In his speech last night to his supporters at Mar-a-Lago, made several hours after he was arraigned in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, Donald Trump took aim at Juan Merchan, the judge in the case.

“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family, whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign, and a lot of it,” Trump said. He also compared the conduct of Merchan, who presided over the Trump Organization’s tax-fraud trial, to something “right out of the old Soviet Union.”

Earlier in the day, two of Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, attacked the judge’s daughter as well, with the former tweeting a picture of her. This came a few days after Trump posted a fake image of himself swinging a baseball bat at the head of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom Trump referred to on his Truth Social platform as an “animal.”

[Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump]

I recently wrote that Trump was behaving like a mob boss. That comparison turns out to have been insulting to mob bosses everywhere. Andrew Weissmann, a former lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s office, was asked on MSNBC about Trump’s attack on Judge Merchan and his family. Noting that he had prosecuted Mafia cases in the past, Weissmann said, “You do not have this behavior from a mob boss. There is a rule in organized crime. You do not do this with respect to prosecutors. You don’t do this with respect to the judge. You certainly don’t go after their families. It’s bad business to do that.” Leave it to Donald Trump to go where Mafia dons will not.

On the day Trump was arraigned, the RealClearPolitics average of polls showed him far ahead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 50.8 percent to 24.6 percent, with no other Republican drawing above 5 percent. In recent weeks, Trump has been surging in the polls, including since the indictment was announced.

Sarah Longwell, who has been doing focus groups with two-time Trump voters, reports that in her most recent groups, everyone supported Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, which hasn’t been the case for months and months.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Almost all elected Republicans who have spoken out have rallied to defend Trump. Senator Lindsey Graham appeared to be on the verge of tears as he begged people to send money to support Trump. Even those positioning themselves to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination are rising to the defense of the indicted ex-president. In listening to them, you would think Trump has never done anything wrong, ever. He is a victim, a persecuted martyr—and, as Marjorie Taylor Greene reminded us, he is in good company: Jesus was arrested too. (This was a particularly nice touch during Holy Week.)

Two things are happening at once: Trump, depraved and deranged, is lashing out, more venomous than ever. As my colleague David Graham notes, in last night’s speech, Trump described Special Counsel Jack Smith as “a radical-left lunatic known as a bomb thrower”; the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani Willis as “a local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta”; and New York Attorney General Letitia James as a “racist.” All three are investigating Trump.

Republican officials, whether they appreciate and admire Trump or are fearful of and submissive to him, continue to stand by him. They recognize that he is the most dominant and popular figure in the Republican Party. And they are stuck with him.

They have had countless opportunities over the years to take the exit ramp, from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, to Trump’s first impeachment, to his attempt to overthrow an election, to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. They have refused every time. More criminal charges of an even more serious nature are unlikely to change that. We’re witnessing the political equivalent of abuse victims struggling to break with their abusers. Having long failed to part ways with Trump, they now feel like they can never break with him. Privately, many Republicans hope that someone else, anyone else, including prosecutors, will do what they were too craven to do, and free them of Trump. But publicly, they are, almost to a person, on his side. The tribe demands no less of its members. To do otherwise is to suffer the fate of the intrepid Liz Cheney.

Republican leaders never grasped how, at every juncture, their willingness to go along with Trump even when they knew better—their willingness to defend his misdeeds, to attack his critics, to bite their tongue, to engage in whataboutism—increased Trump’s hold on the party and further radicalized the base. As that happened, the “normies” became more passive, more compliant, less influential, and more willing to accept and defend a man who is, by any reasonable standard, crazed and unstable. And so, here we are.

The Trump era has been illuminating in this regard. In the past, wondering just how far a party would go in defense of its leader was a matter of speculation. But Trump has moved this question from the realm of speculation to the realm of reality. The GOP has hitched its wagon to Trump, and he is leading them to places even they never imagined. A grotesque man presides over a grotesque party.

In January 2016, when Trump said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters, people thought it was hyperbole. It turned out to be prophecy.

It’s going to be a hell of a thing to explain to future generations.

The defeated president of the United States incited an attack on Congress in hopes of preventing a transfer of power. Hundreds of his supporters were prosecuted and sentenced for joining a violent mob. Yet the first indictment in U.S. history of an ex-president arose from his scheme to pay two alleged sexual partners and one witness for their silence about Donald Trump’s sordid personal life.

