Sometimes, a profound truth comes from the least-expected place.

Take Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican of Arizona, who’s not typically a good source for reliable information or sound views about democracy. Biggs claimed that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, supported legal efforts to overturn the election, and blamed antifa for the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

But Biggs got one big thing right in a tweet this weekend, responding to former President Donald Trump’s prediction that he would be arrested today.

“If they can come for Trump, they will come for you,” Biggs wrote.

He’s right. And that’s exactly the point.

[Read: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

An indictment of the former president, followed by orderly due process, would show that no one is immune to following the law simply because he is famous, wealthy, politically powerful, willing to threaten the justice system, or possessed of intemperate and powerful followers such as Representative Andy Biggs. Biggs has accidentally stumbled on the secret of rule of law, in which no one is above accountability.

Though Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not revealed any charges, any Trump indictment is expected to involve an allegation that the former president attempted to hide a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges a sexual encounter with Trump, in violation of election laws. Trump denies the relationship and any lawbreaking.

Notice that Biggs isn’t claiming that Trump is obviously innocent of any possible charges against him. In fact, he has implicitly acknowledged the payment, likening it to former President Bill Clinton paying a woman who alleged an affair. (The question, again, is whether this violated election laws, though as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis notes, no one wants to be caught paying hush money to a porn star.)

Biggs’s complaint appears to be the very fact of an investigation and potential charge. His implication is that prosecutors are going after Trump merely because they don’t like him or because it’s politically expedient. “This type of stuff only occurs in third world authoritarian nations,” he added. Yet as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump outlines, plenty of democracies have seen high-ranking elected officials arrested. Of course, everyone would prefer that elected officials be incorruptible and spotless, but because they are human like every other citizen, the fact that they are subject to justice is an indication that the rule of law remains in place.

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

This would not be the case if they were subject to show trials, deprived of the same protections as other citizens, or excluded from due process. But no serious person with power is suggesting that Trump should not be entitled to a trial, a jury of his peers if he chooses, and a vigorous defense. Like any other citizen, he would have to be booked and fingerprinted if he is indicted; unlike any other citizen, he’ll then return to Secret Service protection.

As the possibility of a former president being indicted has been normalized from far-fetched to all but inevitable, many observers have emphasized the importance of moving carefully in such a politically sensitive case, both to avoid inflaming tensions in the public and to avoid setting a precedent in which a new government tries to lock up the leaders of its predecessors.

Prosecutors should be careful—but at the same time, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t act. Whether Trump committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt is a question for a jury or judge, but the evidence that he may have committed several is blatant and public enough that allowing him to escape scrutiny would represent a genuine blow to the legitimacy of the justice system. If they can come for you, you’d better hope they can come for the former president too.

• House GOP requests Manhattan DA's testimony as they seek to discredit investigation • Video: How would the Secret Service handle a possible Trump arrest? Ex-agent explains

• Analysis: Why a Trump indictment would have huge national implications • DeSantis needles Trump as he breaks silence on hush money case • Video: How would the Secret Service handle a possible Trump arrest? Ex-agent explains

Prominent Republicans disagree about a lot these days, but on one point they have found consensus: Getting charged with a crime would be great news for Donald Trump.

After the former president predicted that he will be arrested in Manhattan tomorrow—a forecast that seems questionable, though an indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does seem to be imminent—conventional wisdom quickly developed on the right that Trump would be the big winner.

“The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. “Mr. Bragg, you have helped Donald Trump, amazing.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

At National Review, Rich Lowry announced, “It’s going to be very bad for the country and good politically—at least in the short term and perhaps for the duration—for Donald J. Trump.” (Lowry didn’t bother to offer any basis for this claim.)

The former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich, now running a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., said in a statement that an indictment “will not only serve to coalesce President Trump’s support, but it will become the single largest in-kind contribution to a federal campaign in political history.”

Other Republican contenders for president didn’t make predictions quite so firm, but they either hastened to criticize Bragg or kept their mouth shut, both indications that they see this as a moment of strength for Trump, rather than a good opening to bury their own daggers in a weakened rival’s back.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

The immediate spin, backed by so little actual argument, is a bit dizzying and bit déjà vu. Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, when the GOP nominee, John McCain, forgot how many houses he owned, the pundit Mark Halperin became infamous for a prediction: “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it’s Barack Obama.”

That became a notoriously bad take, but Halperin is unchastened. “You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House,” he wrote in italics on his Substack. “You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively.”

But don’t dismiss Halperin’s prediction because he’s a washed-up source of conventional wisdom who’s been badly wrong in the past. Dismiss it because it makes so little sense in light of what we know now. Politics is contingent and volatile, which means that any prediction about what will happen is worth the pixels it’s printed on. The future here is especially hard to guess because nothing really like it has ever happened. As the Republican pollster Whit Ayres dryly told Politico, “I have never studied the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate, … and I’ve never done any polling on the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.”

[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]

But the assumption that Trump will profit seems to spring from hubris (among his allies) and self-protective fear (on the part of his critics and rivals). They are operating on a shared, obsolete conclusion that nothing can ever harm the former president. For a long time, this made sense. Despite a series of scandals that would have ended the career, much less the candidacy, of any other politician, Trump won the 2016 presidential election and then embarked on an even more scandal-ridden administration. Yet he seemed to chug away, indifferent to bad press. A narrative of Trumpian invincibility developed as an antidote to callow, wish-casting predictions of walls closing in on Trump.

