I think we’d be missing the bigger story if we thought that Donald Trump is the creator of all the tensions and divisions in our country. I think that we are still processing the consequences of the Great Recession. The recovery after the Great Recession was unequal across the country. And I saw, I remember a very suggestive set of facts about the counties in this country that voted for Obama in ‘12 and then voted for Trump in ‘16. Many of them were counties that had not recovered as well economically as others in this country. So there is an economic story here. There’s a cultural story, which is that many Americans who form part of President Trump’s base are uncomfortable with the cultural and social changes that have occurred in our country. They feel, some of them feel that this in some ways undermines their identity. It certainly undermines their ability to predict how life will be in this country. And finally let’s not forget the consequences of Covid. We are still making sense of the effect of the pandemic on how we interact with each other. On the very, sort of the basic questions of life and humanity/ Wrap those together and then put that in a social media, TikTok world, and what you end up with is this moment where a lot’s going on. Donald Trump is the avatar of the, of the sort of the dark, sad side of all these changes. You know, you could take a glass half full and talk about our resilience as a country, our ability to change, our ability to continue to innovate.  We are still at the center of most of the great and interesting innovations going on in the world. AI, for example. On the other end, you could say, ‘oh my goodness, everything is changing. I don’t know what’s gonna happen and what my place will be in the future.’ So the fact that the glass itself has a certain amount of water that’s not Donald Trump’s doing. How it’s interpreted by millions of Americans, that is helped by the Trump phenomenon. His charisma, his negative charisma, has had an effect in inflaming – I’ve mixed metaphors but – has in a sense, inflaming these  differences, and he has ridden them to power at least once and wants to do it again in 2024.

SREENIVASAN: Presidential historian Timothy Natali, thanks so much for joining us.

NAFTALI: Thank you, Hari. My pleasure.