From the moment rumors swirled that the Manhattan district attorney would move against Trump, many of us felt an inward worry: Did Alvin Bragg have a case that would justify his actions? The early reports were not encouraging. Many Trump-unfriendly commentators published their qualms. Over a week of speculation, though, it seemed wise to withhold judgment until the actual indictment was available to read. Now the document has been published. The worriers were right.  

The indictment charges that Trump falsified business records to conceal hush-money payments. There won’t be a lot of skepticism about the charges themselves, not even from most of Trump’s partisans. If any normal business owner were caught tampering with records in this way, he would find himself in serious legal trouble. Yet it’s unlikely that a normal business owner would have been caught, because such behaviors would scarcely have excited enough prosecutorial interest to motivate an investigation. At his press conference on Tuesday, even the DA described these counts of deceptive record-keeping as “bread and butter” charges.

[David A. Graham: Unprecedented]

The indictment does not accuse Trump of falsifying records in order to defraud tax authorities, or his lenders, or investors, or even campaign donors. Instead, the indictment accuses Trump of seeking to deceive voters about his dissolute private life. Again, there won’t be a lot of skepticism about that. Trump was trying to preserve an illusion for his supporters, people who had already heard the Access Hollywood audio. As Trump repeated in so many of his speeches: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” If there was a conspiracy to deceive, Trump’s voters numbered among the co-conspirators.

Which may be why the actual crimes charged in this particular indictment look awfully technical.

Throughout the years of Trump’s presidency, those horrified by his authoritarian impulses have repeatedly bumped up against a quandary: Trump’s most heinous actions are often not illegal; his illegal actions are usually not his most heinous. Precisely because Trump has done so many bad things, those investigating him had both a duty and an opportunity to consider carefully: Is this the particular thing for which they will make history with the first indictment of an ex-president of the United States?

The this in this case seems distinctly underwhelming. We’re about to revert to the turmoil and trauma of the Trump presidency—and for what?

One wonders whether there was not a voice around the prosecutorial conference table who said, “We’ve got him dead to rights. We can indict him; we can probably convict him, probably sentence him. But should we? Or should we let somebody who may be able to prosecute more consequential crimes take the lead?”

Tom Nichols: The arraignment of Citizen Trump

The law has many functions in a democratic society. One of them is to educate the public. Since January 6, 2021, a question has hung in the air: Would the mob leader face equal justice as the mob followers? Or would he be protected by some special exemption?

The congressional investigation of the January 6 attack methodically built the case, and compellingly narrated the story, of Trump’s culpability. That account stands as an important achievement and a powerful political fact. But Congress left the legal consequences of its investigation to federal law enforcement. Americans and the world are still waiting to hear whether the Department of Justice will act.

Maybe it will soon. In the meantime, is this the national debate Americans need to guide their understanding of what happened during the Trump presidency, and what might happen again if Trump were returned to office?  

As president, Trump demanded and extracted payments from those who sought preferential treatment from the federal government. Favor-seekers got the message that they should stay in Trump’s hotels, book events in Trump’s ballrooms, direct money to Trump’s company. Neither Trump nor his business, the Trump Organization, has been convicted of any offense in those dealings—despite much talk in Washington about the emoluments clause of the Constitution and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But this past January, the company was found guilty of fraud for falsifying records and cheating on taxes going back years. High crimes indeed.

During the 2008 Democratic presidential-primary campaign, the candidate John Edwards organized payoffs to an ex-lover. He was later charged by federal prosecutors with violating campaign-finance laws. A jury acquitted him on one count and deadlocked on the others. There was no dispute that donor funds had been diverted to Edwards’s mistress (though his lawyers claimed that the money had been a “gift,” not a campaign donation). The jury deadlocked over a balky “This?”

The Trump facts differ from those in the Edwards case in legally significant ways. Trump’s own lawyer in this matter, Michael Cohen, went to prison for his part in the transaction. Yet, with the Edwards example in mind, a prosecutor should consider: Will a Manhattan jury, even if dominated by people who voted against Trump, react to the charge with a similarly disapproving “This?”

Falsifying documents is illegal. Also illegal is committing perjury and inducing others to commit perjury on your behalf. Yet when President Bill Clinton was accused of doing both of those things to cover up an affair with a White House intern, the majority of Americans shrugged off the accusations. Perjury is wrong, they seemed to feel, but the motive for the perjury matters. Perjury to conceal a murder or fraud: very wrong. But perjury to conceal adultery?

Poorly considered prosecutions may offend the public’s sense of fairness, regardless of whether the target is popular. Clinton had won not even 50 percent of the vote in the prior presidential election, in 1996. Two years later, his 73 percent approval rating represented a repudiation of the Ken Starr investigation and the Newt Gingrich–led impeachment. Clinton, too, benefited from a “This?” verdict.