Caution is understandable, but we know enough now to realize that although Trump is exceptionally resilient, he’s also not invulnerable. In 2018, after he decided to frame the midterm elections as a referendum on him personally, Democrats won big in House and governor elections. In 2020, the House impeached him; when the Senate did not vote to convict, some observers took this as proof that he couldn’t be stopped. But it did damage Trump, and later that year, he lost his reelection bid narrowly but decisively, losing the popular vote for the second time. After his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters once again punished candidates flying his banner and rallying around his causes in the 2022 midterms.

What charges against Trump are certain to do is inflame his most devoted supporters. They will be furious that anyone would dare try to hold Trump accountable, view it as an act of political persecution, and make a great deal of noise about it. But no one should mistake the vociferousness of this group for size. They’ve always been noisy. They’ve always been a minority: As I wrote in November, we now have multiple demonstrations that an anti-MAGA majority exists among American voters. And now, with the country heading into the 2024 election cycle, Trump alternatives are gaining more traction—most significantly, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Secret Service’s day of reckoning approaches]

Although Bragg has not announced exactly what charges he might bring against Trump, a consensus has developed among legal analysts that the Manhattan case is the weakest and strangest of the several criminal investigations into Trump. The case involves whether Trump attempted to conceal a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges that Trump had sex with her in 2006. In 2016, the then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen arranged a payment to Daniels in exchange for keeping the story private. Trump then reimbursed Cohen in 2017. Prosecutors will probably seek to prove that Trump and Cohen falsified business records to hide a violation of campaign-finance law. (Trump denies the affair and any wrongdoing.)

A case would appear to hinge on some tenuous legal theories, and Trump might well beat the rap. But any suggestion that he’s delighted by this fight is belied not only by his irate response but by common sense. Trump doesn’t want to discuss the underlying facts of this case—there’s a reason, after all, that Cohen paid Daniels six figures to buy her silence in the first place. Beyond that, several other probes—which look from the outside to be more perilous to Trump—are still on deck, regardless of the outcome in Manhattan.

“Look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a lonely dissident from the GOP consensus, said on ABC News yesterday. Trump could be the Republican nominee in 2024, or even win the White House back, but if so, it will probably be despite any criminal case against him, not because of it.

Whether Donald Trump is arrested and booked on Tuesday or not for a case involving a payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels—something only he has predicted—the potential arrest of a former United States president is not only unprecedented but actually quite technically challenging. How does one arrest a former president in a democracy that has never faced this prospect before? The fate Trump may finally face in a courtroom is not the only reckoning coming around the bend. For the U.S. Secret Service, this is an opportunity for a course correction.

After years in which some agents acted as Trump’s loyal servants, the Secret Service must get back to basics. Although the agency faced considerable challenges before Trump became president, by the end of his presidency, its critics charged that its loyalty to the United States had been subsumed by its loyalty to a man. Trump regularly grifted off the service, charging it exorbitant hotel fees for his own protection on his properties. Trump broke the tradition of separating politics from protection when he appointed the deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, Anthony Ornato, to be his own deputy chief of staff; the service seemed a willing accomplice to Trump’s agenda. The roles played by both Ornato and the service in the January 6 insurrection were, at best, an embarrassing mess and, at worst, a sign that the service was not salvageable.

We were all talking about the Secret Service too much; it had become the subject and was not, as intended, in the background. Whether President Joe Biden has the capacity or inclination to take on an agency that is simultaneously protecting him and his family remains unclear; Biden has appointed a new director, but there haven’t been massive firings or reviews.

Now one of the most unusual moments the agency will ever have encountered presents the Secret Service with the chance to restore its tarnished reputation and return to normal. As a former president, Trump is still a protectee. As a former president, though, he is also no longer in charge. He does not control the environment; he can make noise, but he cannot dictate the terms of his arrest. He may want a perp walk for fundraising purposes, but nobody has to promise him one.

By all accounts of the preparation for a potential arrest, the Secret Service seems to have remembered that its role is to avoid the limelight. Tellingly, the Secret Service is not, in the terminology of site protection, “the coordinating entity.” The agents on Trump’s detail are not taking charge of site protection or securing the courthouse, and not performing advance work for a public appearance. They are leaving that all to local police. If Trump wants to incite a crowd or call for protests, as he has, so be it. That isn’t the service’s problem.

The service just needs to show up with the suspect and let the court conduct its typical process, recording the necessary information. In New York, that involves taking the name, address, Social Security number, and date of birth of the defendant. That the man who entered politics by questioning the birth certificate of Barack Obama will now be reduced to verifying his own identity in court is a delicious bit of irony.

If all goes as it should, Trump’s arrest should be no different from what the service calls an “off the record” event, as if Trump were invited to a wedding and the agents were checking where he was seated. The service seems to know this. Jonathan Wackrow, a former agent in the Presidential Protection Division, believes that it will be very hard for the service to recover if it is perceived as allowing the protectee to dictate the terms of the arrest. “For the Secret Service,” he told me, “they want this to just be another day in the life of the protectee. It is just an administrative movement. That is all. Get him from Point A to Point B and back to Point A.”

When a court demands that a person who is being detained be brought forward so that it can assess the legality of the detention, it issues a writ of habeas corpus—loosely, “produce the body.” That is a clarifying way to think of the service’s role in the days ahead.