Keeping track of all the cases Donald Trump has caught can be hard. There’s the Georgia election-fraud investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 results in that state, which he lost; there’s the New York civil investigation into alleged financial fraud by the Trump Organization; there’s the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into possible campaign-finance violations from Trump’s alleged hush-money payment to the adult actress Stormy Daniels; and there’s the federal special-counsel inquiry regarding Trump’s handling of classified material.

Over the past few weeks, media speculation about criminal indictments has led to conservative media figures and Republican legislators threatening retaliation against prosecutors, with some Trump supporters (and Trump himself) hinting at the possibility of political violence. This is an object lesson in the distinction between “law and order” and the actual rule of law: The former is a conservative shorthand for lawlessness that exempts those in authority from the rules, while the latter applies the law to everyone. Some Republicans’ demands for Democratic Party leaders to pressure legal officials over prosecutorial decisions are themselves a clear expression of the idea that the law should be enforced only against people whom conservatives despise.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Trumpist demands that Trump be above the law, however, should not obscure the necessity that any criminal indictment of the ex-president follow the law to the letter. Media coverage has suggested that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal inquiry into Trump’s alleged hush-money payments may be the shoe likeliest to drop first, but some legal experts have questioned whether that case is a strong one. The trial of the former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, over payments to a former lover, offers a precedent for such an indictment. But it also provides a warning that such cases are difficult to prosecute: The Edwards jury ultimately deadlocked over whether the payments amounted to a crime, and he walked. I won’t speculate on the specifics of this case, but any indictment should be based on clear and convincing evidence that Trump committed a crime, not on personal or partisan ambitions.

Trump has cultivated cynicism about the rule of law by portraying its enforcement as a mere tool of partisan politics; flattering that impression with a flimsy case would undermine the rule of law rather than strengthen it. Impeachment is a political process, but Democrats prepared two strong and thorough cases in both impeachments, each brimming with evidence of Trump’s repeated and deliberate attacks on democratic sovereignty. No criminal indictment of Trump should be held to a lesser standard.

Trump’s political status has already won him preferential treatment from the legal system. Most people do not have the financial or legal resources to fight prosecutors; very few charges lead to trials, because most people, even if innocent, will cop a plea rather than risk more time. But indicting a former president is inherently political, and although Trump supporters will not be moved even by strong evidence, a weak case will strengthen the cynicism about the rule of law that Trump has so successfully exploited for his own purposes. Trumpists will portray any indictment as political, but it does actually matter if the case is weak enough for that argument to be made persuasively.

[David A. Graham: Trump gets a taste of his own medicine]

This is not the same as saying that Trump should skate on something perceived as a small offense when he appears guilty of much greater offenses. There was nothing unfair or dishonorable about nabbing Al Capone for tax evasion, but the government did, in fact, have to prove that he evaded taxes. The stakes are even higher when the greater offenses include an assault on democracy itself.

Trump may become the first former US president to face formal charges. Al Jazeera looks at what we know so far.

Donald Trump is back in his presidential—or at least modern-day-presidential—form, posting unhinged threats on social media in the middle of the night. Early today, he posted on his Truth Social site:

What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!

Nearly every phrase in this message is disturbing, but the most rattling part is his threat of “death & destruction.” This is classic Trumpian mob-boss talk: He doesn’t make a specific threat against anyone, and he doesn’t specifically incite any acts. He might even note in his defense that some of his own critics have fretted that arresting him might produce a violent backlash. And yet the intent is unmistakably to intimidate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and anyone else who might try to charge him with crimes. It’s a threat against the American justice system as a whole.

By now, no one will seriously wonder whether this kind of threat is too much for other Republican leaders to bear. Everyone knows the answer is no. When Trump previously predicted he would be arrested earlier this week and called for protests, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy demurred. “I don’t think people should protest this, no,” he said. “We want calmness out there.” Yet McCarthy also said, “He’s not talking in a harmful way, and nobody should.” GOP leaders have repeatedly found ways, however implausible, to look past Trump’s abuses.

If the intimidation is shocking, the more revealing part of the rant is what it indicates about Trump’s mindset amid the several criminal probes into him, some of which appear to be moving toward indictments. As he once said in a very different context, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” And although Trump was referring to groping women then, that was also his philosophy in life: He broke rules and laws left and right, confident that he wouldn’t get called on it, and if he did, he could easily handle whatever was coming with muscular lawyering or, failing that, a quiet fine or settlement. Now Trump is finding that simply being a star is insufficient to get him out of trouble. In fact, his notoriety has attracted extra scrutiny.

To further dissect his statement:

What kind of person can charge another person

That’s a prosecutor’s job, of course.

who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination

Trump loves this talking point, but the problem remains that Joe Biden got more votes. His implication is that because he is popular (or somewhat popular!) he ought to be immune to law enforcement.

with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed...

Trump is begging the question. Plenty of evidence suggests at least the possibility of a crime, and the point of a trial is to determine whether one has been committed. The former president doesn’t even really bother to mount a substantive defense to the expected allegation against him here, which is that he falsified business records in reimbursing his former fixer Michael Cohen for a hush payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor. (He has previously denied any wrongdoing, as well as an affair with Daniels.) Instead, he’s upset that anyone would even bother to suggest that the rules apply to him.