[David Frum: Where do you stand?]

The first criminal indictment of an ex-president is bound to split American society along partisan, ideological, and cultural lines. Trump’s fiercest supporters would defend him against any charge—even, as Trump himself famously said, if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. But not all Trump supporters are so fierce. A just indictment for a major and consequential crime would pry more of them away than an indictment for a light and technical offense.

Prosecutors would have been wiser to see Trump brought to justice on the most serious legal issues. This Manhattan indictment may, through its sheer pettiness, inadvertently diminish Trump’s misdeeds. It may, even more worryingly, diminish his accusers by casting them—much as Clinton successfully did Starr’s team a generation ago—as prurient snoops.

Prosecutors do not think like politicians, and they should not. Yet they do have leeway to decide which offenses to pursue. As a businessman and as a politician, Trump has broken so many rules that prosecutors in different states and at the federal level can, should, and must reflect on their buffet of options. But if this is indeed all there is, it doesn’t justify inviting the destructive rancor about to explode around us.

In the weeks leading up to today’s arraignment in New York, former President Donald Trump was reportedly enamored by the idea of a dramatic “perp walk.” He seemed to revel in the power of the word arrested. Perhaps Trump, a noted Godfather fan, wanted this historic day to resemble that of the real-life mafioso John Gotti, the former Gambino-crime-family boss, who famously strutted into the New York State Supreme Court in 1990 as flashing cameras captured his smirk.

Trump’s supporters and detractors alike seemed similarly hungry for a spectacle. Hundreds of reporters, photographers, and news cameras lined the area outside Manhattan Criminal Court on this blue-sky morning. Many had waited overnight in the cold in hopes of securing one of the three colors of passes to make it inside. Helicopters hovered overhead. The Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff stood atop a riser for a live-TV hit. Thousands of New York police officers were ready for deployment in case protests turned violent.

Ultimately, though, there was no mugshot, no handcuffs. Trump didn’t address the crowd on his way into the courthouse or as he left. A pro-Trump demonstration before the arraignment had more reporters than participants—Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia left almost as soon as she arrived.

[David A. Graham: Unprecedented]

Still, it was a historic day—the first time a former American president has been charged with a crime. As we learned when Indictment No. 71543-23—“The people of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump”—was unsealed, Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, each a Class E felony that carries a four-year maximum sentence.

But today was just a hearing; the actual trial won’t get under way until the first or second quarter of 2024. By then, Trump may well be the Republican nominee for president once again. He may also be indicted in other felony cases.

I made it inside. The defendant’s red tie was the first thing I saw coming down the courtroom’s center aisle, as I watched the CCTV feed from an overflow room in the courthouse. Trump looked sullen as he found his place at the defense table. He was sitting dead center, flanked on each side by a pair of lawyers. While they ruffled through papers and folders, Trump sat quietly, hands in his lap, shoulders sunk.

Just five photographers were permitted to capture the historic image. They were promptly escorted out of the courtroom before the arraignment began. No TV cameras, laptops, or audio-recording devices were allowed, per a ruling from Judge Juan Manuel Merchan. A scrum of journalists shifted in the long, creaky wooden benches and furiously scribbled notes and quotes on paper.

The prosecution rattled off the broad contours of its case, paying special attention to the way the alleged crimes, in their view, undermined the 2016 presidential election. How do you plead? Trump leaned into the microphone: “Not guilty.” He sounded hoarse.

In New York, falsifying business records is typically a misdemeanor, unless it’s done with the intent to commit or hide a second crime. The Trump indictment and accompanying statement of facts do not specify what that second potential crime may be, although the latter document highlights how the former president allegedly “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election” and “violated election laws.” In a press conference following the arraignment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg cited what he says are breaches of New York State election law, tax law, and federal campaign-finance law. The indictment itself lays out charges for each falsely logged payment Trump made to his attorney and fixer Michael Cohen from February to December 2017, reimbursing Cohen for giving hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress who claims she had a brief relationship with Trump.

Today’s proceeding was, as one longtime city lawyer sitting in the back of the overflow room described it, mostly posturing. Assistant District Attorney Christopher Conroy argued that Trump’s recent inflammatory rhetoric was a threat to public safety. He referenced Trump’s social-media posts featuring phrases such as “death and destruction” and “World War III.” He described an image that the former president had shared of himself wielding a baseball bat at Bragg’s head. Conroy presented printouts of these posts to the judge and to the defense. Trump handed the papers down the line to his lawyers without looking at them. As the descriptions continued, Trump appeared to ask his lawyer to see one of the papers. The prosecution said threats had been made against not only individuals in the case but also their family members.

