In liberal Richmond, California, Julie Freestone has spent much of her retirement making common cause with people who share her “ongoing sense of outrage” about Donald Trump.
or years, she says, she has wanted Trump to “go to prison for the rest of his life,” whether for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result or his role in fomenting the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Yet after each investigation and impeachment, she has watched Trump walk away without consequences. Now, the criminal case unveiled against the former US president in New York has renewed her hope. Might Tuesday’s charges reverse the pattern?
“Would I be happier if he were indicted for inciting an insurrection?” Freestone said. “Absolutely. But I keep telling myself, Al Capone was convicted on tax charges. This is a democracy and people have to be held accountable.”
Across the country, in Manheim, Philadelphia, after seven years of doing anything he could to stop Trump, Charles Roehm has nothing left in his outrage bank. Two years ago, in a letter to his local newspaper, Roehm called for Trump to be jailed. He cited Trump’s role in the Capitol insurrection and spelled out a litany of other potential crimes and unethical behaviour.
Despite Trump’s indictment, Roehm, a veteran of 21 years in the army and a retired accountant who lives in a strongly Republican county, says he has lost faith in the justice system and politicians of every stripe.
“This guy gets away with it over and over,” said Mr Roehm. “I have irregular heartbeat and my medications were working fairly well until this whole thing with Trump. I’m depressed all the time. I’m totally disgusted by a legal system that let him go again and again because of his power.”
That sense of frustration or resignation – a nagging belief that Trump inevitably escapes accountability – is pervasive among those who have railed against the former president for years.
In a divided land, in the early stages of a divisive ex-president’s third campaign for the White House, these are the people who have stayed mostly sputtering mad about Trump for a solid seven years.
Now, in this strange and historic moment, they see him facing felony charges related not to January 6 or to classified documents (though those may yet come), but to his payment of hush money to an adult-film star and a Playboy model.
That has made many Americans, who have repeatedly seen this man escape accountability watching this latest eruption of the “Trump Show” and wondering if they should celebrate, throw up their hands in exasperation or just give up.
These are the people who were appalled by Trump well before he was elected president, the voters who thought the Access Hollywood videotape of Trump boasting about sexually aggressive behaviour with women would tank his candidacy.
Through his term in office and beyond, they cheered on investigators, predicted Trump’s fall, groaned over his every rhetorical explosion, styled themselves as “The Resistance” and worried that his presidency would dismantle the American system they cherished.
Then came Tuesday and pictures of a silent Trump, moving through a courthouse hallway, sitting at the defendant’s table in an ordinary Manhattan courtroom, headed for trial, even potential imprisonment. Among hardcore anti-Trumpers, this struck not so much as the moment they’d been waiting for, as perhaps the beginning of one more chapter that could end in frustration.
Trump’s history has given his followers and opponents alike a sense that almost whatever is thrown at him, he’ll figure out an escape route.
“He’s been able to just run around and do and say whatever he wants,” said Michael Mackey (28), who manages Wild West Comics and Games in Arlington, Texas.
“People are just tired of it. They’re tired of him making us into a laughing stock.”
Sophia Downs, a 16-year-old student at Albany High School in Albany, California, was initially excited by the news of Trump’s indictment: “I felt like, there’s cosmic justice and he’s finally getting what he deserves.”
But a darker feeling quickly took precedence: “As I could actually think about it, I’ve been wondering, will it actually change anything?” asked Sophia, who is president of her school’s Feminist Club. “Will it prevent him from running again? I don’t know.”
“A lot of people, including me, over the last eight years, have thought, OK, here it comes,” historian Jon Meacham told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. “Pick your cliche. It’s the silver bullet. It’s the stake through the heart. But what Trump has done is...he has suspended the ordinary rules of political gravity.”
Meacham has concluded that the populist fever of Trumpism will break only if he and politicians who model themselves on him keep losing elections. “It is a perennial battle between our worst instincts and the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase,” he said. “That’s the struggle we’re in now.”
One instinct among hardcore Trump opponents is to seek relief through humour, and so the resolutely anti-Trump late night TV comedians who have dined out on Trump-to-prison jokes for years took numerous victory laps.
Trump “was right,” Stephen Colbert said on his CBS show after breaking the news of the indictment to his studio audience. “We’re finally saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”
Glee was the order of the day over on NBC, too, where Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show aired a video concoction splicing together bits of Trump’s speeches to create a song: “I’m so indicted, and I just can’t hide it. I’m about to go to jail and I don’t like it.”
However, glee seems like the wrong emotion to Freestone, the retired public health worker in northern California who has long wanted Trump to be imprisoned, but whose own family history persuades her to acknowledge how complex people’s political views can be.
Freestone is the child of a Jewish immigration lawyer who worked on resettling concentration camp survivors after World War II and the wife of a German-born man whose father was a high-level Nazi official.
Her family’s history taught her about speaking up. “We understood that no one spoke up against Nazi Germany and millions of innocent people were killed,” she said, recalling her own activism from the civil rights and women’s rights movements through campaigns for climate policy reform and health-care improvements during the Trump administration.
“But I think that none of us was prepared for the kind of presidency that Donald Trump brought us, or that we visited upon ourselves by electing him.”
She finds it repugnant that Trump has managed to turn past investigations into his behaviour into opportunities to make money and build on his followers’ grievances, but “I don’t think you can weigh that in a democracy where people have to be held accountable,” she said.
And she’s all too aware of Trump’s talent for delaying legal proceedings. “I’m 78 – I think I’ll be dead before anything is resolved, if it ever is,” she said.
Still, “I just don’t think we can say, ‘Oh well, he’s not going to get convicted anyway, so why bother?’
That’s not OK.”