Legal problems aside, a lively debate has occurred over whether getting indicted would actually be good for Trump, by rallying support to him. He’s seen recent improvement in primary polls against Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and raised lots of money. But this Truth missive shows that Trump isn’t acting like it’s good for him. His anger suggests he views Bragg’s probe as a threat, and that leads him to the predictable and unacceptable position of making threats of violence. Trump has the right question: “Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!” Not a bad answer, either.

The former president is fighting with the police. He’s yelling. He’s running. He’s resisting. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him.

When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict—the arrest of Donald Trump—has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump’s Teflon coating—so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences—finally worn away? Pics or it didn’t happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics.

My wonderings were brief, though. Looking more closely, I noticed the blurry unreality of the people in the images: the faces that seemed, up close, only loosely face-like; the hands with not-quite fingers; the extra appendages; the missing ones. The images were not photos, but rather the results of artificial intelligence responding to that most human of prompts: impatience. Speculation over the possibility of a “perp walk” grew so intense, the British journalist Eliot Higgins decided to imagine the event using the text-to-image generator Midjourney. (His inputs: “Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage.”) Higgins posted the AI’s responses on Twitter, making the just-a-joke fakery clear. Soon, they went viral. Some posts sharing the images acknowledged their AI origins; others were notably less clear. “#BREAKING: Donald J. Trump has been arrested in #Manhattan this morning!” one post read, teetering between credulity and parody. The result was an absurdity fit for the era that is shaped, still, by Trump. The AI renderings, meant to capture him at the moment of accountability, instead serve as reminders of his ongoing power. Attention is the one currency that Donald Trump has never squandered. The images of his “comeuppance” have now been viewed more than 5 million times.

The crucial element of the images is not the fact that they are misleading. It is that they are melodramatic. They present Trump’s imagined arrest in maximally cinematic terms: the fight, the flight, the fall. They lie with such swagger that, even after you realize the fakery, it becomes difficult to look away. The images channel one of the showman’s abiding insights: that spectacle, wielded well, will not merely complement reality. It will compete against it. The deepfakes, those hyperreal renderings of a thing that hasn’t happened, are arguably harmless fun, obvious jokes that bide time until real news breaks. But attention being what it is, the images put a dent in any events to come. They are agents of preemptive—and false—catharsis. Trump’s arrest hasn’t happened. Nonetheless, we’ve already seen it.

“Behind closed doors at Mar-a-Lago,” The New York Times reported this week, “the former president has told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters and news cameras.” He has wondered how he should play the scene—should he smile for the cameras?—and how the audience of the American public might take in the show. This speculation, too, is revealing: “We likely won’t see a classic perp walk,” my colleague David Graham noted yesterday; still, the notion of a scenic arrest has been a common one across the media coverage of Trump’s legal woes.

[Read: The cases against Trump: A guide]

As a broader news story, the probability of the former president’s arrest has similarly pitted the doubtful-but-cinematic against the probable-but-dull. Reports about the potential event have been peppered with artful cushions and caveats (“likely indictment,” “expected arrest,” etc.), vacillating between the conditional and the future tenses. Would it happen on Tuesday, as Trump himself had predicted? (No.) How about Wednesday? (No again.) Trying to keep track of it all, as a news consumer, meant being caught in unending whiplash between what has already happened, what will happen, and what merely might.

The AI images neatly channel the maybes. They also capture one of the tensions at play in an event that is both an ongoing legal proceeding and an anticipated spectacle: the public desire for catharsis chafing against the prosecutor’s desire for a winning case. Both desires, though, play games of expectation. Both rely, in their way, on shock in the moment and sustained attention in the long run. And when cinematic images are pitted against dutiful, uncertain realities, you can usually predict the victor. The pictures are very obviously fake; to see them at all, though, is to have an emotional reaction to them. If you’re one of those millions who have seen the fake arrest, the real one, if it happens, may seem like a letdown—a matter of been-there-done-that, already experienced, felt, filed away.

The hype cycle is a fickle thing. And now, as the fake images remind us, its movements can be shaped not only by human spectacles, but also by AI-generated ones. Donald Trump, wielder of fakeries, is broadly akin to AI in the threats he both poses and represents. And the images that claim to depict him in his moment of humble humanity hint at those commonalities. The savvy marketer and the savvy algorithm both eviscerate long-standing, and load-bearing, norms. They are both shocks to the system, in the near term and the long. They treat reality as merely the opening bid in an endless negotiation. And they highlight one of the truths that shapes American politics as readily as it shapes everything else: Shock is a finite resource. Because of that, even the specter of Trump’s arrest, deprived of its ability to surprise, can become the thing that Trump himself never seems to: old news.

Former President Donald Trump's defense attorney repeatedly speculated as a legal pundit that Trump's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels likely happened and that the $130,000 payment made to Daniels days before the 2016 election could be seen as an in-kind campaign contribution, contradicting his recent legal and public defense of Trump.

Robert Costello, the former lawyer for Michael Cohen, spoke to CNN's Paula Reid about the testimony he gave to the grand jury in the investigation of a hush money payment made on behalf of former President Donald Trump to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

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