[Tom Nichols: What Trump’s indictment reveals]

Todd Blanche, the first of Trump’s defense lawyers to speak, appeared unprepared for this moment. “I didn’t realize we were going to make opening statements today,” he told the room. He painted his client as a man under attack who has a First Amendment right to free speech. He lamented the “leaks galore” and spoke of the “grave injustice” against the former president, who at the moment is campaigning to be the future president. “I don’t share your view that certain language and certain rhetoric is justified by frustration,” Judge Merchan countered. Rather than issue a gag order, which would have barred Trump from discussing the case publicly, the prosecution is seeking a protective order, which would prevent Trump from posting documents related to the case on social media. Judge Merchan told the two sides that they needed to agree to the terms of the order.

Trump sat back in his chair, arms crossed, looking angry. The prosecution raised the prospect of a potential conflict of interest on Trump’s legal team—claiming that Stormy Daniels, who is expected to testify as a witness, once sought the legal counsel of Joe Tacopina. “First and foremost, I never met Stormy Daniels,” Tacopina replied. He tripped up on whether he should use her stage name or her legal one, Stephanie Clifford: “Ms. Daniels … Ms. Clifford … whatever her name is.” Occasional muffled laughter could be heard in the overflow room.

Trump had arrived in New York late yesterday afternoon. Cable-news cameras followed his motorcade’s every move from Mar-a-Lago to the tarmac, showing his name-branded plane soaring through the sky and landing at LaGuardia Airport, in his native Queens. His second motorcade drove him to his namesake tower in Midtown Manhattan, where he stepped out, waved at a crowd of reporters and supporters, and entered through a side door.

As with this morning, yesterday’s assembly was mostly media and police. A small group of pro-Trump protesters held colorful banners that read TRUMP 2024 and FINISH THE WALL. Across the street, tourists stood behind metal barricades outside luxury stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Bulgari. People in Phillies jerseys briefly stopped to take in the scene on their way up to the Bronx for the night’s Yankees game. A man walked north on Fifth Avenue yelling “Witch hunt!” Trump Tower’s windows could have used a wash.

Around 10:30 a.m. today, Marjorie Taylor Greene exited a white SUV and was escorted through throngs of reporters and a small cabal of Trump supporters in Collect Pond Park, across the street from the courthouse. Her congressional colleague George Santos also made a cameo in the park. As Greene spoke, whistles and screams from counterprotesters drowned her out. A man stomped out a beat on a kick drum with the message UNFUCK THE WORLD splayed across the front. Competing chants from the pro- and anti-Trump forces filled the park: “Fuck Donald Trump!” “Fascists go home!” “Fuck your feelings!”

A day earlier, New York Mayor Eric Adams had warned Greene, “When you’re in town, be on your best behavior,” and had issued a blanket statement to potential pot-stirring Trump supporters: “New York is our home and not a place for your misplaced anger.”

Steve Mercyzinski, 56, of Brooklyn, wore red, white, and blue Trump apparel and a handmade SAVE AMERICA scarf, and told me that Trump was being unfairly targeted. “He’s being indicted on 34 counts today? Where were the 33,000 counts against Hillary Clinton for deleting 33,000 emails which were subpoenaed?” Across the way, Gregory Williams, 57, from the Bronx, held a homemade sign that read LOCK HIM UP in one hand and a cardboard cutout of Clinton in the other. He told me he had saved the prop from a 2016 Election Night party.

The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper milled about among the crowd, as did podcast hosts from Barstool Sports. There was a guy dressed as Freddy Krueger, a guy smoking a joint, a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit wearing a demonic rubber Trump mask. But, this being Manhattan, there was also a guy in a baseball hat from the Odeon, the venerable TriBeCa hotspot nearby.

As Judge Merchan adjourned today’s session, Trump stood and straightened the lapels of his navy blazer, doing his best tough-guy, Gotti-coming-out-of-court impression. Judge Merchan announced that December 4th would be the next time the court reconvened in person.

After the hearing, Bragg held a brief press conference. “These are felony crimes in New York State, no matter who you are,” he said. “We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.”

The prosecution loosely proposed a January 2024 trial date; Trump’s defense lawyers said they felt spring ’24 might be more reasonable. By then, if polls hold, Trump may once again be the Republican nominee for president of the United States, indictment be damned.

Morgan Ome contributed to this report.